She seems partly based on Cleopatra, but the biggest influence on her depiction seems to be Hatshepsut, from the Eighteenth Dynasty. Stoker locates Tera in the Eleventh Dynasty, when Egypt was ruled out of Thebes, as a daughter of one of the Intefs (Antef, as Stoker writes it) she is a fictional queen. As time continues, an increasing amount of evidence points toward Margaret Trelawney, but the deepest level of the mystery is rooted in ancient Egypt, in a woman named Tera, Queen of the Two Egypts, who, according to legend, grew so powerful in all the arts of her day that she conquered Sleep and Will and could command the powers of all the gods by the seven words that she had carved like stars in a special ruby, and who lacked only one more thing to conquer: Death itself.

Corbeck, an Egyptologist colleague of Trelawney's, visits with a puzzle of his own. The mystery deepens when it appears that Trelawney is assaulted again, and when a Mr. Among those artifacts is a mummified cat and a mummified hand with seven fingers. Trelawney, an Egyptologist and collector of Egyptian artifacts, is now in some sort of deeply unconscious state and has left strict legal instructions requiring that he be kept in his room and that none of the artifacts in the room be moved.

Summary: Malcolm Ross, a barrister, finds himself thrust into an extraordinary mystery when Margaret Trelawney, a woman with whom he is in love, asks for his assistance after her father has been apparently assaulted. It is thus that life is bittersweet, and that which has been done becomes eternal. It is in such a wise that memory plays its pranks for good or ill for pleasure or pain for weal or woe. It all seemed so real that I could hardly imagine that it had ever occurred before and yet each episode came, not as a fresh step in the logic of things, but as something expected.

The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker