Mummius

“ But when Mummius led out his army to battle in turn, then the Achæan cavalry, which was opposite the Roman cavalry, ran immediately, not venturing to make one stand against the attack of the enemy’s cavalry. And the infantry, though dejected at the rout of the cavalry, stood their ground against the wedge-like attack of the Roman infantry, and though outnumbered and fainting under their wounds, yet resisted bravely, till 1,000 picked men of the Romans took them in flank, and so turned the battle into a complete rout of the Achæans. ”

“ The election, however, began; for the faithful Mummius was now presiding, and he proceeded to call on the tribes to vote. But the business of filing into their separate compartments, always complicated, was now impossible. The fringe of the crowd was in a continual uproar; from its extremities the opponents of the measure were wedging their way in. As his supporters squared their shoulders, the whole mass rocked and swayed. There was no hope of eliciting a decision from this scuffling and pushing throng. Every moment brought the assembly nearer to open riot. ”

“ Why such an artist was selected to deface so fine a Torso, we cannot pretend to conjecture. We read that, when the Consul Mummius, after the taking of Corinth, was preparing to send to Rome some works of the greatest Grecian sculptors, he told the packers that if they broke his Venus or his Apollo, he would force them to restore the limbs which should be wanting. ”

“ At the very first the Achaean horsemen broke off en masse before the Roman cavalry of six times their strength; the hoplites withstood the enemy till a flank attack by the Roman select corps brought confusion also into their ranks. This terminated the resistance. Diaeus fled to his home, put his wife to death, and took poison himself. All the cities submitted without opposition; and even the impregnable Corinth, into which Mummius for three days hesitated to enter because he feared an ambush, was occupied by the Romans without a blow. ”

“ Not the feet of my mother, but those of the long-buried dead. Sick with repulsion and fear I looked up, and there bending over and peering into my eyes was the face, the fleshless, mouldering face of the foul and barely recognizable corpse! With a shriek of horror I rolled backwards, and, springing to my feet, prepared to fly. I glanced at the mummy. It was lying on the ground, stiff and still, every bandage in its place; whilst standing over it, a look of fiendish glee in its light, doglike eyes, was the figure of Anubis, lurid and menacing. ”

“ Miss Wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened. We three men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. Only the reader who by some remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly laid from their tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat of the Egyptian sun warms their ancient bodies into the semblance of life, can form any conception of the ultimate horror we experienced when the silent figure before us moved in its grave of lead and sand. ”

“ There is an indescribable and uncanny fascination in the sight of one of these old mummies,—the eyeless sockets, the painful cheekbone, the tight-drawn forehead; they look so human and unhuman at once, so awfully dead and yet somehow so suggestive of having been alive, that it stimulates a far greater curiosity to know what they did and thought and felt, than it is possible to feel about neighbors to-day. ”

“ It is really painful to think of these words as having fallen from the lips of what is now a resin-smelling lump of bones and hardened flesh, perhaps still unearthed, perhaps lying in some museum show-case, or perhaps kicked about in fragments over the hot sand of some tourist-crowded necropolis. Mummies are the most lifeless objects one could well imagine. It is impossible even for those whose imaginations are most powerful, to infuse life into a thing so utterly dead as an embalmed body ”

“ Many other devices were introduced to convert the mummy from a shrunken caricature into a more life-like portrait.
Mummification reached its fullest and most successful development during the six centuries from 1500 b.c. to 940 b.c., which represents the period of the collection of royal mummies in the Cairo Museum. They reveal the ancient Egyptian practice of embalming in its highest perfection, and have provided most of the information we possess of the history of mummification. ”

“ More fearsome to approach is the row of unswathed mummies that follow. Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares at us—or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and meagre shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that protrude from miserable rags. And each royal mummy that our lantern lights reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different fear—they resemble one another so little. Some of them seem to laugh, showing their yellow teeth; others have an expression of infinite sadness and suffering. ”

“ Mummies, as we call these embalmed Egyptian corpses, are often found now, laid up in beautiful tombs, cut out in the rock, and painted in colours still fresh with picture writing, called hieroglyphics, telling in tokens all the history of the person whose body they contained. The kings built tombs for themselves, like mountains, square at the bottom, but each course of stones built within the last till they taper to a point at the top. ”

“ Persons familiar with the Great Portland Square Museum will know that certain of the tombs in the Etruscan room are used as receptacles for Egyptian mummies that have, for various reasons, never been put upon exhibition. Anyone who has peered under the partially raised lid of a huge sarcophagus and found within the rigid form of a mummy, will appreciate the feelings of the man on night duty amid surroundings so lugubrious. ”

“ Some of them are full of mummy-cloths and skeletons, and smell of mortality, to that degree that it needs all the wind of the desert to take the scent of death out of our nostrils.
All this plain and its mounds and hills are dug over and pawed out for remnants of the dead, scarabæi, beads, images, trinkets sacred and profane. It is the custom of some travelers to descend into the horrible and common mummy-pits, treading about among the dead, and bring up in their arms the body of some man, or some woman, who may have been, for aught the traveler knows, not a respectable person. ”

“ In some instances the mummy reposes in its original mummy-case, and sometimes in two or three mummy-cases, the whole enclosed in an enormous outer sarcophagus. In others, only the mummy case is left, the mummy having been destroyed or abstracted. Farther, some mummies are found in mummy-cases not their own, or in mummy-cases which have been altered and usurped for their use in ancient times. ”

“ It was as if Nature were weeping tears of shame to see a Child of Man brought so low. I went to the place where, until a few hours before, the mummy had stood—that wretched mummy which had been the cause of all the trouble. As I had good reason to know, it weighed a considerable amount, more, indeed, than I should have imagined an old man like Pharos could have lifted, much less carried. ”

“ It can’t be Uncle Stephen, sure—or Nan!”
“No, no: it is a mummy—a human body which has been buried for hundreds and thousands of years.”
Roger had never heard of a mummy; and there was no great wonder in that, when even Oliver did not rightly know the meaning of the word. All animal bodies (and not only human bodies) which remain dry, by any means, instead of putrefying, are called mummies. ”

“ The ancient Egyptians, assured that a man’s ka or double shall revivify his body, took pains to guard the flesh from corruption, steeping the corpse in natron and stuffing it with spices. A body so prepared is called a mummy (q.v.) , and the custom was already of a hoary antiquity in 3200 B.C., when the oldest dated mummy we have was made. The bowels, removed in the process, were placed in jars over the corpse in the tomb, together with writing tablets, books, musical instruments, &c., of the dead. Cemeteries also remain full of mummies of crocodiles, cats, fish, cows and other sacred animals. ”

“ I had heard stories of mummies that rose from their sleep of centuries to tell the fate of some one when it was hanging in the balance, of mummies that groaned and gurgled and fought for breath, frantically beating with their swathed hands in the witching hours of the night. And I knew that the lure of these mummies was so strong for some people that they were drawn irresistibly to look upon and confer with them. ”

“ What in the world started you to talking about Egypt and pyramids and Pharaoh and mummies and things like that?”
“Oh, I jest happened to take a peek into one of them books that Saint Jimmy got us to buy for you, that’s all,” returned the old-timer, with a sly wink at the smiling girl. “An’ anyway, it seems like I ought to know somethin’ about mummies by this time, after livin’ as long as I have with that there.” He pointed a long, gnarled finger at his pardner. “Egypt or Arizona, livin’ or dead, it’s all the same, I reckon. A mummy’s a mummy wherever you find it.” ”

“ Down in the south, where the heated sands of Egypt never cool, there in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped and lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, in the hope, it may be, that spices and balm might retain within the sarcophagus some small fragment of human organism through endless ages, till at last the gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the mummy is folded in its cloth. And I do not know really whether I might not say that these little grains of English corn do not hold within them the actual flesh and blood of man. ”

“ Here, in chambers, or species of pits, worked into the rock, are found millions of mummies, piled upon each other, which appear to have been arranged with a certain symmetry, although many are now found displaced and broken.
“Near these deep pits, which served for a common sepulture for several families, we meet also with other smaller chambers, and some narrow cavities in form of niches, which were destined to hold one mummy only, or at most two. The grottoes of Thebes enclose a great number of mummies, better preserved than those in the caverns and pits of Saggârah. ”

“ When we pass out of the glare of the sun and descend the incline down which the mummy went, we feel as if we had begun his awful journey. On the walls are sculptured the ceremonies and liturgies of the dead, the grotesque monsters of the under-world, which will meet him and assail him on his pilgrimage, the deities friendly and unfriendly, the tremendous scenes of cycles of transmigration. Other sculptures there are ”

“ Banquets were held in honor of the mummy, which was placed near the table and offered portions of food. Sometimes mummies were kept in the home for a long time, and were worshipped with the household gods. When at length the day for burial came, the family and friends accompanied the body across the Nile to the Necropolis. They took offerings with them,—food, furniture, toilet articles, and some literature—certainly some pages from the Book of the Dead. ”

“ Pinsent!"
"When I removed the lid he leaped out of the sarcophagus, sprang ashore and fled to the desert. I followed him for several miles. But I could not catch him. I was compelled to give up the chase. And now you tell me that you afterwards found a mummy in the coffin which I had left empty."
"One of us is dreaming," said the girl.
"What was this mummy like?"
"A tall man—with a curious conical-shaped head—and eyes set hideously far apart in its skull—but you have seen the Arab who frightened me—and indeed he attacked you at your camp. ”

“ On the impulse of the moment he had proclaimed this to be the long-lost mummy, and when a closer examination by the light of a lucifer match revealed the green hue of the coffin wood, he knew that he was right.
But what was the mummy in its ancient case doing in Mrs. Jasher's arbor? That was the mute question which the two young people asked themselves and each other, as they stood in the chilly moonlight, staring at the grotesque thing. The mummy had disappeared from the Sailor's Rest at Pierside some weeks ago, and now unexpectedly appeared in a lonely garden, surrounded by marshes. ”

“ It was that very Ptahmes, the man whose mummy your father stole from its ancient resting-place, who was the founder of our house. For some strange reason, what I can not tell, I have always entertained the belief that my existence upon this earth, and such success as I shall meet with, depend upon my finding that mummy and returning it to the tomb from which sacrilegious hands had taken it. ”

“ Every night throughout the rest of the week I spent in this constable's company, studying his somewhat colourless personality. Then, one afternoon, I entered the Museum. My weedy beard, my gaunt expression, and my hollow cough—they were all in the part! I went up to the Egyptian room to assure myself that a certain mummy case had not been removed, and having found it to occupy its usual place, I descended to the Etruscan basement. ”

“ I naturally had recourse to my hands to sustain my weight, but they found no better support; so that I sunk altogether among the broken mummies, with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour, waiting till it subsided again. I could not remove from the place, however, without increasing it, and every step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or other. Once I was conducted from such a place to another resembling it, through a passage of about twenty feet in length, and no wider than that a body could be forced through. ”