their stiffened joints so limbered by his art that their arms had taken natural positions again, lying over the edges of the sarcophagi in which they had rested motionless and immovable through thirty centuries.  For the man had pursued his idea in every shape and with every experiment, testing, as it were, the potential imperishability of the animal frame by the degree of life-like plumpness and softness and flexibility which it could be made to take after a mummification of three thousand years.  And he had reached the conclusion that, in the nature of things, the human body might vie, in resisting the mere action of time, with the granite of the pyramids.  Those had been his earliest trials.  The results of many others filled the room.  Here a group of South Americans, found dried in the hollow of an ancient tree, had been restored almost to the likeness of life, and were apparently engaged in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal—­as cold as themselves and as human.  There, towered the standing body of an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible.  There again, surmounting a lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a Malayan lady—­decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy, half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a little to show the ivory teeth.  Other sights there were, more ghastly still, triumphs of preservation, if not of semi-resuscitation, over decay, won on its own most special ground.  Triumphs all, yet almost failures in the eyes of the old student, they represented the mad efforts of an almost supernatural skill and superhuman science to revive, if but for one second, the very smallest function of the living body.  Strange and wild were the trials he had made; many and great the sacrifices and blood offerings lavished on his dead in the hope of seeing that one spasm which would show that death might yet be conquered; many the engines, the machines, the artificial hearts, the applications of electricity that he had invented; many the powerful reactives he had distilled wherewith to excite the long dead nerves, or those which but two days had ceased to feel.  The hidden essence was still undiscovered, the meaning of vitality eluded his profoundest study, his keenest pursuit.  The body died, and yet the nerves could still be made to act as though alive for the space of a few hours—­in rare cases for a day.  With his eyes he had seen a dead man spring half across a room from the effects of a few drops of musk—­on the first day; with his eyes he had seen the dead twist themselves, and move and grin under the electric current—­provided it had not been too late.  But that “too late” had baffled him, and from his first belief that life might be restored when once gone, he had descended to what seemed the simpler proposition of the two, to the problem of maintaining life indefinitely so long as its magic essence lingered in the flesh and blood.  And now he believed that he was very near the truth; how terribly near he had yet to learn.