There was no possibility of mistaking tones which were so irresistibly familiar, and, moreover, why did they bring back to him such distinct memories of tragedies long forgotten, even by him?
Why did they instantly draw before the windows of his soul a long panorama of vast cities, splendid palaces, sombre temples, and towering tombs, in which he saw all these and more with an infinitely greater vividness of form and light and colour than he had ever been able to do in his most inspired hours of dream or study?
Had the voice really come from those long-silenced lips of the Mummy of Nitocris, that daughter of the Pharaohs who had so terribly avenged her outraged love, and after whom he had named the only child of his marriage?
"It is certainly very strange," he said, going to his writing-table and taking up his pipe.

"I know that voice, or at least I seem to know it, and it is very like Niti's and her mother's; but where can it have come from?
Hardly from your lips, my long-dead Royal Egypt," he went on, going up to the mummy-case and peering through his spectacles into the rigid features.

He put up his hand and tapped the tightly-drawn lips very gently, then turned away with a smile, saying aloud to himself: "No, no, I must have been allowing what they call my scientific imagination to play tricks with me.

Perhaps I have been worrying a little too much about this confounded fourth dimension problem,--and yet the thing is exceedingly fascinating.

If the hand of Science could only reach across the frontier line! If we could only see out of the world of length and breadth and thickness into that other world of these and something else, how many puzzles would be solved, how many impossibilities would become possible, and how many of the miracles which those old Egyptian adepts so seriously claimed to work would look like the merest commonplaces! Ah well, now for the realities.