Unorna tried to laugh with him.

“Do you know, I was so nervous that I fancied all those creatures were groaning and shrieking and gibbering at me, when you came in.”

“Very likely they were,” said Keyork Arabian, his small eyes twinkling.

“And I imagined that the Malayan woman opened her mouth to scream, and that the Peruvian savages turned their heads; it was very strange—­at first they groaned, and then they wailed, and then they howled and shrieked at me.”

“Under the circumstances, that is not extraordinary.”

Unorna stared at him rather angrily.  He was jesting, of course, and she had been dreaming, or had been so overwrought by excitement as to have been made the victim of a vivid hallucination.  Nevertheless there was something disagreeable in the matter-of-fact gravity of his jest.

“I am tired of your kind of wit,” she said.

“The kind of wit which is called wisdom is said to be fatiguing,” he retorted.

“I wish you would give me an opportunity of being wearied in that way.”

“Begin by opening your eyes to facts, then.  It is you who are trying to jest.  It is I who am in earnest.  Did you, or did you not, offer your soul for a certain piece of information?  Did you, or did you not, hear those dead things moan and cry?  Did you, or did you not, see them move?”

“How absurd!” cried Unorna.  “You might as well ask whether, when one is giddy, the room is really going round?  Is there any practical difference, so far as sensation goes, between a mummy and a block of wood?”

“That, my dear lady, is precisely what we do not know, and what we most wish to know.  Death is not the change which takes place at a moment which is generally clearly defined, when the heart stops beating, and the eye turns white, and the face changes colour.  Death comes some time after that, and we do not know exactly when.  It varies very much in different individuals.  You can only define it as the total and final cessation of perception and apperception, both functions depending on the nerves.  In ordinary cases Nature begins of herself to destroy the nerves by a sure process.  But how do you know what happens when decay is not only arrested but prevented before it has begun?  How can you foretell what may happen when a skilful hand has restored the tissues of the body to their original flexibility, or preserved them in the state in which they were last sensitive?”

“Nothing can ever make me believe that a mummy can suddenly hear and understand,” said Unorna.  “Much less that it can move and produce a sound.  I know that the idea has possessed you for many years, but nothing will make me believe it possible.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing short of seeing and hearing.”

“But you have seen and heard.”

“I was dreaming.”

“When you offered your soul?”

“Not then, perhaps.  I was only mad then.”