The mummy and Miss Nitocris : a phantasy of the fourth dimension

by George Chetwynd Griffith

The castle stood on the top of a somewhat steeply sloping hill about five hundred feet above the sandy shore, on which the breakers were curling a couple of miles away. The hill was covered with thick-growing firs from the plain to the castle wall, but two broad avenues ran in straight lines, one to seaward, and the other down into the depths of the vast forest, until it opened on to the post road, which afforded the only practicable carriage route to the station of Trelitz on the main Berlin-Königsberg Railway.

The longer he looked, the more surprisingly distinct the picture became, and, curiously enough, the less his wonder grew. He saw three men on horseback riding at a canter up the avenue from the forest. Their costumes showed plainly enough that they had just come back from the chase. As they rode on they seemed to come quite close to him, until he could see their features with perfect distinctness. By the changing expression of their faces he could tell they were laughing and chatting; but, singularly enough, he could not hear a word that they were saying, which, considering the minuteness with which he saw everything, struck him as being distinctly curious.

He watched them ride up to the old Gothic gateway in the wall which ran round the castle, suiting itself to the irregularities of the hill. They crossed the courtyard and dismounted. The grooms led their horses away, and, as the big double doors opened, they went in, one of them, standing aside for the younger of his companions but entering before the other. In the great hall whose walls were adorned with horns and heads and tusks, and whose floor was almost completely carpeted with skins, they gave their weapons to a couple of footmen; and as they did so he saw the slim and yet stately figure of a woman coming down the winding stair which led into the hall from a broad gallery running round it. As she reached the bottom of the stairway she threw her head back a little, and held out both her hands towards the man who had come in second. As the light of a great swinging lamp above the stairway fell upon her upturned face, he recognised the Countess Hermia von Zastrow, the reigning European beauty whose portrait in the illustrated papers, and in the great photographer's windows, was almost as familiar as that of Queen Alexandra.

The Count—for the handsome young hunter who now took her hands could now be no other than the Prince of Boravia-Trelitz—raised her right hand in courtly fashion to his lips. The other two bowed low before her, and then she led the way up the stairs.

He saw all this as distinctly as though he had been actually present, and yet none of the party seemed to take the slightest notice of him. But he was getting quite accustomed to miracle-working now, and so he accepted the extraordinary conditions of his visions, or whatever it was, with more interest than astonishment. He followed them up the stairs and along the right hand side of the gallery. The Count opened a door of heavy black oak and stood aside for his Countess to enter. Again the younger of his companions went first, and again he followed; then, as the elder man entered and closed the door, the scene was blotted out as though a sudden darkness had fallen upon his eyes.

"Dear me!" he said, getting up and rubbing his temples with both hands. "If I hadn't had so many extraordinary experiences since my promotion to the plane of N^4, I should probably be a little scared as well. But it is really astonishing how soon the trained intellect gets accustomed to anything—even the eccentricities of the fourth dimensional world. Well, well! I hope that's not the end of the adventure, I was getting quite interested. I suppose this must be in some obscure way the reason why those paragraphs in the Pall Mall interested me so strangely."

He walked towards the window, pulled the blind aside and looked out. But instead of his own tree-shaded lawn and the wide expanse of moonlit common beyond which he expected to see, he found himself looking, as it were, through a window from the outside into a great, oak-panelled sleeping chamber, lighted by a huge silver lamp hanging from the middle of the painted and corniced ceiling. Against the middle of the left hand side wall, as he was looking into the room, stood one of the huge, heavily-draped, four-post bedsteads in which the great ones of the earth were wont to take their rest a couple of hundred years ago. The curtains were drawn back on both sides. In the middle of the bed lay Count Zastrow, deathly white, with fast-closed eyes and lips, breathing heavily as the rise and fall of the embroidered sheet and silken coverlet which lay across his chest showed. On the right hand side stood the Countess and the two men whom he had seen before; on the other side stood a tall, strikingly handsome woman, whose dark imperious features seemed strangely at variance with the severely fashioned grey dress and the plainly arranged hair which proclaimed her either a nurse or an upper servant.

He saw the elder of the two men lean over the bed and raise one of the sleeper's eyelids with his thumb. The nurse took up a lighted taper by the table beside her and passed it in front of the opened eye. The man closed the eyelid, and turned and said something to the Countess and the other man. The Countess nodded and smiled, not quite as a man likes to see a woman smile, and, with a swift glance at the motionless figure on the bed, turned away and left the room. The nurse said something to the two men, and as the door closed behind her the scene changed again.

This time he was not looking into a window, but out of one. He was gazing over a vast expanse of forest pierced by a broad, straight road which led for several miles, as it seemed to him, between two dark walls of thickly-growing pines until it ended abruptly with the forest and opened out on a tiny sand-fringed inlet whose narrow mouth was guarded by two little outcrops of rock half a mile to seaward.

A carriage drawn by four black horses rolled rapidly along the road, swung out on to the beach, and stopped. Almost at the same moment a grey-painted, six-oared boat grounded on the sandy beach. A couple of men landed from her, and as the carriage door opened, they saluted. The Count's two guests got out and the others entered the carriage, then one of them got out again followed by the other, and between them they carried a limp, motionless human form completely covered by a great rug of dark fur. It was taken to the boat. All embarked, and the pinnace shot away out through the little headlands. A mile out to seaward lay the long black shape of a torpedo destroyer. The pinnace ran alongside and they all went on board, two of the sailors carrying the body as before.