“No. I suppose it was stolen from his kit. He evidently had it with him all right, unless, as my great-grandfather seemed to think, he invented the whole yarn under the influence of fever.”
I filled my glass. “It’s the queerest tale I’ve heard for years. Of course, all deserts are full of fables, and I remember reading of the one your great-great-uncle mentions of the king and his army who were buried in the sand.”
Wrexham sipped his drink. “Well, now, I’ll get on with the second part, which is where I come in.”
CHAPTER III
WREXHAM’S STORY
We relit our pipes and settled back in our chairs, and Wrexham began:
“As I told you, when I got near Hami last year, I pulled out the old diary and read it again, especially the part I’ve just read to you two fellows.
“I won’t go into details of how I found the tiny village, which, from certain entries in the diary, I am sure must have been my great-great-uncle’s starting-point. I found the place, and there I decided to stop a bit. I can’t tell you why I should want to stop in a tiny little hole like that with nothing to see, not even any old ruins in the neighbourhood; but somehow my old relative’s story had taken hold of me, and I wanted to reconstruct it on the spot.
“You know how traditions linger in the East, more especially in those parts of it that are as yet untouched by the railway. Well, I made a few discreet questions, and sure enough there was a yarn of a white man who years before had gone out into the desert seeking old cities, and had come to grief owing to losing his way. The story was not too coherent, needless to say: sometimes he found a ruined city, sometimes he and all his people had died, and one particular version went on to the effect that he had found much gold, and got safely back, but was carried away by the spirits who watched over the treasure, and who were very wroth at its having been touched. It was a lot of trouble to get out the story—you know how difficult it is to get ignorant people like that to talk to strangers.
“But it was clear enough that some wandering white man had been there ages before, and, further, the local people seemed pretty afraid of wandering into the desert. I did not let on about the old man having had anything to do with me. It’s not a good thing to talk about bad luck being in the family, and certainly the old man did not hit it lucky that trip.
“I hung about prospecting and smelling out the ground, which, by the way, is very little known directly you get off the main route. Northeast you come slap on to the desert practically at once.