Next month, just ahead of ITV’s new drama about the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the British Library will publish Lost in a Pyramid, a brilliant new collection of classic mummy stories.
Of the 12 included, only one was familiar to me: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No 249, in which an Oxford student reanimates a mummy and sends it to attack those against whom he has a grudge. Most of the others – Eva M Henry’s The Curse of Vasartas (the removal of a sarcophagus brings tragedy on all involved); WG Peasgood’s The Necklace of Dreams (those who wear it will suffer first visions, and then death); Hester White’s The Dead Hand (until restored to its rightful owner, it brings only misfortune to the story’s narrator) – have not been in print since their publication. Either way, it’s a major treat, its editor Andrew Smith, an academic with a special interest in the gothic, having made his selection primarily on grounds of their (to me, extreme) readability.
The mummy story had its heyday between 1869 and 1910, encouraged by British military and political involvement in Egypt, and the ongoing excavation of key archaeological sites. A few were romances; others were vaguely erotic. The majority, however, revealed their authors’ ambivalence towards contemporary events by being, as Smith points out in his introduction, curse narratives. Amazingly, one of the first of these – if not the first – was written by Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, who in 1869 published the story to which this collection owes its title, Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse.
It concerns a young couple, Paul and Evelyn. From Egypt Paul has brought home a handful of scarlet seeds he stole from a tomb, one of which Evelyn, ignoring his instructions, now secretly plants. Will it germinate? And if it does, what effect will the bloom have on her? A narrative in which the protagonists are literally made ill – condemned to suffer a living death – by the alien and exotic, Alcott’s short but haunting tale reads like a warning. Larceny on foreign soil, it suggests, is no different from that carried out at home. Commit it, and you must bear the consequences.
Tutankhamun will be shown on ITV later in the autumn
