There were, it is true,
a number of skeletons, disposed here and there in fantastic attitudes,
gleaming white and ghostly in their mechanical nakedness, the bones of
human beings, the bones of giant orang-outangs, of creatures large and
small down to the flimsy little framework of a common bull frog, strung
on wires as fine as hairs, which squatted comfortably upon an old book
near the edge of a table, as though it had just skipped to that point in
pursuit of a ghostly fly and was pausing to meditate a farther spring.
But the eye did not discover these things at the first glance. Solemn,
silent, strangely expressive, lay three slim Egyptians, raised at an
angle as though to give them a chance of surveying their fellow-dead,
the linen bandages unwrapped from their heads and arms and shoulders,
their jet-black hair combed and arranged and dressed by Keyork's hand,
their faces softened almost to the expression of life by one of his
secret processes, their stiffened joints so limbered by his art that
their arms had taken natural positions again, lying over the edges of
the sarcophagi in which they had rested motionless and immovable through
thirty centuries. For the man had pursued his idea in every shape
and with every experiment, testing, as it were, the potential
imperishability of the animal frame by the degree of life-like plumpness
and softness and flexibility which it could be made to take after a
mummification of three thousand years.
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