Inserted here was a drawing of the above mentioned tablet, and, upon it, the following additional fragment: “Memorial-tablet found face downwards. I enclose drawings and translations. Evidently _mine_ is a very ancient _name_? All traces of——.”
Now, I directly trace the mishap which thereafter befell me to the discovery of this same tablet.
A hot day spent in transcribing to paper its mud-filled inscriptions, and a night devoted to their decipherment, might well have driven me forth in search of the cool breezes to be found along the higher slopes of the nearby Libyan Hills.
Yet, in this connection, I must not forget to mention the contents of a newspaper-clipping sent me by Gardiner just before he left Alexandria, a clipping which seems to have a peculiar meaning, especially in the light of the curious experiences which I shall presently relate.
This clipping was found folded carefully in the page of my Diary opposite that last incomplete entry to which I have referred.
Beneath a date and the words “Sphinx, Cairo,” the latter added in Gardiner’s spidery script, there appear the following extraordinary paragraphs: “In the Museum of the Louvre there is a mummy, Catalogue No. 49. It is the mummy of a woman, and is said to have been found in one of the Tombs of the Queens, south-west of the Theban acropolis. The man who found it was crushed to death within twenty-four hours after he had touched it, and his assistants who hauled it up from the tomb-shaft died within a few weeks. Three of the carriers who handled it on the Nile boat died within a short space of time, and one of the men who unpacked it at Paris died in great agony within less than a week after he had played his part in the work of getting it to its destination. All these were seemingly natural deaths, but it is odd that all the men whose fingers touched the mummy should have died so soon after the handling. The body of the unknown appears to have been interred with all the elaboration prescribed for _Queens of the Royal-Blood_! The work of the casemaker was careful in the extreme. Both granite coffin and gold-covered casing were of unusual quality and richness. The many gem-incrustations, with which the gold cases were inlaid, were similarly of the richest and rarest materials. Yet, the name of Meryt, that of a minor priestess of the Temple, found beneath the pitch which had been smeared upon the outer casings, seemed to prove conclusively that the body was that of one of the chantresses of the Temple of Sekhmet at Karnak.