Imprisoned with the Pharaohs

by H. P. Lovecraft

Told from the first-person perspective of escape artist Harry Houdini, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" is a fictionalized account of an encounter that he claims to have experienced while on vacation in Egypt in January 1910. Enlisting the services of a guide named Abdul Reis el Drogman, Houdini is taken on a tour of Cairo and eventually forced to break up a conflict between his guide and a Bedouin leader by the name of Ali Ziz. Drogman enlists Houdini to help him settle the fight by way of a "custom of great antiquity in Cairo": a boxing match atop the Great Pyramid of Giza. Houdini soon discovers, however, that the entire argument was merely a ruse designed to lure him into the desert at night and kidnap him. The escape artist is tied up, taken to an unknown location, and dropped down a deep pit.

After dreaming of spectacular horrors, Houdini awakens at the bottom of the pit and eventually manages to free himself from the ropes. Suspecting that he is somewhere in a temple under the Great Sphinx of Giza, he travels through the dark in an attempt to find an exit, following what he believes to be a draft from outdoors. Instead, he discovers that he has actually been heading further underground, eventually falling down a flight of stairs and landing in a large ceremonial cavern. There he witnesses an army of half-man, half-animal mummies, led by the ancient Egyptian pharaohs Khephren and Nitokris, leaving offerings to a hippopotamus-sized, five-headed, tentacled beast that appears from a hole deep in the hall. As he escapes, he realizes that this creature is merely the paw of a much larger deity in whose image the Sphinx was carved. Houdini dismisses the events as a hallucination or a dream consequent of the strains of his kidnapping ordeal, despite the resemblance he sees between Khephren and his guide, Drogman.