Ignorant tourists make many dumb acquisitions and they should prevent that. Buying exotic seashells means more reefs destroyed, an ivory piece another dead elephant, a monkey and a parrot a step towards the species' extinction and tiger bones or rhino horns translate to less tigers or rhinos.

But if consciousness does not work, an agonizing death could make the bad tourists more cautious about their acquisitions. This is what happened to a German tourist visiting Egypt back in 2004.

The man's stepson sent an anonymous note handed in together with a stolen carving to Egypt's embassy in Berlin in August 2007. When the antiquity's buyer came back to Germany from his Egyptian adventure, he experienced an odd paralysis, nausea, mysterious fevers and cancer in the last stage that ended his life.

The stepson was frightened that the artifact, with a hieroglyphic text carved on it, could have been the culprit for bringing the "Curse of the Pharaohs" to the owners. The man wanted to return the carving to enable the soul of his stepfather to rest in peace and set himself and his relatives free from potential bad effects.

"The Egyptian embassy in Berlin sent the fragment back to Egypt by diplomatic pouch and it has since been handed over to the Supreme Council for Antiquities, where a committee of experts was trying to ascertain its authenticity," the council statement said.

The myth of the curse of the Pharaohs, hitting anyone who disturbs the tombs or mummies of ancient Egypt's Pharaohs, started with the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 and the following death, few months after, of the excavation's financier Lord Carnarvon.

The tomb's discoverer, archaeologist Horward Carter had seen an inscription at the entrance "Death shall touch with its wings that who disturbs the peace of the pharaoh".

Carnavaron died of a neck infection, followed by pneumonia with a rampant evolution. The nurse that carried Lord Carnarvon also died. Lord's brother, in a moment of dementia, committed suicide. A.C. Mace, who opened together with Carter the mortuary room, also died and so did a later visitor of the tomb, Georges Benedite, curator of Louvre Museum.

Scientists tried to give an explanation to this chain of mysterious events linked to the discovery of the Tutankhamun's mortuary room. They supposed the cause were irradiations, or an ancient virus to which modern humans do not present immunity till they found a mold which triggers a disease called histoplasmosis, in contact with bats' guano. The mold enters the respiratory system, invading the lungs, liver, guts and spleen and soon death follows. Today, the disease is curable after a long treatment.