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Anne Rice, best selling author of The Vampire Chronicles, delves into the mysterious legend of the mummy in this original and poetic tale of romance and horror.

It begins in the early 1900s when archaeologist Lawrence Stratford discovers a perfectly preserved mummy in a tomb in Cairo. Little does he know that the mummy, one Ramses the Great, a.k.a. Ramses the Damned, has consumed an extraordinary potion that makes him immortal; only the powerful rays of the sun are needed to bring him to life. Transported to London, the mummy dispenses with his wrap and takes on a human guise. As Reginald Ramsey, he immediately captures the heart of Stratford's daughter, Julie, who is privy to his unnatural secret but can't resist his stunning good looks. All goes well until Reginald comes across Cleopatra, his long-lost love, under glass in a museum. Unable to bear the sight of this once-glorious Queen now on gruesome display, he decides to bring her back to life...a decision he will live - forever - to regret.

The ancient world collides with the modern one in Anne Rice's richly erotic yet sentimental love story that resonates with the macabre

Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra. Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old.

This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life. She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality--and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.