Their Eyes Are Always Too Large, The Eyelids Too Wide
Open And The Dilated Pupils Seem To Stare At Us With Alarm.
Amongst
these mummy cases and these coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the
human figure, there are some
That seem to have been made for giants;
the head especially, beneath its cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed
as it were between the hunchback shoulders, looks enormous, out of all
proportion to the body which, towards the feet, narrows like a
scabbard.
Although our little lantern maintains its light we seem to see here
less and less: the darkness around us in these vast rooms becomes
almost overpowering - and these are the rooms, too, that, leading one
into the other, facilitate the midnight promenade of those dread
"forms" which, every evening, are released and roam about. . . .
On a table in the middle of one of these rooms a thing to make you
shudder gleams in a glass box, a fragile thing that failed of life
some two thousand years ago. It is the mummy of a human embryo, and
someone, to appease the malice of this born-dead thing, had covered
its face with a coating of gold - for, according to the belief of the
Egyptians, these little abortions became the evil genii of their
families if proper honour was not paid to them. At the end of its
negligible body, the gilded head, with its great foetus eyes, is
unforgettable for its suffering ugliness, for its frustrated and
ferocious expression.
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