midnight before
The hoary associations and typical significance of the numerous relics that crowded Mr. Murray 's rooms seized upon Edna 's fancy , linked her sympathies with the huge pantheistic systems of the Orient , and filled her mind with waifs from the dusky realm of a mythology that seemed to antedate all the authentic chronological computations of man . To the East , the mighty alma mater of the human races -- of letters , religions , arts , and politics , her thoughts wandered in wondering awe ; and Belzoni , Burckhardt , Layard , and Champollion were hierophants of whose teachings she never wearied . As day by day she yielded more and more to this fascinating nepenthe influence , and bent over the granite sarcophagus in one corner of Mr. Murray 's museum , where lay a shrunken mummy shrouded in gilded byssus , the wish strengthened to understand the symbols in which subtle Egyptian priests masked their theogony . While morning and afternoon hours were given to those branches of study in which Mr. Hammond guided her , she generally spent the evening in Mr. Murray 's sitting-room , and sometimes the clock in the rotunda struck midnight before she locked up the MSS . and illuminated papyri . Two nights after the examination of the Targum , she was seated near the book-case looking over the plates in that rare but very valuable volume , Spence 's Polymetis , when the idea flashed across her mind that a rigid analysis and comparison of all the mythologies of the world would throw some light on the problem of ethnology , and in conjunction with philology settle the vexed question . Pushing the Polymetis aside , she sprang up and paced the long room , and gradually her eyes kindled , her cheeks burned , as ambition pointed to a possible future , of which , till this hour , she had not dared to dream ; and hope , o'erleaping all barriers , grasped a victory that would make her name imperishable .