It Happened in Egypt

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

"We thought perhaps if you found anything interesting you'd want to stay with it a long time," explained Monny. "That's why we brought you food and drink. It is a good thing we came, isn't it?"

Fenton and I did not answer. Instead, we occupied ourselves with ministering to the enemy: a few bits of crumbled biscuit, a few drops of brandy to moisten them. He mumbled and swallowed and choked; and slowly the veinous red came back to the flabby gray cheeks, with their prickles of sprouting beard.

"It's fresh air he needs now," said Anthony. "He won't die from two or three days' fasting, not he! And it can't be more, for it would have taken him days and nights of hard work to get here, after his men were sent off. Jove, I believe it's more funk than anything else, that's laid him low. Thought he was done for, and all that. Look, there's his candle-lantern upset on the floor. It couldn't have been very gay for him when the light went out. Lend a hand, Duffer, and we'll give him to the Nubians the girls have brought. They'll carry him to his own tent. He never got as far in as the second door here, so we needn't search him. Otherwise I would, like a shot."

Yes, it was Something higher than a mere financier who sent the girls to us in the antechamber of the secret. We could not, for their own sakes, have risked bringing them. But here they were, and we should always have this memory together, we told ourselves, though we did not tell the disobedient ones. That would have been a bad precedent. What there was to see, they would see with us. And even the djinns could not work harm to Angels.

We went out and collected more stones with which to prop up the second screen of rock, which was not so thick as the first, and used Corkran's spade to hold it up at last. Beyond, was another roughly hewn chamber, and at the far end, set in a curiously fitted frame of wood, a wooden door, looking almost as new as though it had been made yesterday. Anthony flashed his electric torch over it, and we saw the grain of deal. There was a bronze lock, and a latch of strange, crude workmanship which Monny touched deprecatingly. "May I?" she half whispered. For to her also the place was haunted. She seemed to ask permission of spirits rather than of her lover. But the latch did not move.

"It would be sacrilege to break the lock," she said. "What shall you do?"

"Take the door off its supports: they're not hinges," Fenton answered, in the queer low tone which somehow we all instinctively adopted. "We've got one or two implements may help to do the trick."

He worked cautiously, even tenderly: for this queen's secret was our secret in the finding, even if the right to it was in the keeping of the djinns. Monny held my lantern, and it was a good half hour before Anthony and I together could carefully lift the deal door, unbroken, from its place.

Still Monny held the lantern, and at the threshold of a dimly seen room beyond, we all drew back: for on the sanded floor were footprints. To them the girl pointed, her eyes turning to Anthony's face, as if to ask; "How can it be that any one came in, when the door was locked, and there was that screen of rock to raise?"

But as we looked, over one another's shoulders, we realised that the prints were not made by modern boots. They were the marks of sandals; and they went across the floor to a thing that glittered in the middle of the room—a vague shape like a draped coffin, with something high and pointed on top: crossed to a glittering table on which a ray from the lantern revealed offerings to the dead: a loaf; a roasted duck, its wings neatly tied with string: cakes and fruit, all dried and blackened, but perfect in form: and a saucer of incense, from which a little ash had fallen from a ghostly pastille onto the table. There the sandalled feet had paused, while the incense caught a spark, and moving on, had walked straight to the door.