"It is hope, Rob!" he said with quiet self-possession.
Robert Cairn came round the table, and leant over his father's shoulder.
"Sir Michael Ferrara's writing!"
"His unpublished book, Rob. We were to have completed it, together, but death claimed him, and in view of the contents, I—perhaps superstitiously—decided to suppress it.... Ah!"
He placed the point of his finger upon a carefully drawn sketch, designed to illustrate the text. It was evidently a careful copy from the Ancient Egyptian. It represented a row of priestesses, each having her hair plaited in a thick queue, standing before a priest armed with a pair of scissors. In the centre of the drawing was an altar, upon which stood vases of flowers; and upon the right ranked a row of mummies, corresponding in number with the priestesses upon the left.
"By God!" repeated Dr. Cairn, "we were both wrong, we were both wrong!"
"What do you mean, sir? for Heaven's sake, what do you mean?"
"This drawing," replied Dr. Cairn, "was copied from the wall of a certain tomb—now reclosed. Since we knew that the tomb was that of one of the greatest wizards who ever lived in Egypt, we knew also that the inscription had some magical significance. We knew that the flowers represented here, were a species of the extinct sacred Lotus. All our researches did not avail us to discover for what purpose or by what means these flowers were cultivated. Nor could we determine the meaning of the cutting off,"—he ran his fingers over the sketch—"of the priestesses' hair by the high priest of the goddess—"
"What goddess, sir?"
"A goddess, Rob, of which Egyptology knows nothing!—a mystical religion the existence of which has been vaguely suspected by a living French savant ... but this is no time—"