Page:Orczy--the gates of Kamt.djvu/65

 and the next moment the man—or apparition, so gaunt and weird was it—had rushed up towards us, and throwing out his arms had fallen on his knees, uttering hoarse and piercing cries:

"Osiris! Anubis! Mercy! Pardon!"

Without a word Hugh turned towards me with a look it were impossible to describe: the words the poor wretch uttered were unmistakably ancient Egyptian. The creature, which seemed hardly human, had crawled at our feet, and his great dark eyes stared upwards at us with a mixture of awe and maniacal terror, and as he crouched before us, to my horror I noticed that what he held in his hand was a human thighbone, half covered with flesh, which he began to gnaw, while uttering the desolate shrieks of a hyena, mingled with the appealing sounds:

"Osiris! Anubis! Pardon! Mercy!"

I must confess that I felt absolutely paralysed with the horror of the situation and the awful dread, which struck me with the chillness of death. Had we toiled and travelled a thousand miles across the terrible wilderness only to find some half-human creatures who lived on the flesh of their kindred, almost deprived of reason through their brutishness, who had forgotten the glorious civilisation of the past in a present of suffering and scantily-eked-out livelihood? I remembered the golden visions of art and majesty which the name of ancient Egypt always evokes, then I looked down upon the creature who babbled that vanished tongue and wondered if, after five thousand years, its people had come to this.

Some such thoughts must have crossed Hugh's mind too, for it was some time before he brought himself to speak to the thing at his feet.

"Be at peace, my son, thou art pardoned."