"What, don't you know?" she cried with unaffected surprise. "Why, we're mummies."
She made this astounding statement with just the same quiet unconsciousness as if she had said, "we're French," or "we're Americans." I glanced round the walls, and observed behind the columns, what I had not noticed till then—a large number of empty mummy-cases, with their lids placed carelessly by their sides.
"But what are you doing here?" I asked in a bewildered way.
"Is it possible," said Hatasou, "that you don't really know the object of embalming? Though your manners show you to be an agreeable and well-bred young man, you must excuse my saying that you are shockingly ignorant. We are made into mummies in order to preserve our immortality. Once in every thousand years we wake up for twenty-four hours, recover our flesh and blood, and banquet once more upon the mummied dishes and other good things laid by for us in the Pyramid. To-day is the first day of a millennium, and so we have waked up for the sixth time since we were first embalmed."
"The sixth time?" I inquired incredulously. "Then you must have been dead six thousand years."
"Exactly so."
"But the world has not yet existed so long," I cried, in a fervour of orthodox horror.
"Excuse me, barbarian prince. This is the first day of the three hundred and twenty-seven thousandth millennium."
My orthodoxy received a severe shock. However, I had been accustomed to geological calculations, and was somewhat inclined to accept the antiquity of man; so I swallowed the statement without more ado. Besides, if such a charming girl as Hatasou had asked me at that moment to turn Mohammedan, or to worship Osiris, I believe I should incontinently have done so.
"You wake up only for a single day and night, then?" I said.