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refuses, however, to answer my question. And yet I have not sought from it any secret of the other world. I simply ask it to restore to this life what from this life it has robbed."

"Fool!" said the Arab; "and who hath told thee it is good for the living that the tomb should restore to their knowledge the secrets it is bidden to withhold? Knowest thou aught of the nature of any force, and whether it be of good or of evil, so long as that force is hidden, and the action of it laid to sleep?"

"Certainly," murmured Edmond, half to himself, "I know not of any force of which I can conceive that it should retain the faculties of action after a slumber so immeasurably prolonged."

The stranger did not immediately reply. A profound melancholy seemed to darken in the intricate depths of the luminous eye which he fixed upon the count as he slowly answered, after a momentary silence,

"Say you so? Yet a grain of corn, taken from the tomb to-day, and cast into the furrow to-morrow, will grow from the blade cut down by the sickle that reaped in the harvests of the Pharaohs ere the glory of these was gathered into the garners of Time. And can you doubt of the immortality of forces far mightier than those that germinate in the grain of corn which you take from the tomb where they slumber, or suppose that the centuries, survived by the seed of the field, can annihilate the seed of the soul?"

Edmond was no less struck by the peculiar tone of voice with which these words were uttered than by the accuracy of the illustration they suggested; for

he had frequently convinced himself of the fact that corn found deposited with mummies in symbol of sacrifice perfectly retains its faculty of germination.

"After all, though," he replied, "if I must grant you the existence of the fact to which you allude, yet I confess that I can think of nothing except a blade of corn from which this sort of palingenesis can be expected."

The Arab approached the mummy that was lying on the sand before the count. He stood over the wizened corpse for some time in profound silence. The ardent and intense regard of those dark and intricate eyes was plunged in piercing scrutiny upon the withered features of the dead man's brown, adust, and stolid face. Not a muscle was moved on the cheek of the Kabyl. Under the lustrous transparency peculiar to the complexion of Orientals, nothing agitated the stern metallic reflection of the firm bronzen features, not less brown nor less immovable than those of the mummy at his feet. But ever and anon from beneath the mysterious languors and soft depth of shadow with which the long, slumbrous eyelash veiled the vigilant eye, Edmond could notice, not without an emotion far from comfortable, that strange lights and flashes, as though struck out from some fierce agony of soul, were passing and darting in lurid, sinister play.

Suddenly at length the Arab stretched forth his swarthy arm, and seized the dead man's hand. He drew the ring from its withered finger, and fixed his glittering eye upon the purple, luminous stone, intently perusing the characters engraved upon it.

"Yes," he muttered, as though continuing aloud

some dialogue commenced within himself, "Behold the fateful words of Seb Kronos, the Indestructible Destroyer! . . . . MINE IS THE WORLD, AND TO ME MUST ALL THINGS COME. I, SOLE, HAVE CREATED; AND I, SOLE, DESTROY. I WILL WHAT I WILL. I GIVE AND I TAKE AWAY. ON MORTALS I BESTOW,

AND FROM MORTALS I WITHHOLD, HAPPINESS. MAN, THAT ART MADE OF THE DUST OF THE EARTH, DISTURB NOT THE HAND OF DESTINY. TOUCH NOT WITH EARTHLY FINGER THE WORK OF FATE."

"Tell me," exclaimed Edmond, "is that indeed the sense of the amulet?"

"It is the words of the amulet," said the other, and he passed the ring into the hands of the count. "Blessed thou," he added, after a pause, "if thou never ascertain the sense of them. He that first discovered the significance of those words lies stretched before thee. Behold the first victim of the oracle!"

The Arab pointed to the mummy at his feet. Then taking the papyrus from the hand of Edmond, "Lo, here," he said, "Thoûoris and his sons; Sethos the elder, Amasis the younger.

"Ignoring the prerogative of birthright, the king areads the monarchy to him that shall read the riddle of the ring, as being the most wise and worthiest to reign. Verily not wise was he that thus reversed the rule of Nature. Now, of the sons of Thoûoris, the most wise was Amasis; forasmuch as in him was an excellent spirit of knowledge, to understand the writings of the gods, and in the showing forth of hard sentences. He, therefore, to his hurt, resolved the riddle of the ring.

"DISTURB NOT THE HAND OF DESTINY.

"TOUCH NOT WITH EARTHLY FINGER THE WORK OF FATE.

"So Amasis read the writing, and declared the interpretation thereof. Deeply within his inmost heart. Sethos kept those words. Even as they were graven upon the stone of the ring, so also were they graven upon the spirit of the man.

And from him the Most High God removed the kingdom and the glory of it, so that the sceptre departed out of the hand of Sethos and was given to his brother, that he should sit on the throne of his fathers after the death of Thoûoris the king.

"Then Sethos bowed his head, and was obedient to the will of the Most High God, revering the words of the Oracle.

"But neither did he forget those words in the after time. Therefore he lifted not his hand, neither in anywise hindered he the work of the Inevitable, when to him his brother (was it not by the fault of the man himself? and was it not by the will of the Most High?), being in evil case, a drowning man without help, stretched forth from out of the whelming of the waters a suppliant hand.

"And so Amasis perished under the eye of his brother Sethos. For the waters took him, and he died."

"And what became of Sethos?" exclaimed Edmond, whose imagination was stretched to the utmost by the strange recital which thus suddenly illuminated the hitherto unelucidated obscurity of that antique

tragedy imaged on the papyrus which he had in vain been attempting to decipher.

A bitter smile played about the hard-lined angles of the lips of the Kabyl chief.

"Saidst thou not thyself," he answered (and a look of inexpressible mockery accompanied these words, slowly and emphatically pronounced), "saidst thou not thyself that thou seekest not from the tomb the secrets of another world?"

Edmond, again overmastered by the supreme mockery which he felt in the tone of this response, was compelled to lower his eyes from the face of the Kabyl. They rested on the gem which he yet held in his hand. The mystic amethyst seemed to dart at him from the glittering and vindictive angles of its luminous facets violet forked fires and flashes of unholy light.

Meanwhile the sun had sunk unnoticed behind the dark summits of the Libyan mountains. And now the large disk of the full moon was swathing in soft, argent light the hot, transparent air, and sultry spaces of the great solitude. When the count again lifted up his eyes, he perceived that the mysterious inhabitant of that solitude had left his side as noiselessly as he had approached it. He could distinctly trace the tall form of the Desert's dusky son silently gliding into darkness among the mighty trunks of the colossal columns of the temple of Ammon Chnouphis.

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