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Updated: June 28, 2025
I answered and lifted her hand to my lips and then stood utterly still, cold with a sudden, horrible sickness staring at this white hand, where, amid sparkling gems, I saw the dull oval of a scarabaeus ring. "What is it, Peregrine?" she questioned, a little breathlessly. "This scarab? It is one my dear pal bought me in Egypt.
I reasoned, for example, thus: When I drew the scarabaeus, there was no skull apparent upon the parchment. When I had completed the drawing I gave it to you, and observed you narrowly until you returned it, You, therefore, did not design the skull, and no one else was present to do it. Then it was not done by human agency. And nevertheless it was done.
But upon the wrappings of the throat I saw the green jasper of the sacred scarabaeus shining again like a living eye.
It was to be supposed that the disabled ship was properly furnished with bulk-heads, so that the water would penetrate no farther than the stern compartment, and that, therefore, she was in no danger of sinking. Crab A was ordered to make fast to the bow of the Scarabaeus, and tow her toward two men-of-war who were rapidly approaching from the harbour.
I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his fantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be "a bug of real gold."
But, when I recovered from this stupor, there dawned upon me gradually a conviction which startled me even far more than the coincidence. I began distinctly, positively, to remember that there had been no drawing on the parchment when I made my sketch of the scarabaeus.
First of these was the sandy plateau of the Angles, where every spring, in the sunlit pastures so beloved of the sheep, the Scarabaeus sacer, with his incurved feet and clumsy legs, commences to roll his everlasting pellet, "to the ancients the image of the world."
My first idea, now, was mere surprise at the really remarkable similarity of outline at the singular coincidence involved in the fact that, unknown to me, there should have been a skull upon the other side of the parchment, immediately beneath my figure of the scarabaeus, and that this skull, not only in outline, but in size, should so closely resemble my drawing.
Pausing at last before the great scarabaeus of polished syenite whose huge size required a place in the centre of the corridor, he said with a twinkle, "I must tell you a story about this of which one of your countrymen is the hero.
Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?
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