By the time I reached home it was considerably past midnight; I was not, however, the least tired, so, exchanging my dress coat for an old velvet painting jacket, for which I entertained a lasting affection, I lit a cigar and began to promenade the room. It had been a fancy of mine when I first took the studio, which, you must understand, was of more than the usual size, to have it decorated in the Egyptian fashion, and, after my meeting with Pharos, this seemed to have a singular appropriateness. It was as if the quaint images of the gods, which decorated the walls, were watching me with almost human interest, and even the gilded countenance upon the mummy-case, in the alcove at the farther end, wore an expression I had never noticed on it before. It might have been saying: "Ah, my nineteenth century friend, your father stole me from the land of my birth, and from the resting-place the gods decreed for me; but beware, for retribution is pursuing you and is even now close upon your heels."
Cigar in hand, I stopped in my walk and looked at it, thinking as I did so of the country from which it had hailed, and of the changes that had taken place in the world during the time it had lain in its Theban tomb, whence it had emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, with colouring as fresh, and detail as perfect, as on the day when the hieroglyphs had first left the artist's hand. It was an unusually fine specimen--one of the most perfect, indeed, of its kind ever brought to England, and, under the influence of the interest it now inspired in me, I went to an ancient cabinet on the other side of the room, and, opening a small drawer, took from it a bulky pocketbook, once the property of my father. He it was, as I have already said, who had discovered the mummy in question, and it was from him, at his death, in company with many other Egyptian treasures, that I received it.
As I turned the yellow, time-stained pages in search of the information I wanted, the clock of St. Jude's, in the street behind, struck one, solemnly and deliberately, as though it were conscious of the part it played in the passage of time into eternity. To my surprise the reference was more difficult to find than I had anticipated. Entries there were in hundreds; records of distances travelled, of measurements taken, evidence as to the supposed whereabouts of tombs, translations of hieroglyphics, paintings, and inscriptions, memoranda of amounts paid to Arab sheiks, details of stores and equipments, but for some time no trace of the information for which I was searching. At last, however, it struck me to look in the pocket contained in the cover of the book. My diligence was immediately rewarded, for there, carefully folded and hidden away, was the small square of parchment upon which my father had written the name once borne by the dead man, with a complete translation of the record upon the _cartonnage_ itself. According to the statement here set forth, the coffin contained the mortal remains of a certain Ptahmes, Chief of the King's Magicians--an individual who flourished during the reign of Menptah (Amenepthes of the Greeks, but better known to the nineteenth century as the Pharaoh of the Exodus). For all I knew to the contrary, my silent property might have been one of that band of conjurors who pitted their wits against Moses, and by so doing had caused Pharaoh's heart to be hardened so that he would not let the Children go. Once more I stood looking at the stolid representation of a face before me, guessing at the history of the man within, and wondering whether his success in life had equalled his ambition, or was commensurate with his merits, and whether in that age, so long since dead, his heart had ever been thrilled by thoughts of love.