some other unknown cause. Moreover, there is about them nothing of the
grace and charm of ancient Egyptian jewellery; evidently they belonged
to a ruder age and civilization. Yet they had, and still have, to my
imagining, a certain dignity of their own.

Also--here I became infected with the spirit of the peculiar
Potts--without doubt these things were rich in human associations. Who
had worn that dress of crimson with the crosses worked on it in gold
wire (they cannot have been Christian crosses), and the purple-bordered
skirt underneath, and the emerald necklace and the golden circlet from
which rose the crescent of the young moon? Apparently a mummy in a tomb,
the mummy of some long-dead lady of a strange and alien race. Was she
such a one as that old lunatic Potts had dreamed he saw standing before
him in the filthy, cumbered upper-chamber of a ruinous house in an
England market town, I wondered, one with great eyes like to those of a
doe and a regal bearing?

No, that was nonsense. Potts had lived with shadows until he believed in
shadows that came out of his own imagination and into it returned again.
Still, she was a woman of some sort, and apparently she had a lover or
a husband, a man with a great fair beard. How at this date, which must
have been remote, did a golden-bearded man come to foregather with a
woman who wore such robes and ornaments as these? And that sword hilt,
worn smooth by handling and with an amber knob? Whence came it? To my
mind--this was before expert examination confirmed my view--it looked
very Norse. I had read the Sagas and I remembered a tale recovered in
them of some bold Norsemen who about the years eight or nine hundred
had wandered to the coast of what is known now to be America--I think a
certain Eric was their captain. Could the fair-haired man in the grave
have been one of these?