"BEWARE!" warned the aged Arab. "Beware the wrath of Princess Amen-Ra!"
The four Englishmen laughed uproariously. What was there to fear of an Egyptian princess who had died some 3,500 years ago?
Her mummy case, only recently excavated from the ruins of a nearby temple, lay on the ground before them, and they were determined to bring it back to London, as a souvenir of their holiday in Egypt. Ignoring the old man's repeated warnings, they paid him a handsome fee---for it was he himself who had led them to the buried mummy case---and made off with their prize.
That very night, one of the Britishers was seen to emerge from his tent. He spoke to no one; his eyes were fixed, trance-like, on the wide expanse of desert sand before him. He was like a man possessed as he wandered off. And this was the last anyone ever saw of him. Somewhere in the desert, he had vanished, and no trace of his body was ever found. His friends assumed that he must have been stricken by a fever that had affected his mind.
Yet, only a few days later, a second tragedy occurred, when another of the tourists was shot in the arm by a bandit, and the arm subsequently had to be removed. Upon returning to Cairo, a third member of the party found a cablegram awaiting him, informing that his entire fortune had been wiped out by a bank failure. And when they came back to London, still bearing the mummy case of Princess Amen-Ra, the fourth member of that ill-fated group met with the same news---business collapse which left him a pauper.
But this was still only the beginning. The long-dead princess, it seemed, was determined to avenge herself upon anyone who disturbed the tranquility of her resting place. For when the mummy case was later bought up by the British Museum, more tragedy was in the offing.
First there was the newspaper photographer who took a picture of the exotic looking case, shortly after its arrival at the museum. While en route to his home, he was fatally injured. Then there was the cleaning man, who scoffed at the notion of a haunted mummy case, and proved contempt by waving his duster at it, derisively. Some days later, his wife was stricken by a rare disease. In addition, all sorts of minor injuries befell various museum workers who had helped set up the mummy case in its exhibit vault. Visitors to the museum began talking of strange noises emanating from the case---tapping and crying---and one night watchman went so far as to claim that the princess once emerged from the vault.
It was then that officials of the British Museum decided that these wild tales had gone far enough, and agreed to remove the case from the exhibit hall and store it in the basement. Of the men selected to carry it down, one of them suffered a badly sprained ankle, almost immediately afterwards, and another was found dead of a stroke, only a few days later.
Of course, nobody, except a handful of superstitious people, ever believed that this mummy case actually bore a curse---that the hardships it seemed to create were ever anything more than mere coincidence. Yet, fate had one more cruel trick to play, involving Princess Amen-Ra in her final tragedy.
For in 1914 an American Egyptologist purchased the mummy case from the British Museum, planning to bring it to this country. But this man, too, went to his death, together with the princess, aboard the steamship Titanic, which struck an iceberg in the mid-Atlantic, and sank with a loss of 1,500 lives!
- story author uncredited
- title header illustration created by TrUz ApalOOza
- story featured in The House of Secrets #67 (October 1957)
- published & copyrighted by DC Comics
FACT CHECK: I did a little searching and found this article which documents the above story to be untrue, including the Titanic reference.
No comments:
Post a Comment