第 16 页

But one thing in Anuradhapura has not changed through all the weariness of time, and has not bent to heathen conqueror or bowed to that greater Vandal, the civilisation of the West. The temple of the sacred Bo-tree still remains, an oasis tilled by religion. The brick of the court yard walls maintains its blush; the priests are in the same ochre-coloured robes; the tree bears leaves to a line the same as those it bore when King Oevenipiatissa sat on his throne of gold and ivory and precious gems. The peacocks are there too, as they always have been, to lend colour to the place with their living jewellery.

Only once in all its life of over two thousand years have the newer gods frowned on the tree, and that was in the October of 1887. Then it was that they sent a great storm and splintered off the main stem and threw it to the litter of the courtyard. The yellow-clothed priests with sorrow took the wood and cremated it with vast and mournful ceremony, and the cult of the sur viving branches continues.

The tree now is hoary with years, and rests feebly on its crutched sticks, and is bound about the middle with many a girdle; but its heartshaped leaves are as fresh as those it bore in that far mysterious past, and never for an instant do they rest. Unceasingly they circle and dance and quiver before the little monkeys on the wall, and the yellow-robed priests of the temple, and the tired pilgrims who do obeisance in the courtyard. They are never cut, never shaken; but when they fall to the ground, then the devout take them as holy relics, and give what is due to the priests of the temple.

This is the year of our Lord 1895, and the Buddhist pilgrims have done reverence to every leaf which has fallen from that tree since 288 years before His birth. We know that the heathen is an erring man who bows down to wood and stone, but we do not always realise that his constancy is a thing we cannot match.

Two thousand one hundred and eighty-three years--one tree--one religion: think the matter out. It may bring understanding to other things which lie within that smiling, haggard, mysterious East.

XI

THE MUMMY OF THOMPSON-PRATT

GARGKAVE was a fellow of Clare with rooms in College, who lectured twice a week on Con structive Egyptology, as a rule to empty benches. He was one of the most profound Egyptologists of the day, and had a clever knack of keeping all interesting items to himself, and discoursing the dry bran of theory only. At the beginning of each October term he had quite a crowd to hear him. The undergraduate who thought he ought to do something up at Cambridge on which to report progress to parent or guardian, would run his eye down the list, and pitch upon Construc tive Egyptology as a subject likely to be of the light fiction order, and one which would probably offer him pleasant entertainment. But one hearing of Gargrave soon knocked this notion on the head, and that undergraduate in future wasted no more time drawing caricatures on lectureroom foolscap with spluttering lecture-room quills, whilst Gargrave prosed about the true significance of an accidental scratch on a scarabeus, but spent his mornings in bed, or on the river, or merely playing poker, as Nature had originally intended. And the lecture-room benches remained vacant till the next batch of green freshmen arrived in the succeeding October.

This result was pointed out clearly to Gargrave by candid friends. But this made no difference in the discourses. He held to the solid Cam bridge theory that 'Varsity lectures were not intended to amuse, or teach anything that was useful; but merely to educate; which was a very different matter. " D'ye think I'm a music hall?" Gargrave would say. " Or is it a damned board-school you take me for?" The rest of the Clare fellows wished Gargrave would take orders, and then they could give him a college living and get rid of him. But Gargrave refused to do this thing, on the plea of religious scruples; and rumour got about in Cambridge that his creed was that of the ancient gods of Egypt.

Of the same college, and the bye-term senior to Gargrave, was Thompson-Pratt, Demonstrator in Chemistry at the Cavendish laboratories. He was not a Fellow of Clare, or even likely to be made one. Why he had ever got a first class in the National Science tripos was an abstruse mystery. He was not a man of brilliant intellect, nor did he, in his undergraduate days, ever resort to excessive reading. When he graduated at the end of his third year, he tried school-mastering for a twelve-month, disliked it, and stumbled into this demonstratorship in chemistry which was then vacant. Envious people said he got it by sheer favouritism. He himself suggested that it was a just reward for his powers of blarney.

Thompson-Pratt always had matches and strong tobacco ready in his pocket for any one who needed them, and in the waiting spaces during a lingering experiment he could re-spin a yarn from back numbers of the Pink 'Un as deftly as one could wish to hear it. He was a distinctly popular man in a small way, and got asked out more than was good for his health.

Gargrave dined daily at the high table in hall, drank two glasses of port and ate four walnuts in the Combination Room afterwards, and then returned to his own rooms on the Don's staircase and worked till 2 A.M. Thompson-Pratt kept in Green Street, dined at the Hoop, and spent his evenings at threepenny-rise poker with four other Bachelors who entertained one another in turn and sat up till daylight. He knew Gargrave and disliked him candidly, and Gargrave despised Thompson-Pratt. So here are the men, and these are the relations between them.

Gargrave brought home the mummy himself by long sea from Alexandria in a P. & 0. boat, and as I happened to be on board, and was a man of his own year and college, he looked upon me as his especial prey and bored me accordingly. I told him at the outset that except as fuel I was not interested in mummies in any degree whatever. But that did not choke him off in the least; and he poured conversational mummy-dust into my ears all down the Mediterranean, and through the Straits, and across the Bay, and down Channel till we fetched up in Southampton. I gave him the slip there in the Custom-House, and hoped he'd get run over by a cab in the street.

Two years later I went up to Cambridge to take my M.A. degree. I was paying my fees in the butteries, when in came Gargrave and passed the time of day. " Look here," he said, "I wish you'd come round to my rooms after you've finished your business in the Senate House. I've got an experiment I want you to be in at."

"What sort of experiment?" I asked. " Not mummies?"

"It has to do with a mummy. The one you saw me bring home from Egypt."

"No, thanks, old man," I said. " I hate the whole breed of them. Besides, I've another engagement."

He pawed my coat sleeve. " I know you hate them. That's just the very reason I want you. You'll be an unprejudiced witness. Now do stay. You needn't put up at the Bull. I've got a spare bed, and I'll tell my gyp to make it up for you. I believe I've got hold of the finest thing that was ever hit upon since Egyp tology started, and I want you to be there to confirm my notes."

"But I should be no good at taking down notes. I'm merely a novelist. I haven't climbed as far as being a reporter yet. Shorthand is clean beyond me."

"I've got a phonograph to take it all down," he said. Writing would be no use even though you knew the language, which you don't. The accent we use now is probably quite wrong. You wouldn't be able to catch hold of one word in ten."

"I wish you wouldn't talk hieroglyphics."

"I can't explain it more to you here," he said. "You must come and see for yourself, and I can promise you the entertainment will be exciting enough and suit even your lively tastes. If you stay away, you'll regret it all the rest of your life."

"Why?"

He was getting exasperated. " You'll see why, you fool, when my book comes out in a year's time."

It was really cheering to see Gargrave human enough to lose his temper. " All right," I said, "I'll come after I've been through the mill in the Senate House and can smoke in Cambridge streets at night without danger of being proctorised and fined the gentle six-and-eight. Solong," I said, and turned into the butteries to talk over past undergraduate high-jinks with my old gyp.

Now if anything better had turned up, it is more than possible that I should have forgotten my engagement with Gargrave and gone else where. I had had a very excellent three years in Cambridge some time before, as an irrespon sible undergraduate, and was by no means averse to having a short retaste of the old lively scenes. But I could find no one that I knew who seemed at all interesting; the current undergraduates, looked at from the light of after years, seemed mere schoolboys; and in fact the larger part of my acquaintance seemed to consist of gyps, bedmakers, or tradesmen's assistants; and so faute de mieux, after I had been raised to the sublime degree of Magister Artium, I restored my borrowed hood, cap, gown, and bands to the tailor's, and strolled across to Gargrave's staircase.

I went in without knocking, more Cantab. He was fitting a new wax cylinder to a phonograph, and as he leaned over the machine and I saw the curves of his head, I thought of what a thousand pities it was that a man with such a magnificent brain should fritter it on such a useless life-work. The mummy case stood open against one of the walls, the mummy in it stripped of its swathings. The air was full of the sickly flavour of spices. I pulled out a cigar and lit it.

"Don't smoke," said Gargrave. " I must have the air here quite clear."

"Then open the window," I said. " The place stinks."

"You'll be used to the atmosphere directly.

There's the mummy. What do you think of him?"

"Toughish biltong. Newer meat for me. He's well tattooed about the chest and arms, though."

"Those are not tattoo marks. Look closer. They are a pattern in the grain of the epidermis."

"So they are. Mr. Menen-Ra isn't that his name? is a curious beast."

"Curious! He's unique. Or at least he and his descendants are."

"Oh, those markings would not pass on to his son."

"So you say. But it appears they did."

"Have you got another mummy here, then?"

"I've got more than that. I've got one of his living descendants, he's due in this room almost directly."

Humbug."

"You shall judge for yourself. You know the very man. He's Thompson-Pratt, of the byeterm above us."

"What, the demonstrator in the labs?"

"That same man. He's the lineal descendant of this mummy, as I've been at infinite pains to find out."

"And has he got the strawberry mark, or whatever you call it?"

"He has, line for line, pustule for pustule."

"Did he see your mummy and come up and claim it as a cousin?"

"He did not. I discovered his markings for myself long before I saw the mummy. It was the term after you had gone down. He'd been on this staircase here to see the Dean, who was out. He slipped in coming down, and took a header, and got all the sense knocked out of him. I heard the noise. I was the only man in. So I went and picked him up, and brought him in here. He lay so still I thought he was dead, so I ripped open his shirt to see if I could feel his heart beating; and it was then that incidentally I came across the markings. I got him back to his senses again soon afterwards, and whilst he was lying on my sofa getting his nerves straight again, I told him what I had seen and asked him how they came there.

"He was furiously angry and said I'd taken a great liberty.

"'My good man,' I said, 'I didn't look for the things. I merely stumbled across them by accident.'

"{ They are the curse of my life,' said he. ' I love swimming, and yet I daren't bathe in pub lic. People hoot at me if I do. Look,' he said, and pulled back his shirt, and showed me his chest and the tops of his arms. ' I'm marked like the spotted man at the fair. I'm a blooming spectacle. My father's the same way, and so's the grand gov'nor, and so was his father before him. I suppose it's a sort of family curse, or some such rot as that, only we're too ashamed of the whole thing to have any yarn about it.' And then he pinned me not to tell about him, and then he went. I didn't worry my head more about the matter. Biology's outside my line, and Thompson-Pratt was not a man I had any special interest in at that period.

"Well, then, of course I went on with my work, and in time went to Egypt and got this mummy of Menen-Ra. I brought it home in its swathings, and didn't open it out till I got here. I'd procured it, as you know, for a certain purpose connected with one of my theories. But when I'd had the first glance at those markings on its skin, I let my original ideas go to the winds for the time being. So far as I could remember, they were the exact repetition of those carried by Thompson-Pratt.

"Here was a strange thing! I sat and thought of it hour after hour, and day after day. I tell you theories fairly bubbled out of me. At last I made up my mind what was to be done. But before I went further, I had got to know if the markings were exactly the same as Thompson- Pratt's. He made a big difficulty about it, and for a man who pretends to be scientific, I must say he was absurdly prejudiced. But he gave in at last, and let me take a photograph. I tell you it was simply marvellous: line for line, pus tule for pustule, his markings were the same as the mummy's.

"Well, that was strong evidence, you'll say, but I wanted to go deeper. I've put an enor mous amount of work into it; I've had scores of genealogy experts working for me; and I've had amazing luck. I've worked out the chain of descent in Egypt, Italy, France, England, Scot land, and England again without a break; and I've learned for an absolute certainty that Thompson-Pratt is the direct descendant of the Egyptian Menen-Ra, whose mummy you see against the wall yonder.

"And now," he went on, I'll explain to you what I intend to do." But he did not explain to me then. The door opened and Thompson-Pratt came into the room. He nodded curtly enough to Gargrave, but he greeted me kindly. " Hullo, old man. How's the world using you? Heard you were up taking out your M.A. Staying up long?"