Page:"The Mummy" Volume 1.djvu/204

190 "True; I did not think of that! Well, then," sighing deeply, "I suppose we must do without the hamper?"

"Certainly; and without those boxes and bottles too, I hope."

"Oh no! we can't do without those. Those bottles contain my magic elixir, that cures all diseases merely by the smell:—a new idea that. You know it has been long discovered, that the whole materia medica might be carried in a ring, and that all the instruments of surgery might be compressed into a walking-stick. But the idea of sniffing health in a pinch of snuff is, I flatter myself, exclusively my own."

"Very likely; but we cannot be encumbered with your panaçea in our aërial tour."

"Then that box contains my portable galvanic battery; that, my apparatus for making and collecting the inflammable air; and that, my machine for producing and concentrating the quicksilver vapour, which is to serve as the propelling power to urge us onwards, in the place of steam; and these bladders are filled