Episode 20: Narrative Tropes – When Mummies Are Not Mummies

Ii-wey! I just finished reading Elizabeth Peters’ novel Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975), the first novel in which Peters introduced the discerning reader to the independently wealthy Victorian Englishwoman, Amelia Peabody. For those unfamiliar with the plot that set in 1884-1885, Amelia adopts a destitute Evelyn as her companion for a winter trip through Egypt. The women make the acquaintance of the Emerson brothers, archaeologist Radcliffe and philologist Walter, and soon the quartet are encamped at the brothers’ excavation site at Amarna. Peters blends romance with a healthy dose of mystery, in the guise of a mummy, by utilizing two narrative tropes that were established in literature and film.

We are initially introduced the mummy and the first trope when the mummy makes a nocturnal visit to Amelia and Evelyn’s hotel room at the Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo shortly before their Nile cruise departure. Aided by her bed’s mosquito netting and the moonlight streaming through the open bedroom window, Amelia believes the mummy is a ghostly apparition but after finding a bead on the floor, she rationalizes the mummy is a physical being. With this first mummy appearance, Peters uses the trope of a mummy as ghost, which is reminiscent to the tale in the Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction television series (see my discussion in Episode 6) where a ghost made repeated appearances in a museum above its Egyptian sarcophagus. Comics has been a great source of mummy/ghost trope. IDW published an excellent collection of mummy comics titled Mummies!: Classic Monsters of Pre-Code Horror Comics in which mummy ghosts, associated with the opening of a tomb and/or a stolen artifact, curse the greedy discoverer, usually to the point of their demise. 

The second trope that Peters employs in Crocodile on the Sandbank is the mummy, who in fact is a living breathing human who is up to nefarious activities. Peters effectively creates tension when a mummy appears at the Emerson excavation site after they found a tomb and removed the mummy to their camp. The workers at the camp believe in curses, which is reinforced with the appearance of a mummy. The believability of supernatural intervention is accentuated by Peters’ description that the mummy has stiff movements and black vacant orbs for eye sockets. Additionally, the deposit of wrappings after the mummy’s visitations and the incredulous instance of not one but two bullets penetrating the mummy in a particularly perilous moment for our characters adds to the mummy’s mystique. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No. 249 introduced the concept of an avenging mummy and that storyline could be loosely applied in this case. The discovery of a fragile mural that Emerson and Peabody go to great lengths to try to preserve is discussed as possibly be the source of the avenging mummy. In the climatic third act, readers learn that the mummy was a disguise. Many of the silent era films used this plot device for comedic relief – playing a practice joke or scaring other characters. 

Although she incorporates initially familiar tropes, Peters then gives the tropes a twist. In the former, Peabody realizes that the netting and moonlight skewed her vision followed by her unceremonious entanglement with said net, providing a humorous spin. And, when she found the bead, Peabody deduced, as did the reader, that the mummy was not a ghost. However, it did leave a wonderment for the reader as to what exactly Peabody did see. In the latter trope, readers wonder if the mummy’s curse is to blame for its appearance. Peters keeps the rouse up for a long time before revealing the mummy wasn’t really a mummy. The mummy in both tropes are the one and the same and ultimately, a person wearing a disguise. This is an effective way to utilize well-worn tropes and breathe life into them for readers to be entertained and perhaps, mortified. 

Senebti! 

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