The Deeds of the Disturber - Elizabeth Peters [9]
As soon as we had settled ourselves on board ship, I hastened to the salon in search of newspapers more recent than the ones I had perused before leaving Cairo. I took the precaution of clipping out articles of interest, which was fortunate, since as soon as he discovered what I was doing, Emerson threw every one of the newspapers overboard, to the extreme annoyance of the other passengers. Armed with my clippings, I found a comfortable deck chair and brought myself up to date on the case of the malicious mummy.
Emerson’s remarks in the bathroom had been both uninformative and misleading. It was not entirely his fault; one had to read carefully between the lines in order to obtain the facts, which had been distorted, mangled, and misquoted in the normal process of reporting.
Though popularly referred to as a mummy case, the object that had aroused such a furore was more properly termed a wooden inner coffin. If I were asked why this distinction should be made, I could do no better than refer the dedicated student to Emerson’s monumental work, The Development of the Egyptian Coffin from Predynastic Times to the End of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, with Particular Reference to Its Reflection of Religious, Social, and Artistic Conventions, Oxford University Press. Knowing, however, that the majority of readers are not dedicated students, I venture to supply a brief synopsis.
The earliest coffins were simple wooden boxes, more nearly square than rectangular, since the bodies they contained had been folded into a crouching or fetal position. As time went on, the wooden surfaces, inside and out, were painted and/or carved with magical spells and religious symbols. By the Middle Kingdom (about 2000–1580 B.C.), the coffins had become elongated and there were usually two of them. The so-called anthropoid coffin, shaped like the mummified form it enclosed, did not appear until the Empire Period (approximately 1580–1090 B.C.). A well-to-do peson might possess as many as three such coffins, each smaller than the last, fitting inside one another like a set of Chinese boxes; and the nest of coffins was sometimes enclosed as well within a stone sarcophagus. Such was the vain preoccupation of these amiable but misguided pagans with the survival of the flesh! (In which aim, a moralist might add, they defeated their own purpose, for a body so swathed and boxed up was more susceptible to decay than one exposed to the hot, dry air and baking sands of the desert.)
From the engravings reproduced in the newspapers and from my familiarity with the seminal work of my distinguished spouse, I was able to deduce that the coffin in question dated from the Nineteenth Dynasty. The artist had sentimentalized the face into simpering prettiness, but the details were characteristic of the period – the heavy, ornate wig, the arms folded across the quiet breast, the conventional religious symbols and bands of hieroglyphic inscriptions. The engraving did not show these clearly, but one reporter – an enterprising rival of Mr O’Connell’s – had made a copy of them. I recognized the standard mortuary formula, addressed to the God of the Dead: ‘Invocation to Osiris, Lord of Busiris, et cetera, et cetera, by the Chantress of Isis, Henutmehit . . .’
So the lady (she was female, at any rate) was not a princess or the priestess of a dark and sinister cult. I had suspected as much from the form of the coffin; her titles made it clear, for although she had held a minor temple appointment, she was no more out of the ordinary than the wife or sister of a modern clergyman. Why should this undistinguished, if handsome, coffin have been singled out as a source of death and peril?
The answer, as Emerson had already suggested, had to be found in the fertile brains of the reporters. O’Connell was not the only one to fall on the story like a vulture on a corpse; in the vivacity of his inventiveness and the lurid tone of his prose he was equalled, if not surpassed, by at least one rival, a certain M. M. Minton, who wrote