It is unnecessary to describe Susan. Ranney did that in every letter he wrote home to his mother and sister in beautiful Greenwich, Connecticut. Susan was there described as a paragon of beauty and sweetness. Yet, there seemed to be a fly in the ointment. A tall and “not a bad looking sort of chap,” so Ranney described him, a lieutenant of the Seaforth Highlanders, apparently caused Steven not a little worry. It seemed that back in their Highland home he lived in the same Scottish village as the Braintrees, brother and sister.
“By George, I’ll take old Amenhotep’s will to Braintree’s dinner to-night. I’m sure Susan will be interested; at any rate, she’ll pretend to be, bless her. Perhaps she’ll find it more to her taste than that Egyptian flint knife I showed her yesterday. Yet, I am surprised that a surgeon’s sister, and a head-nurse at that, should evince such horror of a knife, even though that ancient instrument had served the embalmer to make the last great incision.”
Late that evening, after a few short but blissful hours spent by Susan’s side—Lieutenant Angus Hector McPherson being then on duty at the Garrison—Ranney threw his kitbag into a sleeper of the night train to Upper Egypt.
After some ten hours of fitful sleep amidst the choking dust and fine sand which would persist in floating into the compartment, Steven Ranney found himself once again upon the very modern station platform of Thebes, the world’s most ancient city.
CHAPTER II
A Fall Down Thirty Centuries
The research work conducted by Professor Ranney, as chief of the Yale expedition to Egypt, had lain in and about the site of the Mortuary Temple of King Amenhotep the Third, well-named “Magnificent.” The low depression which to-day marks the site of this once gorgeous edifice lies well down upon the broad Theban Plain, and immediately fronts that long line of rocky mounds, refuse heaps and ruined tombs which rises, tier upon tier, along the lower slopes of the towering Libyan Hills.
It had been a site of rare possibilities from an Egyptologist’s point of view. On this account excavation privileges hereabouts had been sought by representatives of every great museum or seat-of-learning both in the Old World and the New.