"George Griffith - The Romance of Golden Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith George)

be tempted to make a bargain with him. Do you know, Djama, I believe I would give half the remainder
of my own life, whatever that may be, to learn the secrets that were once locked up in that withered,
desiccated brain of his.'

The speaker was one of two men who were standing in a large room, half-study, half-museum, in a big,
old-fashioned house in Maida Vale. Wherever the science of archoeology was studied, Professor Martin
Lamson was known as the highest living authority on the subject of the antiquities of South America. He
had just returned from a year's relic-hunting in Peru and Bolivia, and was enjoying the luxury of
unpacking his treasures with the almost boyish delight which, under such circumstances, comes only to
the true enthusiast. His companion was a somewhat slenderly-built man, of medium height, whose clear,
olive skin, straight, black hair, and deep blue-black eyes betrayed a not very remote Eastern origin.

Dr Laurens Djama was a physiologist, whose rapidly-acquired fame--he was barely thirty-two--would
have been considered sounder by his professional brethren if it had not been, as they thought, impaired
by excursions into by-ways of science which were believed to lead him perilously near to the borders of
occultism. Five years before he had pulled the professor through a very bad attack of the calentura in
Panama, where they met by the merest traveller's chance, and since then they had been fast friends.

They were standing over a long packing-case, some seven feet in length and two and a-half in breadth, in
which lay, at full length, wrapped in grave-clothes that had once been gaily coloured, but which were
now faded and grey with the grave-dust, the figure of a man with hands crossed over the breast, dead to
all appearances, and yet so gruesomely lifelike that it seemed hard to believe that the broad, muscular
chest over which the crossed hands lay was not actually heaving and falling with the breath of life.

The face had been uncovered. It was that of a man still in the early prime of life. The dull brown hair was
long and thick, the features somewhat aquiline, and stamped even in death with an almost royal dignity.
The skin was of a pale bronze, though darkened by the hues of death. Yet every detail of the face was so
perfect and so life-like that, as the professor had said, it seemed to be rather the face of a man in a deep
sleep than that of an Inca prince who must have been dead and buried for over three hundred years. The
closed eyes, though somewhat sunken in their sockets, were the eyes of sleep rather than of death, and
the lids seemed to lie so lightly over them that it looked as though one awakening touch would raise them.

'It is beyond all question the most perfect specimen of a mummy that I have seen,' said the doctor,
stooping down and drawing his thin, nervous fingers very lightly over the dried skin of the right cheek.
'On my honour, I simply can't believe that His Highness, as you call him, ever really went to the other
world by any of the orthodox routes. If you could imagine an absolute suspension of all the vital functions
induced by the influence of something--some drug or hypnotic process unknown to modern science,
brought into action on a human being in the very prime of his vital strength--then, so far as I can see, the
results of that influence would be exactly what you see here.'

'But surely that can't be anything but a dream. How could it be possible to bring all the vital functions to a
dead stop like that, and yet keep them in such a state that it might be possible--for that's what I suppose
you are driving at--to start them into activity again, just as one might wind up a clock that had been
stopped for a few weeks and set it going?'

'My dear fellow, the borderland between life and death is so utterly unknown to the very best of us that
there is no telling what frightful possibilities there may be lying hidden under the shadows that hang over it.
You know as well as I do that there are perfectly well authenticated instances on record of Hindoo
Fakirs who have allowed themselves to be placed in a state of suspended animation and had their
tongues turned back into their throats, their mouths and noses covered with clay, and have been buried in