No More Learning

Gliddon, I really am astonished to hear you talk in this style,"
said the Count, resuming his chair. "No nation upon the face of the
earth has ever acknowledged more than one god. The Scarabaeus, the Ibis,
etc. , were with us (as similar creatures have been with others) the
symbols, or media, through which we offered worship to the Creator too
august to be more directly approached. "

There was here a pause. At length the colloquy was renewed by Doctor
Ponnonner.

"It is not improbable, then, from what you have explained," said he,
"that among the catacombs near the Nile there may exist other mummies of
the Scarabaeus tribe, in a condition of vitality? "

"There can be no question of it," replied the Count; "all the Scarabaei
embalmed accidentally while alive, are alive now. Even some of those
purposely so embalmed, may have been overlooked by their executors, and
still remain in the tomb. "

"Will you be kind enough to explain," I said, "what you mean by
'purposely so embalmed'? "

"With great pleasure! " answered the Mummy, after surveying me leisurely
through his eye-glass--for it was the first time I had ventured to
address him a direct question.

"With great pleasure," he said. "The usual duration of man's life, in
my time, was about eight hundred years. Few men died, unless by most
extraordinary accident, before the age of six hundred; few lived longer
than a decade of centuries; but eight were considered the natural
term.
After the discovery of the embalming principle, as I have already
described it to you, it occurred to our philosophers that a laudable
curiosity might be gratified, and, at the same time, the interests of
science much advanced, by living this natural term in installments. In
the case of history, indeed, experience demonstrated that something of
this kind was indispensable. An historian, for example, having attained
the age of five hundred, would write a book with great labor and then
get himself carefully embalmed; leaving instructions to his executors
pro tem. , that they should cause him to be revivified after the lapse of
a certain period--say five or six hundred years. Resuming existence at
the expiration of this time, he would invariably find his great work
converted into a species of hap-hazard note-book--that is to say, into
a kind of literary arena for the conflicting guesses, riddles, and
personal squabbles of whole herds of exasperated commentators.
These guesses, etc. , which passed under the name of annotations, or
emendations, were found so completely to have enveloped, distorted, and
overwhelmed the text, that the author had to go about with a lantern to
discover his own book. When discovered, it was never worth the trouble
of the search. After re-writing it throughout, it was regarded as the
bounden duty of the historian to set himself to work immediately
in correcting, from his own private knowledge and experience, the
traditions of the day concerning the epoch at which he had originally
lived. Now this process of re-scription and personal rectification,
pursued by various individual sages from time to time, had the effect of
preventing our history from degenerating into absolute fable. "

"I beg your pardon," said Doctor Ponnonner at this point, laying his
hand gently upon the arm of the Egyptian--"I beg your pardon, sir, but
may I presume to interrupt you for one moment? "

"By all means, sir," replied the Count, drawing up.

"I merely wished to ask you a question," said the Doctor. "You mentioned
the historian's personal correction of traditions respecting his own
epoch. Pray, sir, upon an average what proportion of these Kabbala were
usually found to be right? "

"The Kabbala, as you properly term them, sir, were generally discovered
to be precisely on a par with the facts recorded in the un-re-written
histories themselves;--that is to say, not one individual iota of either
was ever known, under any circumstances, to be not totally and radically
wrong.