The Mummy or Ramses the Damned by Anne Rice Page B

they lay heaped on the marble table. The other items could also be easily destroyed by prying hands. Quill pens, ink pots, a little silver burner meant for oil, it seemed, with a ring in which to position a glass vial. The vials themselves lay beside it—exquisite specimens of early glasswork, each with a tiny silver cap. Of course all these little relics, and the string of alabaster jars behind them, were protected by small, neatly inscribed signs which read: “Please do not touch.”
    Nevertheless, it worried her, so many coming here to view these things.
    “Remember, it’s poison, most definitely,” Julie had told Rita and Oscar, her indispensable maid and butler. And that had been enough to keep them out of the room!
    “It’s a body, miss,” Rita had said. “A dead body! Never mind it’s an Egyptian King. I say leave the dead alone, miss.”
    Julie had laughed softly to herself. “The British Museum is full of dead bodies, Rita.”
    If only the dead
could
come back. If only the ghost of her father would come to her. Imagine such a miracle. Having him again, speaking to him, hearing his voice.
What happened, Father?
Did you suffer? Was there even one second when you were afraid?
    Yes, she wouldn’t have minded such a visitation at all. But no such thing would ever happen. That was the horror. We went from the cradle to the grave beset by mundane tragedies. The splendour of the supernatural was a thing for stories and poems, and Shakespeare’s plays.
    But why dwell on it? Now had come the moment to be alone with her father’s treasures, and to read the last words he wrote.
    She turned the pages now to the date of the discovery. And the first words she saw made her eyes fill with tears.
    Must write to Julie, describe everything. Hieroglyphs on the door virtually free of error; must have been written by one who knew what he was writing. Yet the Greek is entirely of the Ptolemaic period. And the Latin is sophisticated. Impossible. Yet there it is. Samir uncommonly fearful and superstitious. Must sleep for a few hours. Am going in tonight!
    There was a hasty ink sketch of the door of the tomb and its three broad paragraphs of writing. Hastily she turned to the next page.
    Nine P.M. by my watch. Inside the chamber at last. Appears to be a library rather than a tomb. The man has been laid to rest in a King’s coffin beside a desk on which he has left some thirteen scrolls. He writes entirely in Latin, with obvious haste but no carelessness. There are droplets of ink all over, but the text is completely coherent.
    “Call me Ramses the Damned. For that is the name I have given myself. But I was once Ramses the Great of Upper and Lower Egypt, slayer of the Hittites, Father of many sons and daughters, who ruled Egypt for sixty-four years. My monuments are still standing; the stele recount my victories, though a thousand years have passed since I was pulled, a mortal child, from the womb.
    “Ah, fatal moment now buried by time, when from a Hittite priestess I took the cursed elixir. Her warnings I would not heed. Immortality I craved. And so I drank the potion in the brimming cup. And now, long centuries gone by—amid the poisons of my lost Queen, I hide the potionwhich she would not accept from me—my doomed Cleopatra.”
    Julie stopped. The elixir, hidden amongst these poisons? She realized what Samir had meant. The papers had not told that part of the little mystery. Tantalizing. These poisons hide a formula that can grant eternal life.
    “But who would create such a fiction!” she whispered.
    She found herself staring at the marble bust of Cleopatra. Immortality. Why would Cleopatra not drink the potion? Oh, but really, she was beginning to believe it! She smiled.
    She turned the page of the diary. The translation was interrupted. Her father had written only:
    Goes on to describe how Cleopatra awakened him from his dream-filled sleep, how he tutored her, loved her, watched her seduce the Roman leaders one by