Chapter III

“The date is no matter,” said Doctor Zeda, “but there was at Gîzeh, to the north of the Sphinx, a temple dedicated to Isis, but wherein the worship was different. We only know of this shrine by the monuments, but they prove it to have been--eh, Mr. Halesowen?”

Halesowen nodded.

“Here, then, the gods of the dead were adored--but the worship of Anubis took precedence, and was conducted at a shrine apart. Here, locked within three-and-thirty doors, having each its separate janitor who held the key, reposed a sacred symbol--a symbol, my friends, upon which was based the occult knowledge of the initiated; a symbol more precious than the lives of a hundred-hundred warriors--for so it is written!”

“I have never met with the inscription!” said Halesowen, drily.

Doctor Zeda smiled.

“You never are likely to meet it!” he responded. “Your Belzoni and Lepsius, your Birch, Renouf, Brugsch and Petrie, is a mere unseeing vandal, blinded to the great truth--to the ultimate secret that Egypt holds for him who has eyes to see and a brain to realize!”

The mysterious foreign gentleman looked about him with a sort of challenge in his glance; then he quietly resumed his story.

“At the change of the moon in the sacred month, Methori, a maiden selected from a noble house for her beauty and purity, and for a whole year dedicated to the service of the gods, held in her hands the sacred thing--held it aloft that the initiated might worship, until the first white beam lit up the receptacle, when all bowed down their heads and chanted the ‘Hymn of the Souls Who Are Passing.’ Then was it locked again within the three-and-thirty doors, there to remain for another year. None saw the symbol itself but the high priest, who looked upon it when he was so ordained--for any other that gazed upon it died! It was contained in a holy vase!”

He paused impressively. We had all fallen under the peculiar fascination of the speaker’s personality; we felt as though he spoke of matters wherein he had had personal concern. I could almost believe him to have witnessed the strange rites that he told of with such conviction.

“In a year so long ago,” he softly resumed, his voice now a kind of jagged whisper, “that to speak of its date were to convey nothing to you, the high-born virgin on whom the exalted office was conferred closed upon her unhappy soul the gates of paradise for ages unnumbered; called down upon her head the curse of the high priest and the anger of the most high gods; was rejected of Set himself!

“She let fall from her hands the sacred vase, and the holy symbol was lost to the children of earth for evermore! Lost was the key to the book of wisdom; closed was that book to man for all time!”

“Go on!” said Halesowen, harshly, for Zeda had paused again.

“You do not grasp?” asked the doctor. “Well, then, know that the sentence was ‘Until the parts of this vase be made whole again.’ Five fragments there were: a large one, which is your potsherd, and four smaller. The four smaller, after twenty years of untiring search, I have recovered and joined together. What if we now make whole that which was broken? May I not, by the exercise of such poor shreds of the lost wisdom as I have gathered up, summon before me that wandering spirit ere it return again to plead for rest at the judgment seat of Amenti?”

When I say that the man’s words proved electrical, I do not exaggerate the effect which this astounding proposition had upon us. Halesowen was fairly startled out of his chair, and stood with his eyes fixed on the other in a fascinated gaze.

Zeda, entirely returning to his customary urbanity, shrugged and smiled. “You believe my story?”

Lesty was the first to recover himself, and his reply was characteristic. “Can’t say I do,” he drawled, frankly. “I don’t say that _you_ may not, though,” he added.

“Then do you not owe it to assist in proving my words? A little séance? You are sceptical, quite? Very well; I try to show you. If I fail, then it is unfortunate, but--I bow to an inevitable!”

We looked at each other, interrogatively, and then Halesowen answered, “All right. It’s a queer yarn, but we leave the matter entirely in your hands.”

The doctor bowed. “Shall we say to-night to begin?” he said, tentatively.

“By all means.”

The doctor expressed himself delighted, and, carefully relocking the fragment of the vase in its double case, he was about to depart, when a point occurred to me.

“Might I ask whom you suspect of the attempted burglary?” I said.

He turned, in the door, and fixed a strange glance upon me. “There are others,” he replied, “who seek as I seek, and who do not scruple to gain their ends how they may. Of them we shall beware, my friends, for we know they design upon us!”

With that and a low bow he retired.

Little of interest occurred during the day, until about four in the afternoon, when Halesowen aroused us out of a lazy doze to show a letter just received from the British Museum.

It was in reply to one asking why he had received no acknowledgment of the photographs and drawings submitted; and it informed him that no such photographs and drawings had come to hand!

We usually took tea in the afternoon, and Halesowen joined us on this occasion, whilst, at about five o’clock, Doctor Zeda also looked in. He remained until it began to grow dusk, when we all went over to Halesowen’s to arrange the first “sitting”--for so the doctor referred to the projected séance. Retiring, for a few minutes, to his own establishment, Zeda returned with the iron box and explained what he proposed to do.

“Around this small table we sit, as at séance,” he said; “but no medium--only the potsherd. With these flexible bands I will attach, temporarily, the parts, and stand the vase in Mr. Halesowen’s frame, here by the window--so. Beside it we will place the lamp, shaded thus--so that a dim light is upon it. We can just see from where we sit in the dark. We will now wait until it is more dusk.”

Accordingly, we went out on to the balcony and smoked for an hour, Zeda polluting the clean air with the fumes of the long, black cigars he affected. They had an appearance as of dried twigs and an odour so wholly original as to defy simile. Between eight and nine o’clock he expressed himself satisfied with the light--or, rather, lack of it--and we all gathered around the table in the gloom, spreading our hands as he directed. For close upon an hour we sat in tense silence, the room seeming to be very hot. A slight breeze off the Common had wafted the fumes of Zeda’s cigar in through the open windows, which he had afterward closed, and the reek filled the air as with something palpable--and nauseous. I was growing very weary of the business, and Lesty, despite the doctor’s warning against disturbing the silence, had begun to cough and fidget irritably, when the rumbling foreign voice came, so unexpectedly as to startle us all: “It is useless to-night; something is not propitious. Turn up the lights.”

From the celerity with which Halesowen complied, I divined that he, too, had been growing impatient.

“There is some not suitable condition,” said Zeda, relocking his portion of the vase in its case. “To-morrow we shall make some changes in the order.”

He seemed not at all disappointed, being apparently as confident as ever in the ultimate success of the séances. One of the windows, he suggested, should be left open on the following evening during our sitting; and this we were only too glad to agree upon, since it would possibly serve to clear the atmosphere, somewhat, of the odour emanating from the doctor’s cigars. Several other points he also mentioned as being conceivably responsible for our initial failure--such as our positions around the table, and the relative distance of the potsherd. “We shall see to-morrow,” were his last words as he left us.

“A perfect monument of mendacity!” muttered Lesty, as we heard the retiring footsteps of our foreign friend on the gravel below; “and I think his accent is assumed. I don’t know why we even seem to credit such an incredible fable.”

“I don’t know, either,” said Halesowen, reflectively. “But he certainly possesses the missing part of the vase, and if he does not believe the story himself, what earthly object can he hope to serve by these séances?”

“Give it up!” replied Lesty, promptly; and that, I think, rather aptly expressed the mental attitude of all three.

We saw nothing of Zeda throughout the following day, but he duly put in an appearance in the evening, and placed us around the table again, but in different order. One of the French windows was left open, and the potsherd, with the lamp beside it, placed somewhat to the left.

After persevering for about forty minutes, we were rewarded by a rather conventional phenomenon. The table rocked and gave forth cracking sounds. There was no other manifestation, and, at about half-past ten, the doctor again terminated the séance.

“Excellent!” said Zeda, enthusiastically, “excellent! We were _en rapport_, and within the circle there was power. To-morrow we shall triumph, my friends, but there is again an alteration that occurs to me. You, Mr. Clifford, shall sit next to Mr. Lesty on the left, Mr. Halesowen shall be upon his right, and I, facing Mr. Lesty between. Also, there is too much light from the lamps in the road. It is good, I think, to have open the windows, but this Japanese screen will keep out that too much light and shelter the vase. To-morrow we will observe these things.”

This, then, concluded our second sitting, and brings me to the final episode of that affair which, strange enough in its several developments, was stranger still in its dénouement.