They proved to be all church books, liturgies for different seasons, or homilies; and not historical, nor of any particular interest, either from their age or subject. There now remained only the great book upon the altar, a ponderous quarto, bound either in brown leather or wooden boards; and this the carpenter's son with difficulty lifted from its place, and laid it down before us on the ground; but, as he did so, we heard the noise again. The carpenter and I looked at each other: he turned pale—perhaps I did so too; and we looked over our shoulders in a sort of anxious, nervous kind of way, expecting to see something—we did not know what. However, we saw nothing; and, feeling a little ashamed, I again settled myself before the three candle-ends, and opened the book, which was written in large black characters of unusual size. As I bent over the huge volume, to see what it was about, suddenly there arose a sound somewhere in the cavern, but from whence it came I could not comprehend; it seemed all round us at the same moment. There was no room for doubt now: it was a fearful howling, like the roar of a hundred wild beasts. The carpenter looked aghast: the tall and grisly figures of the Egyptian gods seemed to stare at us from the walls. I thought of Cornelius Agrippa, and felt a gentle perspiration coming on which would have betokened a favourable crisis in a fever. Suddenly the dreadful roar ceased, and as its echoes died away in the tomb, we felt considerably relieved, and were beginning to try and put a good face upon the matter, when, to our unutterable horror, it began again, and waxed louder and louder, as if legions of infernal spirits were let loose upon us. We could stand this no longer: the carpenter and I jumped up from the ground, and his son in his terror stumbled over the great Coptic manuscript, and fell upon the candles, which were all put out in a moment; his screams were now added to the uproar which resounded in the cave: seeing the twinkling of a star through the vista of the two outer chambers, we all set off as hard as we could run, our feelings of alarm being increased to desperation when we perceived that something was chasing us in the darkness, while the roar seemed to increase every moment. How we did tear along! The devil take the hindmost seemed about to be literally fulfilled; and we raised stifling clouds of dust, as we scrambled up the steep slope which led to the outer door. "So then," thought I, "the stories of gins, and ghouls, and goblins, that I have read of and never believed, must be true after all, and in this city of the dead it has been our evil lot to fall upon a haunted tomb!"
Breathless and bewildered, the carpenter and I bolted out of this infernal palace into the open air, mightily relieved at our escape from the darkness and the terrors of the subterranean vaults. We had not been out a moment, and had by no means collected our ideas, before our alarm was again excited to its utmost pitch.
The evil one came forth in bodily shape, and stood revealed to our eyes distinctly in the pale light of the moon.
While we were gazing upon the appearance, the carpenter's son, whom we had quite forgotten in our hurry, came creeping out of the doorway of the tomb upon his hands and knees.
"Why, father!" said he, after a moment's silence, "if that is not old Fatima's donkey, which has been lost these two days! It is lucky that we have found it, for it must have wandered into this tomb, and it might have been starved if we had not met with it to-night."
The carpenter looked rather ashamed of the adventure; and as for myself, though I was glad that nothing worse had come of it, I took comfort in the reflection that I was not the first person who had been alarmed by the proceedings of an ass.
I have related the history of this adventure because I think that, on some foundation like this, many well-accredited ghost stories may have been founded. Numerous legends and traditions, which appear to be supernatural or miraculous, and the truth of which has been attested and sworn to by credible witnesses, have doubtless arisen out of facts which actually did occur, but of which some essential particulars have been either concealed, or had escaped notice; and thus many marvellous histories have gone abroad, which are so well attested, that although common sense forbids their being believed, they cannot be proved to be false. In this case, if the donkey had not fortunately come out and shown himself, I should certainly have returned to Europe half impressed with the belief that something supernatural had occurred, which was in some mysterious manner connected with the opening of the magic volume which we had taken from the altar in the tomb. The echoes of the subterranean cave so altered the sound of the donkey's bray, that I never should have discovered that these fearful sounds had so undignified an origin; a story never loses by telling, and with a little gradual exaggeration it would soon have become one of the best accredited supernatural histories in the country.
The well-known story of the old woman of Berkeley has been read with wonder and dread for at least four hundred years: it is to be found in early manuscripts; it is related by Olaus Magnus, and is to be seen illustrated by a woodcut, both in the German and Latin editions of the 'Nuremberg Chronicle,' which was printed in the year 1493. There is no variation in the legend, which is circumstantially the same in all these books. Without doubt it was partly founded upon fact, or, as in the case of the story of the Theban tomb, some circumstances have been omitted which make all the difference; and a natural though perhaps extraordinary occurrence has been handed down for centuries, as a fearful instance of the power of the evil one in this world over those who have given themselves up to the practice of tremendous crimes.
There are many supernatural stories, which we are certain cannot by any possibility be true; but which nevertheless are as well attested, and apparently as fully proved, as any facts in the most veracious history. Under circumstances of alarm or temporary hallucination people frequently believe that they have had supernatural visitations. Even the tricks of conjurers, which have been witnessed by a hundred persons at a time, are totally incomprehensible to the uninitiated; and in the middle ages, when these practices were resorted to for religious or political ends, it is more than probable that many occurrences which were supposed to be supernatural might have been explained, if all the circumstances connected with them had been fairly and openly detailed by an impartial witness.