es shall be decorated with his sign, the
scarabeus. Your body will be carefully watched by our priesthood to
observe the growth of your soul and know that you finally believe in its
existence and the infinite power of God. You shall pass through the
valley of humiliation, living as the Chelas live upon your own soul.
Your suffering shall bring improvement and growth until your soul shall
prove sufficient unto itself, since it shall know God and itself.
Finally it shall part company with your mummied body and become a part
of the light of the world."

I arose at daylight the next morning and, after carefully bathing,
rubbed my whole body with a preparation for closing the pores; then,
retiring to a couch, drank a vial of most precious and potent embalming
fluid, which, knowing death to be near, I had secreted when preparing
the mummy of the queen.

I felt a contraction of my stomach, an icy chill, a gradual though rapid
cessation of consciousness and being. For what period I know not I slept
the sleep of death.

Sluggishly in my dead frame fluttered a something. For days or years, I
know not, there was a mere sense of spiritual life or being and a
fluttering of body as of a small numbed insect; was it a scarabeus? This
was succeeded in time by an acuter consciousness, when I saw my puny
soul in its bare weakness.

Then began the journey through the valley of humiliation and suffering,
when soul lived upon and thought only of self and its escape. Through
ages of suffering and loneliness and blackness, my only thought was a
constant prayer for absolute non-existence. Within the heart of my tiny
soul there began to grow a germ-like conception and reverence for God.
With this thought the soul seemed to take unto itself strength to make
feeble efforts to tear a way through its coffin of flinty skin and in
feeble flight bounded and pounded incessantly on its case of parchment,
as a drummer on his drum, with a ceaseless, monotonous, drum, drum,
drum.

Finally, through the mummy eyes, there seemed to come dim rays of light.
Then the feeble soul stationed itself immediately behind them and prayed
only for light. And, after a thousand years, enough light was given to
see crevices in the tomb and shifting grains of sand drift through. Life
before had been so bare that the mere seeing of the flight of a grain of
sand into that place of utter calm and monotony was as an angel visit to
the disconsolate of earth.

Now the all-a