May 23, 1863.]
ONCE A WEEK.
589
THE CENTURION’S ESCAPE.
A TALE OF THE EGYPTIAN PRIESTHOOD.[1]
“How cursedly hot it is,” muttered the Centurion Septimius, to his lieutenant, grave old Lepidus, as he lay half stripped in the shade of his tent, longing for the Northern wind.
And he might well say so. The place was Syene, the time the month of August, and the almost vertical sun was pouring down his rays with a fierceness such as the Roman officer had never felt before.
Septimius and his cohort had been marched up to Syene to hold in check the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, who, servile in general, and little- ↑ The plot of the following tale first suggested itself to the writer, while examining the wonderful remains of secret passages, dungeons, etc., in the Island of Philæ, at the southern extremity of Egypt. The story has no foundation in fact: but, so far as passages, escapes, etc., are concerned, might possibly have happened. Somewhat similar machinery has been employed in the early portion of Moore’s “Epicurean.” The only unexplained mystery, the visions which were seen by Lepidus, might have been managed by the help of a magic-lantern; and his subsequent fainting fit is easily explained, by the use of the fumes of Indian hemp or some similar narcotic. The whole magic in the story is trickery. How far the Egyptians, particularly in the olden time, may have been acquainted with mesmerism, clairvoyance, second sight, or similar phenomena is a difficult, perhaps an unanswerable, question. That, in latter times, they adopted mere mechanical and chemical jugglery, there can be no doubt.
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