s that unconsciously one was taken back to
strange lands and strange times. There were so many mummies or mummy
objects, round which there seemed to cling for ever the penetrating
odours of bitumen, and spices and gums--"Nard and Circassia's balmy
smells"--that one was unable to forget the past. Of course, there was
but little light in the room, and that carefully shaded; so that there
was no glare anywhere. None of that direct light which can manifest
itself as a power or an entity, and so make for companionship. The
room was a large one, and lofty in proportion to its size. In its
vastness was place for a multitude of things not often found in a
bedchamber. In far corners of the room were shadows of uncanny shape.
More than once as I thought, the multitudinous presence of the dead and
the past took such hold on me that I caught myself looking round
fearfully as though some strange personality or influence was present.
Even the manifest presence of Doctor Winchester and Miss Trelawny could
not altogether comfort or satisfy me at such moments. It was with a
distinct sense of relief that I saw a new personality in the room in
the shape of Nurse Kennedy. There was no doubt that that business-like,
self-reliant, capable young woman added an element of security to such
wild imaginings as my own. She had a quality of common sense that
seemed to pervade everything around her, as though it were some kind of
emanation. Up to that moment I had been building fancies around the
sick man; so that finally all about him, including myself, had become
involved in them, or enmeshed, or saturated, or... But now that she had
come, he relapsed into his proper perspective as a patient; the room
was a sick-room, and the shadows lost their fearsome quality. The only
thing which it could not altogether abrogate was the strange Egyptian
smell. You may put a mummy in a glass case and hermetically seal it so
that no corroding air can get within; but all the same it will exhale
its odour. One might think that four or five thousand years would
exhaust the olfactory qualities of anything; but experience teaches us
that these smells remain, and that their secrets are unknown to us.
Today they are as much mysteries as they were when the embalmers put
the body in the bath of natron...

All at once I sat up. I had become lost in an absorbing reverie. The
Egyptian smell had seemed to get on my nerves--on my memory--on my very
will.

At tha