58 THE DOWNFALL OF THE DERVISHES stooped over it he heard articulate speech issue from the mummied form inside! The voice, however, was only momentary, and after a time his host informed him that already before he entered the room the sound had been heard by his wife and himself proceeding from the box.

This mummy is now, I hear, in England, and one authority who has been consulted suggests that the employment of the Réntgen rays might perhaps reveal in the mummy’s interior some mechanical device employed by the ancients to produce the semblance of the human voice. That some contrivance of this kind was known in antiquity seems almost certain, Priestcraft sometimes caused the statues of gods to talk, as, for example, the famous statue of Memnon amongst the ruins of Thebes. In the case before us some vibration may have started this venerable clock-— work into renewed activity, just as nowadays the pressure of infantile fingers causes the mechanical doll to squeak and gibber, or cry ‘“ Papa,” “ Mamma.”

At length Colonel Wingate took pity on our abject position in the ghyassa, and we were