“No—’tis a man,” exclaimed Roger, in some agitation. “At least it is something like a man. Is not this like an arm, with a hand at the end of it?—a little dried, shrunk, ugly arm. ’Tis not stiff, neither. Look! It can’t be Uncle Stephen, sure—or Nan!”
“No, no: it is a mummy—a human body which has been buried for hundreds and thousands of years.”
Roger had never heard of a mummy; and there was no great wonder in that, when even Oliver did not rightly know the meaning of the word. All animal bodies (and not only human bodies) which remain dry, by any means, instead of putrefying, are called mummies.
“What do you mean by hundreds and thousands of years?” said Roger. “Look here, how the arm bends, and the wrist! I believe I could make its fingers close on mine,” he continued, stepping back—evidently afraid of the remains which lay before him. “If I was sure now, that it was not Stephen or Nan ... But the peat water does wonders, they say, with whatever lies in it.”
“So it does. It preserves bodies, as I told you. I will show you in a minute that it is nobody you have ever known.”
And Oliver took from Roger’s hand the slip of wood with which he had been working, and began to clear out more soil about the figure.
“Don’t, don’t now!” exclaimed Roger. “Don’t uncover the face! If you do, I will go away.”
“Go, then,” replied Oliver. It appeared as if the bold boy and the timid one had changed characters. The reason was that Roger had some very disagreeable thoughts connected with Stephen and Nan Redfurn. He never forgot, when their images were before him, that they had died in the midst of angry and contemptuous feelings between them and him. Oliver, on the other hand, was religious. Though, in easy times, more afraid than he ought to have been of dishonest and violent persons, he had yet enough trust in God to support his spirits and his hope in trial, as we have seen: and about death and the grave, and the other world, where he believed the dead went to meet their Maker and Father, he had no fear at all. Nothing that Roger now said, therefore, made him desist, till he had uncovered half the dried body.
“Look here!” said he—for Roger had not gone away as he had threatened—“come closer and look, or you will see nothing in the dusk. Did either Stephen or Nan wear their hair this way? And is this dress anything like Ailwin’s cloak? Look at the long black hair hanging all round the little flat brown face. And the dress: it is the skin of some beast, with the hair left on—a rough-edged skin, fastened with a bit of something like coal on the left shoulder. I dare say it was once a wooden skewer. I wonder how long ago this body was alive. I wonder what sort of a country this was to live in, at that day.”
Roger’s fear having now departed, his more habitual feelings again prevailed.