And he had reached the conclusion
that, in the nature of things, the human body might vie, in resisting
the mere action of time, with the granite of the pyramids. Those had
been his earliest trials. The results of many others filled the room.
Here a group of South Americans, found dried in the hollow of an
ancient tree, had been restored almost to the likeness of life, and were
apparently engaged in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal--as
cold as themselves and as human. There, towered the standing body of
an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only
sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a
lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a
Malayan lady--decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved
that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy,
half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a
little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly
still, triumphs of preservation, if not of semi-resuscitation, over
decay, won on its own most special ground. Triumphs all, yet almost
failures in the eyes of the old student, they represented the mad
efforts of an almost supernatural skill and superhuman science to
revive, if but for one second, the very smallest function of the living
body. Strange and wild were the trials he had made; many and great
the sacrifices and blood offerings lavished on his dead in the hope
of seeing that one spasm which would show that death might yet be
conquered; many the engines, the machines, the artificial hearts, the
applications of electricity that he had invented; many the powerful
reactives he had distilled wherewith to excite the long dead nerves,
or those which but two days had ceased to feel.
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