Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 26, 2025
I pictured her to myself as a creature of pink and shallow prettiness. The day to which his ambition strained as the ultimate goal was the day when he could become a curator in the British Museum and transplant her to decent London lodgings. He longed to placard and arrange scarabs in a plate-glass case and to classify Chimbote pottery and on bank holidays to push a go-cart in the park.
These bare-footed Arabs offered for sale scarabs, stone mummy images, mummified feet, skulls, beads, and trinkets so clamorously and persistently that our dragoman had to use his long lashed whip to clear the way. After leaving the chalet, naked boys, apparently from four to ten years of age, followed us with outstretched hands, begging for backsheesh.
That talk changed J. Preston Peters from a supercilious scooper-up of random scarabs to what might be called a genuine scarab fan. It does not matter what a man collects; if Nature has given him the collector's mind he will become a fanatic on the subject of whatever collection he sets out to make. Mr. Peters had collected dollars; he began to collect scarabs with precisely the same enthusiasm.
Bronze figures if good work, inches high squared = shillings: except in bad state, or Osiris, or bad clumsy work, or votive animals. Papyri or parchment, continuous text, 1 pound a square foot, accounts, half or a third. Jewellery, between weight in coin and double that, according to work. Scarabs, common but fair 2s., names 2s.-5s.; up to 5 pounds or 10 pounds if beautiful.
She wore it on her wrist and he told her to give it to Polly." Mr. Marvin held in his hand a bracelet of scarabs linked together. It looked to him to the very one the reincarnated mummy had worn. Harry and Pauline in wonder came to him, and it was well they did. The excitement and exertion had again overstrained his failing energies. He tottered, and they were just in time to save him from a fall.
It was not a part of the bargain." "Quite so," she said, nodding, "but who knows what you will be worshipping before an hour is over? Oh! forgive me for laughing at you, but I can't help it. You are so evidently frightened." "Who wouldn't be frightened?" I answered, looking with gloomy apprehension at the sandal-wood box which had appeared upon a case full of scarabs.
The specialist began to wonder whether it would not have been better to advise Mr. Peters to collect postage stamps. "A scarab," he said "derived from the Latin scarabeus is literally a beetle." "I will not collect beetles!" said Mr. Peters definitely. "They give me the Willies." "Scarabs are Egyptian symbols in the form of beetles," the specialist hurried on.
They set out to walk to the villa. As they went through the little town, Nigel pointed out the various "objects of interest": the antiquity shops, where may be purchased rings, necklaces, and amulets, blue and green "servants of the dead," scarabs, winged discs, and mummy-cases; the mosque, a Coptic church, cafés, the garden of the Hôtel de Luxor.
Beetles, of which the scarabs were a numerous family, increased vastly, and the oldest known dragon-fly and supposed ancestor of those which hawk over the Oxford river, left his skeleton, or what represents a dragon-fly's skeleton, among some two thousand other specimens of fossil insects, in the Swiss Alps. It was then that the first bird and the first butterfly appeared.
In the pause the drawing-room door opened, and a woman with blazing dark eyes and snow-white hair, wearing a white tea-gown and a necklace of very fine Egyptian scarabs, came in, with an intense, self-possessed and inquiring look. This was Mrs. Mansfield, "my only mother," as Charmian sometimes absurdly called her.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking