Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/111

 at Ramahadin. Hanley said, quickly: "Susan, this is an acquaintance of your father's. He speaks only Egyptian. His name is Ramahadin."

Susan bowed to the Egyptian. She said to Hanley. "When did he get here? I didn't see anyone come up today—"

"He was here all night," Professor Blythe said, hurriedly. "He arrived last night after you had retired. He's—an Egyptian scientist. Professor Shepard and I are consulting with him."

"Whose woman is this?" Ramahadin said suddenly, in Egyptian.

"She is my daughter," Professor Blythe said.

"What strange clothes she wears." Ramahadin grunted. "She is too thin, but I will accept her."

Cold wind seemed to blow upon the back of Eric Hanley's neck. He saw the glitter in the ancient Egyptian's eyes and he said, softly, "This is a different civilization, Ramahadin. Women are no longer sold—or given away—by their fathers."

"Pah!" snorted Ramahadin. "Women are cheap."

"Not in this world," chuckled Professor Shepard. "I was married to one—once. She kept me poor, buying clothes for her."

"Then you were a fool. A purple Phoenician robe is the best any woman can want. How do men acquire women in this new world?"

"They marry them, with the woman's consent," Hanley replied, curtly.

"Very well, then, tell this woman I will marry her.

Eric Hanley started to speak, but Professor Blythe was ahead of him.

"That, too, must wait until you know more of the world you've come into," he said, and it was very apparent that his words carried weight with the Egyptian; possibly Ramahadin recognized knowledge as power, one scholar to another.

"Anyway," went on Susan's father—who was blessed with a sense of humor, which was beginning to assert itself now that the first shock of the success of his experiment was wearing off—"I can't imagine where one would shop for a Phoenician robe, purple or otherwise."

This last remark being in English puzzled Susan, but, being a scientist's daughter, she shrugged her shoulders, and gave Eric a look as if to say that she had told him she feared for her father's sanity in the midst of such extraordinary experiments.

II

ATER it was all explained to her, and although Eric had expected her to view the whole miracle with horror, she seemed to take it in her stride—although both she and Hanley regarded Professor Shepard's association with her father as one of evil. Blythe seemed to have forgotten his disagreement with Eric Hanley and accepted him as one of the circle responsible for the bringing of Ramahadin into a modern world.

The scientists contended that their primary interest was in seeing how the ancient Egyptian reacted to that world—once they had satisfied themselves that the unholy formula from the Book of the Dead would actually work. Also, its possibilities were boundless. Professor Shepard would have started for Egypt at once to unearth, steal, borrow or buy other sarcophagi to experiment with their contents, but world conditions forbade. Men seemed intent on destroying civilization, not on studying the secrets of its origins.

There remained to them Ramahadin himself, and the Egyptian presented a phenomenon extraordinary past all telling. He went about the modern world with a sort of calm superciliousness which pleased Shepard, but annoyed Blythe, and they all were startled when some three days after