One might think that four or five thousand years would exhaust the olfactory qualities of anything; but experience teaches us that these smells remain, and that their secrets are unknown to us.
Today they are as much mysteries as they were when the embalmers put the body in the bath of natron...
All at once I sat up.

I had become lost in an absorbing reverie.

The Egyptian smell had seemed to get on my nerves--on my memory--on my very will.
At that moment I had a thought which was like an inspiration.

If I was influenced in such a manner by the smell, might it not be that the sick man, who lived half his life or more in the atmosphere, had gradually and by slow but sure process taken into his system something which had permeated him to such degree that it had a new power derived from quantity--or strength--or...
I was becoming lost again in a reverie.

This would not do.