The Virgin of the Sun | Page 9

a
man. My father saw the bodies near the ruins of some forest city, in the
tomb over which was heaped a great mound of earth. That of the lady,
which had a kind of shroud made of the skins of long-wooled sheep
wrapped about it as though to preserve the dress beneath, had been
embalmed in some way, which the natives of the place, wherever it was,
told him showed that she was royal. The others were mere skeletons,
held together by the skin, but the man had a long fair beard and hair
still hanging to his skull, and by his side was a great cross-hilted sword
that crumbled to fragments when it was touched, except the hilt and the
knob of amber upon it which had turned almost black with age. I think
my father said that the packet of skins or parchment of which the
underside is badly rotted with damp was set under the feet of the man.
He told me that he gave those who found the tomb a great deal of
money for the dress, gold ornaments, and emerald necklace, as nothing
so perfect had been found before, and the cloth is all worked with gold
thread. My father told me, too, that he did not wish the things to be
sold."
This was the end of the writing.
Having read it I examined the dress. It was of a sort that I had never
seen before, though experts to whom I have shown it say that it is
certainly South American of a very early date, and like the ornaments,
probably pre-Inca Peruvian. It is full of rich colours such as I have seen
in old Indian shawls which give a general effect of crimson. This
crimson robe clearly was worn over a skirt of linen that had a purple
border. In the box that I have spoken of were the ornaments, all of plain
dull gold: a waist-band; a circlet of gold for the head from which rose
the crescent of the young moon and a necklace of emeralds, uncut
stones now much flawed, for what reason I do not know, but polished

and set rather roughly in red gold. Also there were two rings. Round
one of these a bit of paper was wrapped upon which was written, in
another hand, probably that of the father of the writer of the
memorandum:--
"Taken from the first finger of the right hand of a lady's mummy which
I am sorry, in our circumstances, it was quite impossible to carry
away."
This ring is a broad band of gold with a flat bezel upon which
something was once engraved that owing to long and hard wear now
cannot be distinguished. In short, it appears to be a signet of old
European make but of what age and from what country it is impossible
to determine. The other ring was in a small leathery pouch, elaborately
embroidered in gold thread or very thin wire, which I suppose was part
of the lady's costume. It is like a very massive wedding ring, but six or
eight times as thick, and engraved all over with an embossed
conventional design of what look like stars with rays round them, or
possibly petalled flowers. Lastly there was the sword- hilt, of which
presently.
Such were the trinkets, if so they may be called. They are of little value
intrinsically except for their weight in gold, because, as I have said, the
emeralds are flawed as though they have been through a fire or 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,