she
attains to the maximum of horror that a spectral figure can evoke. What
will she be like to-night in the uncertain light of our little lantern?

There she is indeed, the dishevelled vampire in her place right enough,
stretched at full length, but looking always as if she were about to
leap up; and straightway I meet the sidelong glance of her enamelled
pupils, shining out of half-closed eyelids, with lashes that are still
almost perfect. Oh! the terrifying person! Not that she is ugly, on the
contrary we can see that she was rather pretty and was mummied young.
What distinguishes her from the others is her air of thwarted anger, of
fury, as it were, at being dead. The embalmers have coloured her very
religiously, but the pink, under the action of the salts of the skin,
has become decomposed here and there and given place to a number of
green spots. Her naked shoulders, the height of the arms above the
rags which were once her splendid shroud, have still a certain sleek
roundness, but they, too, are stained with greenish and black splotches,
such as may be seen on the skins of snakes. Assuredly no corpse, either
here or elsewhere, has ever preserved such an expression of intense
life, of ironical, implacable ferocity. Her mouth is twisted in a little
smile of defiance; her nostrils pinched like those of a ghoul on the
scent of blood, and her eyes seem to say to each one who approaches:
"Yes, I am laid in my coffin; but you will very soon see I can get out
of it." There is something confusing in the thought that the menace of
this terrible expression, and this appearance of ill-restrained ferocity
had endured for some hundreds of years before the commencement of our
era, and endured to no purpose in the secret darkness of a closed coffin
at the bottom of some doorless vault.

Now that we are about to retire, what will happen here, with the
complicity of silence, in the darkest hours of the night? Will they
remain inert and rigid, all these embalmed bodies, once left to
themselves, who pretended to be so quiet because we were there? What
exchanges of old human fluid will recommence, as who can doubt they
do each night between one coffin and another. Formerly these kings and
queens, in their anxiety as to the future of their mummy, had foreseen
violation, pillage and scattering amongst the sands of the desert, but
never this: that they would be reunited one day, almost all unveiled,
so near to one another under panes