door that might be locked at pleasure. The general gloom of the building
never tempted casual callers. The Professor purposely abstained from the
decoration or even ordinary furnishing of his chamber. The whitewashed
walls were covered with dust-bitten maps, casts of bas-reliefs,
engravings of ruins. Behind the door were stacked huge packing-cases
containing the harvest of a recent journey to the eastern shores of the
Mediterranean. Along one wall mutilated statues and torsos were
promiscuously mounted on trestles or temporary pedestals made of inverted
wooden boxes. Above them a large series of shelves bulging with folios,
manuscript notebooks, pamphlets, and catalogues ran up to the window,
which faced north-east, admitting a strong top-light through panes of
ground glass; the lower sash was hidden by permanent blinds in order to
shut out all view of the opposite houses and the street below. A long
narrow table occupied the centre of the room. It was always strewn with
magnifying-glasses, proofs, printers' slips, negatives--the litter of a
palaeographic student. There were three or four wooden chairs for the
benefit of scholarly friends, and an armchair upholstered in green rep
near the stove. In a corner stood the most striking, perhaps the only
striking, object in the room--a huge mummy from the Fayyum. The canopic
jars and outer coffins belonging to it were still unpacked in the freight
cases. It had been purchased from a bankrupt Armenian dealer in Cairo
along with a number of Graeco-Egyptian antiquities and papyri, of far
greater interest to the Professor than the mummy itself. As soon as the
interior was examined it was to be presented to the Museum; but more
entertaining and important studies delayed its removal. For many months,
with a curious grave smile, the face on the shell seemed to look down
with amused and permanent interest on Professor Lachsyrma struggling with
the orthography of some forgotten scribe, and arguing with a friend on
mutilated or corrupt passages in a Greek palimpsest.