"Oh, with pleasure!" I murmured, and fled away.

I spent a very instructive two hours in the museum, studying various
Egyptian antiquities including a couple of mummies which rather
terrified me. They looked so very corpse-like standing there in their
wrappings. One was that of a lady who was a "Singer of Amen," I
remember. I wondered where she was singing now and what song.
Presently I came to a glass case which riveted my attention, for above
it was a label bearing the following words: "Two Papyri given to Lady
Ragnall by the priests of the Kendah Tribe in Africa." Within were the
papyri unrolled and beneath each of the documents, its translation, so
far as they could be translated for they were somewhat broken. No. 1,
which was dated, "In the first year of Peroa," appeared to be the
official appointment of the Royal Lady Amada, to be the prophetess to
the temple of Isis and Horus the Child, which was also called Amada,
and situated on the east bank of the Nile above Thebes. Evidently this
was the same temple of which Lady Ragnall had written to me in her
letter, where her husband had met his death by accident, a coincidence
which made me start when I remembered how and where the document had
come into her hands and what kind of office she filled at the time.

The second papyrus, or rather its translation, contained a most
comprehensive curse upon any man who ventured to interfere with the
personal sanctity of this same Royal Lady of Amada, who, apparently in
virtue of her office, was doomed to perpetual celibacy like the vestal
virgins. I do not remember all the terms of the curse, but I know that
it invoked the vengeance of Isis the Mother, Lady of the Moon, and
Horus the Child upon anyone who should dare such a desecration, and in
so many words doomed him to death by violence "far from his own