Читать книгу Seven Sins онлайн

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In spite of the injunction to silence, three sibilant inhalations marked the astonishment of the onlookers.

Recessed beyond the curtain a sort of shrine or altar lay. Upon a dais covered with a leopard skin rested a throne, evidently of great antiquity and inlaid with silver and gold. The recess embracing this throne was semi-circular, and decorated with designs from the Book of the Dead, so that a grotesque procession of gods of the Nile marched in eternal monotony behind the woman seated there: figures with the heads of hawks, of cats, of crocodiles; a saturnalia such as might have haunted the dreams of a sleeping Pharaoh.

This woman wore the asp headdress of royal Egypt, a dull gold bangle on her right arm and a number of antique rings upon her fingers. She sat in a rigid pose, her hands palm downward, her body upright, her knees and feet pressed closely together—and her beauty was melodramatic in its flamboyance, in its stark passivity.

Hair dressed in a barbaric fashion resembled polished copper; wide-open eyes which stared eerily before her were of amber flecked with green: beautiful eyes but they held no human spark of life or love or passion, but seemed to survey a past dead world. A sheath-like garment of transparent tissue permitted the curves of her body to gleam through it like those of an ivory statue. No pulse throbbed in that white throat: there was no perceptible movement of her breast. Her lips were slightly parted in a sibylline smile.