The Mummys Foot | Page 3

the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers
scribbled over with verses, in themselves an undecipherable mosaic
work of erasures; articles freshly begun; letters forgotten, and posted in
the table drawer instead of the letter-box, an error to which
absent-minded people are peculiarly liable. The effect was charming,
bizarre, and romantic.
Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went out with the gravity and
pride becoming one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over
all the passers-by whom he elbows, of possessing a piece of the
Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh.
I looked upon all who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so
authentically Egyptian as very ridiculous people, and it seemed to me
that the proper occupation of every sensible man should consist in the
mere fact of having a mummy's foot upon his desk.
Happily I met some friends, whose presence distracted me in my
infatuation with this new acquisition. I went to dinner with them, for I
could not very well have dined with myself.
When I came back that evening, with my brain slightly confused by a
few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately

titillated my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the
natron, bitumen, and myrrh in which the paraschistes, who cut open the
bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess. It was a
perfume at once sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand
years had not been able to dissipate.
The Dream of Egypt was Eternity. Her odours have the solidity of
granite and endure as long.
I soon drank deeply from the black cup of sleep. For a few hours all
remained opaque to me. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with
their sombre waves.
Yet light gradually dawned upon the darkness of my mind. Dreams
commenced to touch me softly in their silent flight.
The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld my chamber as it
actually was. I might have believed myself awake but for a vague
consciousness which assured me that I slept, and that something
fantastic was about to take place.
The odour of the myrrh had augmented in intensity, and I felt a slight
headache, which I very naturally attributed to several glasses of
champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods and our future
fortunes.
I peered through my room with a feeling of expectation which I saw
nothing to justify. Every article of furniture was in its proper place. The
lamp, softly shaded by its globe of ground crystal, burned upon its
bracket; the water-colour sketches shone under their Bohemian glass;
the curtains hung down languidly; everything wore an aspect of
tranquil slumber.
After a few moments, however, all this calm interior appeared to
become disturbed. The woodwork cracked stealthily, the ash-covered
log suddenly emitted a jet of blue flame, and the discs of the pateras
seemed like great metallic eyes, watching, like myself, for the things
which were about to happen.

My eyes accidentally fell upon the desk where I had placed the foot of
the Princess Hermonthis.
Instead of remaining quiet, as behoved a foot which had been
embalmed for four thousand years, it commenced to act in a nervous
manner, contracted itself, and leaped over the papers like a startled frog.
One would have imagined that it had suddenly been brought into
contact with a galvanic battery. I could distinctly hear the dry sound
made by its little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle.
I became rather discontented with my acquisition, inasmuch as I
wished my paper-weights to be of a sedentary disposition, and thought
it very unnatural that feet should walk about without legs, and I
commenced to experience a feeling closely akin to fear.
Suddenly I saw the folds of my bed-curtain stir, and heard a bumping
sound, like that caused by some person hopping on one foot across the
floor. I must confess I became alternately hot and cold, that I felt a
strange wind chill my back, and that my suddenly rising hair caused my
night-cap to execute a leap of several yards.
The bed-curtains opened and I beheld the strangest figure imaginable
before me.
It was a young girl of a very deep coffee-brown complexion, like the
bayadère Amani, and possessing the purest Egyptian type of perfect
beauty. Her eyes were almond shaped and oblique, with eyebrows so
black that they seemed blue; her nose was exquisitely chiselled, almost
Greek in its delicacy of outline; and she might indeed have been taken
for a Corinthian statue of bronze but for the prominence of her
cheek-bones and the slightly African fulness of her lips, which
compelled one to recognise her as belonging beyond all doubt to the
hieroglyphic race