Note return — Chapter XVIII · A LIGHT IN THE MUSEUM

“Anûpu, eh? Hani’s given name. That’s curious.” Salveter rose and looked at the design. “And another point might be considered, Mr. Vance,” he went on, after a pause. “These lower-class Copts are, for all their superficial Christian veneer, highly superstitious. Their minds run along one traditional groove: they like to fit everything to a preconceived symbolism. There have been nine more or less coincidental deaths of late among those connected with the excavations in Egypt,[27] and the natives ridiculously imagine that the afrîts of their ancestors lay in ambush in the various tombs to mow down the western intruders, as a kind of punitive measure. They actually believe in such malefic forces.… And here is Hani, at bottom a superstitious Egyptian, who resents the work of Doctor Bliss:—is it not possible he might consider the death of the doctor by a dagger once worn by a Pharaoh as a sort of mystical retribution in line with all these other irrational ghost stories? And Hani might even regard the jackal’s head on that sheath as a sign that he—named after the jackal-headed god, Anûbis—had been divinely appointed the agent in this act of vengeance.”