about to disappear under the first rolls of
bandages? Flowers that are three thousand years old, so frail and yet so
eternal, make a strange impression upon one.

There was also found amid the bandages a small fruit-berry, the species
of which it is difficult to determine. Perhaps it was a berry of the
nepenthe, which brought oblivion. On a bit of stuff, carefully detached,
was written within a cartouche the name of an unknown king belonging to
a dynasty no less forgotten. This mummy fills up a vacant place in
history and tells of a new Pharaoh.

The face was still hidden under its mask of linen and bitumen, which
could not be easily detached, for it had been firmly fixed by an
indefinite number of centuries. Under the pressure of the chisel a
portion gave way, and two white eyes with great black pupils shone with
fictitious life between brown eyelids. They were enamelled eyes, such as
it was customary to insert in carefully prepared mummies. The clear,
fixed glance, gazing out of the dead face, produced a terrifying effect;
the body seemed to behold with disdainful surprise the living beings
that moved around it. The eyebrows showed quite plainly upon the orbit,
hollowed by the sinking of the flesh. The nose, I must confess,--and in
this respect Nes Khons was less pretty than Tahoser,--had been turned
down to conceal the incision through which the brain had been drawn from
the skull, and a leaf of gold had been placed on the mouth as the seal
of eternal silence. The hair, exceedingly fine, silky, and soft, dressed
in light curls, did not fall below the tops of the ears, and was of that
auburn tint so much prized by Venetian women. It looked like a child's
hair dyed with henna, as one sees it in Algeria. I do not think that
this colour was the natural one; Nes Khons must have been dark like
other Egyptians, and the brown tone was doubtless produced by the
essences and perfumes of the embalmer.

Little by little the body began to show in its sad nudity. The reddish
skin of the torso, as the air came in contact with it, assumed a bluish
bloom, and there was visible on the side the cut through which had been
drawn the entrails, and from which escaped, like the sawdust of a
ripped-up doll, the sawdust of aromatic wood mixed with resin in grains
that looked like colophony. The arms were stretched out, and the bony
hands with their gilded nails imitated with sepulchral modesty the
gesture of the Venus of Medici. The feet, s