CHAPTER XVIII
A Night of Horror
Zeta Phalos’ companions fully shared his feelings, though they repressed them more than their emotional Oriental comrade.
“All for nothing! All for nothing!” moaned Phalos. “After all these years and all this effort, to find the tomb of Ras-Ameses too late!”
A sense of futility and depression, too great for words, gripped the hearts of all the men.
But from this first despondency a thought came to the professor that made him start up with renewed animation.
“Let me have that flashlight, will you, Frank, for a minute?” he asked.
The captain relinquished it, and the professor picked up a piece of the broken coffin lid and examined it with care. Then he gathered up the other pieces and laid them together as they had been originally.
A moment of critical study and he straightened up with a laugh. His companions looked at him with amazement.
“Glad you can see something to laugh about,” said the captain grimly.
“Why shouldn’t I laugh?” was the reply. “Here we’ve had all our grief for nothing. This isn’t the coffin and that isn’t the mummy of Ras-Ameses.”
“Are you sure?” asked the captain, while Phalos ceased his moaning and hurried to his side.
“Certain!” was the reply. “Look at the symbols on this cover. Do you see the vulture? Do you see the sacred cobra? Do you see the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt? Of course you don’t. None of them is there. Yet they would be there if this were the coffin of the royal Ras-Ameses. This is the coffin of one of his relatives—see, here is his name, Horum-Aleb. Perhaps a nephew or a son-in-law.”
A cry of vast relief broke from the lips of Phalos when he perceived that the professor was right in his conclusions.
“You are right,” he said. “I jumped too soon at conclusions. I should have remembered that large numbers of the royal family were buried in close proximity to the Pharaoh himself.”
His relief, however, though great, was not of long duration, and his brow clouded as another thought occurred to him.
“But if men have broken in here and despoiled this tomb, is it likely that they would stop here?” he asked. “Would they not persist until they found the vastly more valuable one of the king himself?”
“That, of course, is possible,” conceded the professor. “But we’ll not assume that until we know it. Besides, everything here shows that they acted with the wildest haste. They may have been alarmed and made off with their booty without going any farther.”
“There’s one other angle to this matter,” put in the captain. “Whoever rifled this tomb had some other way of getting into it and getting out of it than by the way we came in. We know that they didn’t use that, or the stone would have been down when we got to it. And if there is another entrance or exit, we have our chance of finding it.”
“Is there anything in the inscription bearing on this tomb of Horum-Aleb?” asked the professor.
“Not by name,” replied Phalos. “I have pored over the manuscript so often that I know it by heart, and that name does not occur in it. But the diagram that I have worked out from the veiled descriptions of the whole group of tombs gives an estimate of their length and width that may be of help to us in this instance.”
“Will you lend us your flashlight again, Frank, while we look it up?” asked the professor.
Somewhat to his surprise, the captain hesitated.
“We’ve got to be exceedingly careful of this flashlight,” he observed. “I have only one extra battery with me, and if we have to stay here long our lives may depend upon our having light enough to see our way about. But I have plenty of matches, and we’ll use torches and small fires as far as possible.”
“You always think of everything, Frank,” was the tribute the professor paid him. “Very well, then, we’ll use one of these splintered pieces of coffin lid as a torch.”
He lighted one end of the resinous wood, which burned with a bright though flickering light.
“While we’re looking this over, Frank,” the professor suggested, “suppose you take the measurements of this room with your tape.”
The captain complied, and found that the mortuary chamber was thirty-three feet long by twenty-two wide.
He announced the result, and an expression of gratification came from the lips of the savants.
“Those figures apply to a tomb only the third removed from that of Ras-Ameses, as far as we can make out,” said Phalos. “We can’t be very far from the royal tomb itself.”
“Do you remember, Frank,” asked the professor, “how many such measurements were found in the memoranda of Richard’s that we examined at Hillville? That shows that he wasn’t following a blind trail, but had something definite to go upon. It’s another proof that it was he who secured the other copy of the inscription.”
“I guess you’re right,” agreed the captain.
They went forward, and found themselves before long in a bewildering maze of passages that branched off from one another in all directions. Some led up to walls that might or might not have rooms on the other side. Others terminated in what were veritable points, and had evidently been designed to mislead and weary any intruder into the tombs.
“You have to hand it to those old engineers and architects,” grumbled the captain, in unwilling admiration. “In cunning and foxiness they’d make some of our modern ones look like thirty cents.”
The demands of hunger now began to make themselves felt, and the professor suggested that they snatch a hasty meal. The others willingly acquiesced.
“Napoleon used to say that an army, like a snake, traveled on its stomach,” remarked the professor. “Which is one way of saying that a hungry man is no good for fighting. And we have a fight on our hands, if any one ever had.”
They made their way back to the mortuary chamber of Horum-Aleb. Once there, they took from the bag of provisions a limited amount of their precious stores. They ate sparingly, but the meal was made more palatable by coffee that Ismillah had brewed that morning and placed in a thermos bottle.
Never before had any of them partaken of a meal in such weird and uncanny surroundings. To save the light, they sat in utter darkness. This had the additional advantage of hiding from them the funereal trappings and the dried-up figure of the headless mummy lying over in the corner.
But they knew it was there. That thing that had once been a man like themselves was there. They could visualize him in the darkness. He was a guest at their meal—a very quiet guest to be sure—but he was there.
Suddenly there rose a wail as of a soul in torment, a dreadful hideous shriek that filled them with horror.
The old Egyptian fell over on his face and groveled on the floor.
“The vengeance of the ancient gods,” he cried wildly, “for daring to search for the Tombs of Gold!”