And then the chanting and intoning commenced, and the dreadful hymns for the dead swelled and reverberated in the room until I put my hands before my ears to shut out the ancient and obscene chants.

“Our master out of the skies is dead!” they wailed. “Deep, deep in the earth shall we bury our king. Long has he ruled us, and horrible the evil he did to us, but he was our king out of the skies, and we revere his memory. Horrible his black tongue that shot out fire, horrible the maidens he devoured, horrible the blood he drank, but he was a king. In the book of the dead, it is written that he shall be judged by gods, by his peers he shall be judged. He shall appear as a snake, as a reptile before his peers, but by his ears they shall know him.”

Then the picture cleared terribly, and I saw that the procession trod on hot reddish sands, and a great stone effigy loomed up behind them. It was a sphinx, but a more ancient sphinx than the one we know, and its eyes glowed banefully. And in a deep and perfectly round hole dug in the sand at the statue’s base they buried their king, and strewed gold dust upon him, and anointed his limbs with oil which they poured from jars of veined porphyry.

Unmentionable were the rites they performed above him, and the last words of their loathsome high priest, who had the head of a lizard, were lethal words, and I shivered when I realized at whom they were directed.

“For thirty centuries you shall sleep, but a little shameless creature with no hair to cover him shall drag you forth, because in his time he shall be as a god. But his evil day will not be long under the sun. He too shall return unto dust, and a very thin creature with neither legs nor eyes shall play havoc with his bones. It is written. Rest in peace and remember us who worshiped you!”

The vision grew vaguer, and the forms seemed to converge and merge into each other. Then gradually the darkness closed in, and I found myself staring with frightened eyes at Professor Dewey’s monstrous acquisition. It loomed vaguely out of the blackness, and it seemed to be stirring, and squirming about.

I watched fascinated while the ancient wrappings fell away, and two long pink hands fumbled hectically with mildewed cerements. The hands were abnormally emaciated, and covered with thin, reddish hair.