"Well, Walter," my uncle began, "the time has come at last; you are off to-morrow, and now we are going to tell you the great secret that is known only to Mr Jenkins and myself. If either of us were young enough to undertake the work, you may be sure that we should not have let you do it. But it wants a young and an energetic man to carry it through, and that is why we have gone to the trouble of training you. What we are going to disclose to you is absolutely in confidence; you must reveal it to no one; for, as you will see, on the keeping of the secret depends the whole success of your expedition."
My uncle now unlocked a safe, from which he took a tin despatch-box. Then, unfastening a bundle of papers, he began:—
"THE GIRDLE OF SOPHANA, THE GREAT QUEEN. That is what we want you to find. It exists, or it did a few years ago, beyond a doubt. If you can discover it and bring it to England, you will be a made man. If you fail, we shall not blame you. But I will tell you what we know about it. Mr Jenkins and I have devoted years to the matter, and, from what we have been able to gather from scraps of information, collected from history tablets and other sources, we know that Queen Sophana was possessed of a girdle of solid gold. Exactly what it was like we do not know, though several life-like snakes are said to have been embossed upon it, and it was supposed to have been possessed of certain magic properties. We have not much to go upon, but we will not keep anything from you, and you shall hear how we have put two and two together. In the first place, the ancient representations, on cylinder seals and such like things, of the queen, always show the girdle or belt round her waist; secondly, the old writers, in describing the queen, frequently refer to the magic belt; thirdly, on a fragment of a history tablet we have found clear evidence that, on the death of the queen, her favourite handmaiden dressed her mistress in pure white clothes and carefully fastened on the girdle before the corpse was laid in the coffin of baked clay.
"Then there are several other tablets on which mention is made of the girdle; and we have copies of all these things ready for you to take with you. But we should never have thought of trying to unearth this treasure, had it not been for information of a much more recent date that has come to us. Barely sixty years ago, some members of an Arab tribe ransacking the ruins of Babylon, found, bricked up in a solid wall many feet underground, a substantial tomb; inside the tomb were several coffins, and within one of these, encircling a shrivelled corpse, lay a belt of golden snakes—massive and of great weight. Now comes the difficulty; for, according to the story which the Arabs relate, the finders of the treasure, from the moment that they took possession of it, suffered every species of calamity. But of all this you must read in the manuscripts which we are handing over to you; it is too long a story to go into now, and I need only tell you the end. The golden girdle was eventually buried in the place where it had been found, by the sole survivor of a family of the Shammar tribe, in whose possession it had been for some years; and, in order that no one should notice that the ground had recently been turned over, the man obliterated all trace of his work by setting fire to the scrub jungle far and wide. Lastly, we have the climax; the Arab committed suicide on the bank of the Euphrates, by falling on the point of his broken spear.
"What you have to do is to endeavour to find out the spot where the man buried the girdle; dig it up, and bring it home. Mr Jenkins and I have written down our views as to how we think this can best be done; but you must consider what we have written as mere suggestions, and you must be guided by circumstances. We do not pretend to be anything more than students and theorists; and, unhappily, such men as Layard and Rawlinson, who could have helped us, have long since passed away. In reading through your papers, you will, of course, come across a deal of Eastern superstition; but I think that you are matter-of-fact enough to pay no attention to the supposed magical properties of the girdle, or any nonsense of that kind."
The remainder of the conversation it is unnecessary to give. I received lengthy instructions as to the voyage, as to secrecy, and as to more commonplace matters of business—how I was to draw money for my expenses, and so forth. No detail had been forgotten by my uncle and his assistant, who, I discovered, were staking their reputations on the success of my quest.
I was handed a despatch-box containing, as I was told, all papers bearing on the object of my journey; and then, like many another, I, Walter Henderson, buoyed up with hope and puffed up with pride, left the Museum under the impression that I was fairly on the road to fame.