“It has taken forty years of ceaseless toil to solve that great and glorious mystery, but now at last it is done, and I, Hugh Tankerville, am ready, with your help, to prove to the world that those great people, who were driven off by the stranger across the desert, did not perish in the wilderness: that they found a land which lies beyond the rolling billows of sand and shingle, where they formed an empire more great and vast, more wonderful and glorious, than aught we have dreamed of in our so-called science.”
“This is a theory,” I said with a smile.
“It is a fact,” he replied earnestly; “at least it was a fact two thousand years ago, when that same Greek priest wandered across the wilderness in search of the vanished hordes of Egypt: when he with simple conviction, perhaps with his dying breath, pronounced, ‘Enough! They are!’ ”
“Then do you mean to tell me?…” I began.
“I tell you, Mark, that beyond those inaccessible sand dunes that surround the Libyan desert, in that so-called arid wilderness, there live at the present moment the descendants of those same people who built the Pyramid of Ghizeh and carved the mysterious majesty of the Sphinx.”
“Let them live in peace,” I said flippantly, “since no one can get at, or to, them. You have said it yourself, they are—if they are at all—beyond the inaccessible dunes.”
“Inaccessible only to the ignorant, but not to those who know. They were not inaccessible to the scribe who wrote this parchment over three thousand years after the great emigration into the wilderness.”
“Do you maintain then,” I said still incredulously, “that the writer of parchment No. 2 actually set out on a desert journey and verified the truth, as set forth in parchment No. 1?”
“How he came possessed of the original papyrus he does not very clearly say, but, as soon as he had deciphered it, he started forth across the Libyan desert, and crossed those inaccessible dunes, using those landmarks which are clearly explained on the old Egyptian document, and which proved, in every instance, to be absolutely correct in indicating a way across the impassable wilderness.”
“Well! but he never got there.”