The Romance of Golden Star | Page 2

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 graves that have been filled up and
had sentries watching day and night over them for as long a period as
six weeks, and then have been dug up and restored to perfect health and
strength again in a few hours. Now, if life can be suspended for six
weeks and then restored to an organism which, from all physiological
standpoints, must be regarded as inanimate, why not for six years or six
hundred years, for the matter of that? Given once the possibility, which
we may assume as proved, of a restoration to life after total suspension
of animation, then it only becomes a question of preservation of tissue
for more or less indefinite periods. Granted that tissue can be so
preserved, then, given the other possibility already proved, and--well,
we will talk about the other possibility afterwards. Now, tell me, don't
you, as an archæologist, see anything peculiar about this Inca prince of
yours?'
The professor had been looking keenly at his friend during the delivery
of this curious physiological lecture. He seemed as though he were
trying to read the thoughts that were chasing each other through his
brain behind the