all, as was evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of
the table. The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a
charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with
its clawlike hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up
against the sarcophagus was an old yellow scroll of papyrus, and in
front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of the room, his head
thrown back, his widely-opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to
the crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with
every expiration.

"My God! he's dying!" cried Monkhouse Lee distractedly.

He was a slim, handsome young fellow, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, of a
Spanish rather than of an English type, with a Celtic intensity of
manner which contrasted with the Saxon phlegm of Abercombie Smith.

"Only a faint, I think," said the medical student. "Just give me a
hand with him. You take his feet. Now on to the sofa. Can you kick
all those little wooden devils off? What a litter it is! Now he will
be all right if we undo his collar and give him some water. What has
he been up to at all?"

"I don't know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty
well, you know. It is very good of you to come down."

"His heart is going like a pair of castanets," said Smith, laying his
hand on the breast of the unconscious man. "He seems to me to be
frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him! What a face he
has got on him!"

It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline
were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of
fear but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the under side of a
sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time
been considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and
folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown
hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled ears
protruding on either side. His light grey eyes were still open, the
pupils dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare.
It seemed to Smith as he looked down upon him that he had never seen
nature's danger signals flying so plainly upon a man's countenance, and
his thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had
given him an hour before.

"What the deuce can have frightened him so?" he asked.

"It's the mummy."

"The mummy? How, then?"