 Hergé took influence from the published works of French adventurer and gunrunner Henry de Monfreid , particularly his books Secrets of the Red Sea and The Hashish Cruise . Having lived through the First World War , Hergé disliked arms dealers , and used Monfreid as the basis for the gunrunner character in Cigars . The idea of mummified bodies being lined up along a wall was adopted from Pierre Benoît 's 1919 book L <unk> ( Atlantis ) , which had recently been made into a 1932 film by Georg Wilhelm Pabst . The wall paintings depicted on a cover of Le Petit Vingtième was based on a bas @-@ relief of Hathor and Seti I housed in the Louvre , Paris , while the throne featured in Tintin 's dream was adopted from that found in the tomb of Tutankhamun . The inclusion of the secret society operating the smuggling ring was influenced by right @-@ wing conspiracy theories about Freemasonry , with Hergé likely gaining information on the brotherhood from a 1932 article by Lucien <unk> @-@ Reynaud in the radical magazine La Crapouillot ( The Mortar Shell ) . 
