"Some Words With a Mummy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

grossly misjudged. It had been five thousand and fifty years and
some months since he had been consigned to the catacombs at Eleithias.
"But my remark," resumed Mr. Buckingham, "had no reference to your
age at the period of interment (I am willing to grant, in fact, that
you are still a young man), and my illusion was to the immensity of
time during which, by your own showing, you must have been done up
in asphaltum."
"In what?" said the Count.
"In asphaltum," persisted Mr. B.
"Ah, yes; I have some faint notion of what you mean; it might be
made to answer, no doubt- but in my time we employed scarcely any
thing else than the Bichloride of Mercury."
"But what we are especially at a loss to understand," said Doctor
Ponnonner, "is how it happens that, having been dead and buried in
Egypt five thousand years ago, you are here to-day all alive and
looking so delightfully well."
"Had I been, as you say, dead," replied the Count, "it is more
than probable that dead, I should still be; for I perceive you are yet
in the infancy of Calvanism, and cannot accomplish with it what was
a common thing among us in the old days. But the fact is, I fell
into catalepsy, and it was considered by my best friends that I was
either dead or should be; they accordingly embalmed me at once- I
presume you are aware of the chief principle of the embalming
process?"
"Why not altogether."
"Why, I perceive- a deplorable condition of ignorance! Well I cannot
enter into details just now: but it is necessary to explain that to
embalm (properly speaking), in Egypt, was to arrest indefinitely all
the animal functions subjected to the process. I use the word 'animal'
in its widest sense, as including the physical not more than the moral
and vital being. I repeat that the leading principle of embalmment
consisted, with us, in the immediately arresting, and holding in
perpetual abeyance, all the animal functions subjected to the process.
To be brief, in whatever condition the individual was, at the period
of embalmment, in that condition he remained. Now, as it is my good
fortune to be of the blood of the Scarabaeus, I was embalmed alive, as
you see me at present."
"The blood of the Scarabaeus!" exclaimed Doctor Ponnonner.
"Yes. The Scarabaeus was the insignium or the 'arms,' of a very
distinguished and very rare patrician family. To be 'of the blood of
the Scarabaeus,' is merely to be one of that family of which the
Scarabaeus is the insignium. I speak figuratively."
"But what has this to do with you being alive?"
"Why, it is the general custom in Egypt to deprive a corpse,
before embalmment, of its bowels and brains; the race of the Scarabaei
alone did not coincide with the custom. Had I not been a Scarabeus,
therefore, I should have been without bowels and brains; and without
either it is inconvenient to live."
"I perceive that," said Mr. Buckingham, "and I presume that all
the entire mummies that come to hand are of the race of Scarabaei."