Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, no one of the party--excepting Danbazzar--had ever really counted on success. Certainly, in their wildest imaginings, they had not schooled their minds to acceptance of the miracle; had not realized what success would mean.
Slowly, and by different mental processes, realization came in turn to John Cumberland and to Barry, as it had come, instantly, insupportably, to the scientific mind of Professor Blackwell. A girl who had lived during the reign of Seti I--a girl barely out of her teens--was living now. She must be, according to ordinary human computation, fully three thousand two hundred years old; but, according to all the laws of modern physiology, she was still no more than nineteen or twenty!
To the Professor, the problem presented was one of scientific faith. Acceptance meant destruction of his life’s labour, the tearing up of every textbook written on the subject; it assailed the very throne of reason itself. Rejection, with Zalithea living, meant closing his eyes to the truth. For a long time he remained alone in his tent and could not be induced to see her.
John Cumberland’s problem was a legal one. To whom did Zalithea belong? Since she antedated any government of which documentary trace remained, surely not to the authorities at Cairo? The thought that a false step might result in her loss was terrifying.
But, if these two found their ideas chaotic, how infinitely more so were those of Barry. At one moment he was raised to a poetic heaven. In the next he found himself plunged in an inferno of such torturing doubts that he longed for the power to run away from himself.
Upon the realization of his shadowy ideal, the proof that the unknown might become known, had followed, what? A knowledge that he must either fly from Zalithea or learn to love her--and that she was, to all intents and purposes, a supernatural being!
Such were the early reactions of these three to a phenomenon--and a phenomenon in the form of an unusually lovely girl--which struck deep at the roots of human credulity; which forced them to accept the inacceptable, to remain sane though face to face with madness.
Danbazzar alone attacked the problem with confidence. A large Bell tent was set up at the lower end of the wâdi, and furnished, though simply, in Ancient Egyptian fashion. The necessary materials he had brought with him and Hassan es-Sugra supervised the work. His optimistic foresight had not stopped here. A messenger who had been dispatched to Luxor at dawn returned before midday with an elderly Arab woman.
“She has been standing by over a week,” said Danbazzar. “Hassan engaged her. She’s a trained servant and was seven years in the harem of the last Khedive. Remember!” he warned. “Hassan doesn’t know what we found in the sarcophagus! Nobody outside of this party knows. Zalithea is the sick daughter of a friend of mine in El Kasr who has come down for treatment by Professor Blackwell. That’s the story, and we’ve got to stick to it. The sarcophagus was empty.”
Accordingly Safîyeh was installed, with her few belongings, in the new tent. A covered litter was extemporized and Hassan dispatched on a mission to Kurna.
Danbazzar, following two hours of profound sleep, had become his capable self again. Three visits he had made to the tomb, and reported that Zalithea slumbered soundly. John Cumberland’s anxiety was intense. He had urged the immediate removal of the girl from that nearly unbreathable atmosphere but had been overruled.
“We’ll stick to the formula,” said Danbazzar truculently, “with or without your permission. She has to stay there eight hours. After that we have nothing to go upon.”
They carried the litter up to the tomb, setting it close to the screen. Professor Blackwell mounted guard at the top of the valley and Barry at the bottom. They wore their ordinary working kit; but John Cumberland and Danbazzar had arranged to put on the Ancient Egyptian dresses under cover of the screen before awakening the sleeper.
That Danbazzar could make himself understood in the long dead language known to Zalithea had been already proved. It was one further item of evidence showing his knowledge of Egyptology to be masterful.
“I know very few words,” he admitted, “and until to-day I couldn’t tell if my pronunciation was understandable. Others have claimed to know how to speak the language. But no living man for a thousand-odd years back has been able to prove it! I shall have to try to talk to her. She is sure to be frightened. I expect she’ll be as weak as a kitten. And it’s going to be no easy job to carry her up past that broken door.”
“Let me help!” said John Cumberland eagerly.
Danbazzar shook his head.
“Just stand by with the litter,” he directed. “The fewer strange faces she sees the better. I can manage alone.”
But the wonder of Egypt’s sunset was stealing over the Valleys before the litter was borne down the wâdi to the tent and a slight, muffled figure tenderly carried inside.
Barry was wild to see her. Danbazzar would not consent.
“She’s frightened to death,” he said, “poor little girl. When she saw old Safîyeh she just fell into her arms and hid her face against her.”
Professor Blackwell looked up. They were seated in the big tent.
“I have been endeavouring to do as you requested,” he said. “But to prescribe any routine or diet for such a patient is quite beyond my powers. I have somewhat recovered from the first shock, however, and I am prepared to give her an examination at any time that may be convenient.”
“When she has bathed and recovered from the journey,” Danbazzar replied, “I should like you to see her. I think I have made her understand that the High Priest is coming.”
“The High Priest!” exclaimed Professor Blackwell.
“Well, you must remember,” said Danbazzar, “the priests were the doctors in her time. And I figured out that someone must have looked her over on the other occasions.”
Professor Blackwell clutched his high brow.
“I was about to say something insane,” he murmured. “I was going to ask if she seems to remember her last awakening. It suddenly occurred to me that this took place roughly three thousand years ago!”
“Yet she does seem to remember it,” Danbazzar declared.
“What!” cried John Cumberland. “You have gathered this?”
Danbazzar inclined his head in that graceful manner which was his.
“I’m not certain,” he confessed. “But I think so. I realize I only know enough of her language to act as a link. From this we must build up and teach her English as though she were a child. Her difficulties are going to be worse than those of an ordinary foreigner. We shall never be able to find any analogies! The objects, the customs--all are different.”
Hassan es-Sugra, it appeared, had been prepared for the coming of the mythical sheik’s daughter. He expressed no surprise on his return from Kurna, nor did he inquire what had become of her escort.
He had been making certain mysterious arrangements for transporting the tomb furniture to some place of safety. Work was to be resumed on the shaft next morning, with the object of widening it sufficiently to allow of the removal of the sarcophagus, and the unusual wall paintings were to be photographed before the tomb was reclosed.
Meanwhile, Professor Blackwell had completed a professional examination of his strange and beautiful patient. He returned to the tent where the other members of the party awaited him, in an indescribably puzzled frame of mind. Removing his skullcap, he lighted a cigar and fortified himself with a peg of whisky from one of the bottles buried in the sand.
“Amazing!” he declared; “quite, quite amazing! Her pulse, respiration, and temperature are absolutely normal! Her flesh is firm and healthy. Her hair is vigorous; her teeth are perfect. I could swear that her nails were manicured yesterday!”
“They were last manicured around 1360 B.C.!” said Danbazzar.
“There is a small scar under the hair just above the right ear which suggests that the theory--now generally accepted, I believe--that surgery was practised by the ancients is not without foundation. She is in extraordinarily good spirits. I twice caught her laughing at me!”
No one seemed very surprised, but:
“What about diet?” asked John Cumberland. “Surely she should be treated as an invalid?”
“Frankly,” the Professor returned, “I see no reason whatever to treat her as an invalid. Apart from the fact that she seems to be rather tired, I can detect no abnormal conditions of any kind. She addressed me several times during the interview, but her remarks were naturally unintelligible. They seemed to afford her considerable amusement, nevertheless. And the old woman from Luxor must have gathered something of their gist. She, also, appeared to be highly entertained.”
“Safîyeh can’t possibly have understood one word,” said Danbazzar quickly. “Arabic is the only language she speaks, except for a smattering of English; and we have told her that Zalithea talks Kabyle.”
“Which,” added John Cumberland, “judging from her style of beauty, she certainly never did!”
“We’ll know one day!” said Danbazzar.
“You don’t think there’s any danger,” Barry broke in, “of--of----”
He fumbled for words, and:
“Of her crumbling to dust, or something of that sort?” the Professor concluded for him. “Your frame of mind, Barry, is gradually beginning to resemble my own! Frankly, I cannot answer your question. According to my personal observation, the young lady is as healthy as she is beautiful. According to my training and beliefs, she ought to have been dead for three thousand-odd years!”
“What amazes me,” Barry declared, “is her cheerfulness! Just think. Everyone she ever knew is long forgotten. She found herself in a tomb, buried alive, this morning. Yet this evening you say she is laughing!”
“Her laughter may have been hysterical,” murmured the Professor, pulling up his robe for greater comfort, and revealing the fact that beneath he wore a pair of very soiled gray flannel trousers rolled up some six inches above his sandals. “No doubt a visit from a High Priest is somewhat awe-inspiring.”
At the end of further discussion, a dinner menu for Zalithea was decided upon, and Mahmoud given the necessary orders. A new spirit of restlessness had descended upon the party. If they had solved their first great problem, another faced them.
Barry, having prepared for the evening meal, climbed the side of the wâdi to that spot from which on the night of their arrival he had watched the sun setting. It was not so long ago. It seemed an age. He knew that something had happened in the interval which marked the end of one phase of his life, the beginning of another.
Now that he had actually seen Zalithea, that vague dread which had sometimes troubled him when he had found himself thinking of the girl on the balcony had gone. Yet, he asked himself to-night, did not his recognition of this girl increase rather than solve the mystery?
Since it could not possibly have been Zalithea he had seen on that balcony in New Jersey, then in the garden of Mr. Brown’s house, and later on Fifth Avenue, it must have been her living double!--this or, as others had suspected, a delusion. But why should he have suffered this delusion, not once, but many times, immediately prior to the night that the papyrus came into his father’s possession?
Surely he was justified in believing that only some form of telepathy or clairvoyance could explain it… and that this explanation presupposed a mysterious bond of sympathy between himself and the girl he was destined to meet?
The Ancient Egyptians, he understood, believed in reincarnation. Since their wisdom was so great in such matters, as the extended life of Zalithea proved, quite possibly they were right. She had slept, miraculously, living on; but he had died, in the ordinary way, and was now reborn--in the ordinary way!
He recalled, was ever recalling, how she had looked at him in the moment of opening her long, dark eyes. Death had effaced physical memory in his own case; only subconscious memory remained. But Zalithea, never having died, remembered! They had met before, in those remote days--and she remembered him!
It was an idea that first delighted and then terrified Barry. He had imagined, on that night in his father’s library, that the shadow of Ancient Egypt was creeping out to touch him.
He had been right!
What this inexplicable discovery might mean to John Cumberland, to Danbazzar, to Professor Blackwell, he could only dimly foresee. But what did it mean to him?
This he could not foresee at all.
And then, as he began mechanically to climb down to the camp, the sound of a distant voice reached his ears. It was a laughing voice… and he knew that he had heard it before!
