He walked across to a distant shelf, selected a volume, opened it at a particular page, and placed it on his son's knees.
"Read there!" he said, pointing.
The words seemed to dance before the younger man's eyes, and this is what he read:
"To read two pages, enables you to enchant the heavens, the earth, the abyss, the mountains, and the sea; you shall know what the birds of the sky and the crawling things are saying ... and when the second page is read, if you are in the world of ghosts, you will grow again in the shape you were on earth...."
"Heavens!" whispered Robert Cairn, "is this the writing of a madman? or can such things possibly be!" He read on:
"This book is in the middle of the river at Koptos, in an iron box—"
"An iron box," he muttered—"an iron box."
"So you recognise the iron box?" jerked Dr. Cairn.
His son read on:
"In the iron box, is a bronze box; in the bronze box, is a sycamore box; in the sycamore box, is an ivory and ebony box; in the ivory and ebony box, is a silver box; in the silver box, is a golden box; and in that is the book. It is twisted all round with snakes, and scorpions, and all the other crawling things...."