“I can always go alone.”
What was the use of further argument? I had known all along that I should ultimately give in. After all, I had independent means, was my own master—in spite of Aunt Charlotte; I had nothing to do, and was barely thirty years of age. Is it great wonder that the love of adventure, inherent in every Englishman, had by now completely annihilated my reason? After all, I’d just as soon go and hunt for ancient Egyptians in impossible desert regions with Hugh Tankerville as wait for problematical patients in Harley Street.
I stretched out my hand to Sawnie Girlie and said:
“No, you don’t, Girlie. When do we start?”
CHAPTER IV.
THE ROCK OF ANUBIS
We started about a week afterwards; personally, I should find it difficult to say exactly how much of Hugh’s wild theories I believed. The whole thing fascinated me immensely, and although I never for a moment credited the notion that we should find any living beings, other than wild Bedouins and Tibestis, in that part of the Libyan desert which we meant to traverse, yet I certainly did hope that we might find a few interesting relics of a great and vanished past.
Hugh had made a good photographic reproduction of the two papyri, leaving the originals safely locked up in a ponderous fire-proof safe, which had been screwed to the floor of the museum in the dear old Chestnuts. Old Janet with her daughter and son-in-law were to take care of the house in the master’s absence, and… we started.
No one who met us, either at Charing Cross or Paris, or subsequently at Marseilles or Cairo, could have guessed, in our thoroughly matter-of-fact form of procedure, that we were aught but a pair of young, enthusiastic tourists visiting the glorious country for the first time, and with no other object in view save that of our own selfish pleasures. And we were bent on crossing half a continent to find a people who had disappeared from the history of the world since nigh upon five thousand years.
The dragoman from whom we hired the dahabijeh and its crew, which were to take us up the Nile as far as Wady-Halfa, was struck, with speechless wonder at the two mad English who obstinately refused to do more than cursorily glance at the glories of Thebes and Luxor, and seemed impelled by some chasing spirit which forbade them to land or to waste time. I could not, of course, very accurately estimate Hugh’s thoughts and feelings, as our little craft slowly and silently flitted up the sacred and historic river. At eventime, when the waters lay dark and peaceful, and the moon shone silvery and radiant on date palms and distant mosques, on sandy shores and majestic ruins, the boatmen, whom we had provided with tambourines and darabukas, would crouch on deck and intone some of their half-melancholy, monotonous tunes. Then I would see Hugh’s eyes fixed longingly and searchingly on that distant horizon towards the west, and I myself, quiet, matter-of-fact Britisher as I was, would begin to dream of the great people whom we had set forth to seek. I saw, as the dahabijeh glided noiselessly along, the great procession of the wandering hordes quitting their homes, polluted by the conquering stranger, and seeking a new and glorious resting-place in the west far away.
The great and mysterious immensities of the Libyan desert became peopled in my mind with high priests in flowing robes and leopards’ skins, with priestesses in heavy plaited wigs, and priests with shaven crowns, with men and women, angular and gaunt, dark and high cheek-boned, flat-footed and large-eyed, such as we see depicted on ancient tombs and papyri. I seemed to hear the monotonous, sing-song tones of the ancient Egyptian language with which dear old Mr. Tankerville had rendered me familiar; the air became filled with sounds of the sistrum and the drum, and the tall papyrus grass, as we passed, seemed to send forth in the evening air a long-drawn sigh for the glories past and gone.