by Sax Rohmer
“That may be, sir—” the man began; when:
“Who’s on duty, here?” bellowed the chief, suddenly appearing out of the opening.
“One moment, Sir Lionel,” a quiet voice interrupted; and I saw Hewlett grasp his arm. “I am responsible for the men on duty. Sergeant!”
“Sir?”
“Have you anything to report?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“It’s some damned trick!” growled the chief.
Nayland Smith came out last, saw me in the darkness, and:
“Is everything all right, Greville?” he asked eagerly.
“We managed to get her to sleep,” Petrie replied. “Everything is all right. But this business passes my comprehension, Smith.”
“It does!” the latter rapped. “But, needless to say, I anticipated it.”
“It’s a trick!” the chief shouted. The man’s a conjurer: always was. How did he get Rima in? Damn it! Can’t we ask her?”
“You’ll ask her nothing tonight, Barton,” Petrie returned quietly. “And you’ll ask her nothing in the morning until you have my permission.”
“Thanks!” was the reply. “I’ll remember you in my will.” He was, in short, in a towering rage, and: “Where’s Greville?” he finished up.
“Here I am.”
“D’you think it feasible that Fu-Manchu could have slipped up into one of the construction chambers?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I. Even if he did, he’s got to come down sometime.”
“What are these construction chambers, Greville?” Nayland Smith asked in a low voice.
“Five low spaces above the King’s Chamber,” I replied, “terminating in a pointed roof, generally supposed to have been intended to relieve the stress on the room below.”
“Any way into them?”
“Yes — by means of a long ladder.”
“Is there anything in what Barton says?”
“Hardly. In any event, there is only one way out!” I turned to Sir Lionel. “Have you searched the shaft. Chief?”
“No!” he growled— “I haven’t. And what’s more I’m not going to. Have the damn place closed and watched; that’s all that’s necessary.”
Nayland Smith turned to Hewlett.
“You must arrange for the Pyramid to be closed to visitors for the remainder of the week. And have men on duty at the entrance day and night.”
“Very good,” said Hewlett; “I’ll see to it.”
We had climbed down again to the base, and my feet were on the sand, when an idea occurred to me.
“By heavens! Sir Denis,” I cried. “It isn’t safe to leave just four men there tonight.”
“Why?” he snapped.
“You remember the meeting of dervishes reported by Enderby? Well — they are here — fifty or sixty strong!”
“Where?”
“Just this side of Mena House.”
“A rescue!” said the chief hoarsely. “They mean to rush the entrance! Fu-Manchu is hiding inside!”
I could see Nayland Smith pulling at the lobe of his ear.
“They began to gather about midnight,” said Hewlett. “It’s been reported.”
“Who are they?”
“Mostly men from outlying villages, and as Mr Greville says, members of various dervish orders.”
“I don’t like this,” rapped Nayland Smith. The Mahdi organised the dervishes, you know. What’s your opinion, Hewlett?”
“I haven’t one. I can’t make it out — unless, as Sir Lionel suggests, they are going to attempt to rush us… But, by jove! here they come!”
We had set out down the slope and nearly reached that point where Petrie and I had left the car. Now, we pulled up like one man.
Dimly visible in the darkness of the night, their marching feet crunching upon the sand, we saw a considerable company of Arabs approaching from the opposite direction.
“It might be dangerous,” Nayland Smith muttered, “if it weren’t for the fact that sixty armed men are still on duty.”
And as he spoke, that onward march ceased as if in response to some unspoken order. Vaguely, although at no great distance from where we stood, we could see that strangely silent company. The policeman who had stopped Petrie’s car suddenly appeared.
“What do I do about this, sir?” he asked, addressing Hewlett. “They look nasty to me.”
“Do nothing,” was the reply. “We have the situation well in hand.”
“Very good, sir.”
We were near enough now to the crowd on the edge of the plateau to be able to distinguish the colours of robes and turbans — white, black, green and red; a confused blurred mass, but divisible into units. And as I looked doubtingly in their direction, suddenly I saw a hundred arms upraised, and in a muted roar their many voices reached me:
“Mokanna!”
Whereupon, unanimous as worshippers in a cathedral, they dropped to their knees and bowed their heads in the sand!
“Good God! What’s this?”
Nayland Smith was the speaker.
We all turned together, looking back to the northern face of the Great Pyramid. And as we did so, I witnessed a spectacle as vivid in my mind tonight as it was on the occasion of its happening.
Perhaps two thirds of the way up the slope of the great building, but at a point which I knew to be inaccessible to any climber, a figure appeared... Even from where I stood, it was visible in great detail — for the reason that this figure was brilliantly lighted!
Many explanations occurred to us later of how this illumination might have been produced. We recalled the globular lamp in the King’s Chamber; several such lamps, masked from the viewpoint of the onlookers and placed one step below the figure, backed by reflectors, would, I think, have accounted for the phenomenon. But at the time, no solution offered.
Personally, I was conscious of nothing but stark amazement, For there, enshrined in the darkness, I saw El Mokanna!
I saw a tall, majestic figure, wearing either a white or a very light green robe. The face was concealed by a golden mask and surmounted by a tall turban. Upraised in the right hand glittered a sword with a curved blade...
A weird chanting arose from the dervishes. I didn’t even glance back. I was staring — staring at that apparition on the Pyramid. Distant shouting reached me — orders, as I realised. But I knew, had known it all along, that no climber could reach that point.
Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the apparition vanished.
The lights had been extinguished or covered: such was the conclusion to which we came later. But at the time the effect was most uncanny. And as the figure vanished, again, from the dervishes, came a loud and now triumphant shout:
“Mokanna!”
In the dead silence which followed:
“Fu-Manchu has set us a problem,” said Nayland Smith. “Either he or some selected disciple has been posing as the reborn prophet, from Afghanistan right down to the border of Arabia. You understand the dervish gathering, now, Hewlett?”
A murmuring of excited conversation reached us. The assembly of Arabs, palpably come there as to a tryst, was dispersing and already returning down the slope.
“It was urgent,” Sir Denis went on; “hence the abduction of Rima. This was an appointment with the leaders of the Senussi and other fanatical orders. He had tricked them hitherto, but if the real relics had once been placed beyond his reach detection sooner or later was inevitable. This spark, Greville—” he turned to me in the darkness— “is going to light a bonfire. The Mokanna promises to be a greater problem that the Mahdi.”
Whereupon the chief began to laugh!
That laughter was so unexpected, and indeed so eerie in the circumstances, that I found in it some quality of horror.
“He’s tricked us, Smith!” he shouted. “He’s tricked us! But, by God, I’ve tricked him!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE. FACTS AND RUMOURS
The story of the second M
asked Prophet, although extreme precautions were taken by the British secret service and by Sir Denis Nayland Smith, nevertheless leaked out and into the newspapers of Europe and America. It is well known today to everybody, so far as externals go.
Journalistic espionage triumphed even before the prophet appeared in Egypt. That ominous disturbance moving from Afghanistan down through Persia was paragraphed in the London Daily Telegraph, in the Times of New York and in Le Temps of Paris. The Indian papers had fairly long accounts.
When that strange rumour, hitherto unsupported by tangible evidence, reached Egypt, a special correspondent of the Daily Mail interviewed prominent Moslems. With one exception these denied all knowledge of the matter. The one — a learned imam whose name I have forgotten, but which may be found in the files of the newspaper in question — admitted that news of this movement had come to him. But, he informed his interviewer, it was confined to members of certain unorthodox sects; therefore he was not in a position to express any opinion regarding it.
This interview must have taken place, I suppose, at about the time that we reached Cairo. It was not prominently featured; but later came a column account by the same correspondent, of a second gathering of Wise Men, numbering not three, but according to his estimate, seventy; and a story of the apparition on the Great Pyramid which closely corresponded to the truth.
Since no other newspaper carried this story, I can only suppose that the correspondent of the Daily Mail was staying at Mena House.
Throughout these exacting days I lived in a state of unrelieved suspense. The watch on the Pyramid had had no results; the place was opened again to the public. Rima, who narrowly escaped a serious breakdown, was not fit to be moved for some time. Indeed, during the first forty-eight hours, Dr. Petrie was unable to conceal his anxiety.
The chief remained at Shepheard’s awaiting the return of Ali Mahmoud with the heavy baggage; but I had moved to the hotel by the Pyramids in order to be near Rima. She suffered from a strange delusion that I was dead, and my presence was frequently required to reassure her. Later, I learned the origin of this obsession, which at the time puzzled me, as it puzzled Petrie.
Acting partly, I think, upon that one memory which remained to me of the hiatus preceding Rima’s abduction, Sir Denis had proceeded in a Royal Air Force plane to Damascus.
The chief during this period was wrapped in one of his most impossible moods. A score of times I tried to discuss the mystery of Fu-Manchu’s disappearance; and:
“Your measurements were wrong, Greville,” was his invariable conclusion.
Characteristically, he did not question his own!
He referred, of course, to the investigation which we had carried out there, based upon his conviction that there were other chambers in the Great Pyramid. Sceptical as I had been at the time, I was disposed now to believe that Sir Lionel’s extraordinary imagination had not misguided him.
Failing the existence of other chambers, and, more astounding still, of another exit, the escape of Dr. Fu-Manchu was susceptible of no material explanation. The later apparition of the Masked Prophet at an inaccessible point on the northern slope, might have been accounted for by daring trickery.
But these were trying days indeed. Knowing, as everyone knows who has spent much time among Orientals, that news travels among them faster than radio can carry it, I killed many idle hours in the native quarter, listening to the talk of shopkeepers, peddlers and mendicants.
In this way, thanks to my knowledge of vernacular Arabic, I kept abreast of the Mokanna movement. Probably I knew, before Nayland Smith and the British intelligence service knew, that the threat of that uprising grew less day by day. It had proved abortive; something had gone wrong. I used to report to the chief such scraps of rumour as reached me. They seemed to afford him matter for amusement.
“We’ll sail in the next P. & O., Greville,” he said one night. “Rima should be fit enough by then. It’s high time we were out of Egypt. I’m only waiting for Ali Mahmoud…”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR. RIMA’S STORY
And then at last came a day when Petrie announced to me privately that Rima was ready, was anxious, to be questioned; to tell her own story.
“Only you and I, Greville,” he stipulated. “It remains dangerous ground, and Barton is liable to prove an irritant…”
We had tea with her, Petrie and I, on the balcony of her room overlooking the Pyramids. It was Sunday. The tourist season now was in nearly full flower. Camels with grotesquely poor riders paced up the slope to that little plateau which contains two of the wonders of the world: the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. There were many cars. In the garden, smart Egyptians and their women occupied the best tables, regarding English, French, and American tourists with thinly veiled amusement.
Rima looked almost ethereal after her strange nervous illness, but so utterly desirable that I felt a savage urge to take her in my arms and stifle her with kisses. But, now that the fear phase had passed, I saw that she regarded me with a queer aloofness.
When her story was told, I understood...
“Of course, Shan, Dr. Petrie has made it all clear to me. You should be grateful to him, dear. I think he has saved me from…
“It was that night when you called for me at Shepheard’s — but of course, I’m forgetting; you know nothing about it! You see, Shan, after your disappearance on the evening of our arrival, I was simply in a frenzy. They kept it from me for a long time — Uncle and Sir Denis and the doctor. But at last they had to tell me, of course.
“I didn’t know what to do with myself. I began to think that my crazy behaviour was attracting attention — and I rushed up to my room. I hadn’t been there more than five minutes when one of the servants bought me a note — from you!”
“It was a forgery!” I cried. “It must have been!”
“Don’t interrupt, Greville,” said Petrie quietly. “These are the facts. Remember that they relate to a period during which your own evidence is not available.”
Good heavens! it was true. A great part of that night was a blank to me…
“It was from you,” Rima went on. “You asked me to tell no one, but to come out at once and join you… I couldn’t wait for the lift: I simply raced downstairs and out onto the terrace. An Egyptian chauffeur in a blue uniform met me and showed me where you were waiting—”
“I was waiting! Where?”
“Just opposite the hotel, beside a French landaulet. Of course, I ran across to you. Shan! you simply hauled me in! You were grim to the nth degree! But I was so utterly happy that at first I thought of nothing except that I had found you again.
“Then, Shan — oh, heavens… Shan!”
“Don’t let the memory upset you, Rima,” said Petrie. “It’s all passed and done with. You know, my dear, he’s the third victim, as I have told you. All three of us, Greville, at various times, have had similar experiences at the hands of our Chinese friend.”
“I understand,” I replied, watching Rima; “I begin to understand. Go on, darling.”
“It came to me, my dear, that you were mad! I saw, in a flash, what had happened — because something like it had once happened to me. I fought with you — oh, my God, how I fought; it was terrible! Then, when I realised it was useless, I tried to will you to know what you were doing.
“We passed through Gizeh Village and were out on the causeway to here when the driver pulled up suddenly. A tall man dressed in black was standing in the roadway. He came forward to the right of the car — and I recognized him —
“It was Dr. Fu-Manchu!”
“Rima!”
“I began to collapse. I couldn’t stand much more. He spoke to you. I didn’t hear the words; but — Shan... you fell back on the seat as though you were — dead...
“It was the last straw. I believe I made a fool of myself — or they may have drugged me; but I passed away.
“When I opened my eyes again, after a thousand years of nightmare, I found myself in a strang
e but delightful room. I was lying on a couch wrapped in a silk dressing gown; and an old negress sat sewing near me…
“It turned out to be part of a suite in a house which must have been right outside Cairo; because all I could see from the little windows in the mushrabiyeh screens was miles and miles of desert. I suppose the negress was a servant of Dr. Fu-Manchu, but she was certainly a sweet old thing.
“My first waking thought, Shan, was about you! But the old woman could tell me nothing. She merely said over and over again, ‘Don’t fret, honey child; it will sure be all right.’
“I spent a whole day in those three small rooms. It was quite impossible to get out, and the old negress never left me. No one else came near us. She did all she could to make me comfortable, but I refused to touch food. I have never passed through such a day in my life. I felt myself to be slowly going mad with suspense. Once, a long way over the desert, I saw some camels; that was towards evening. Otherwise, I saw nothing…
“At sunset the negress lighted the lamps; and she had only just done so when I heard the sound of a gong somewhere in the house below.
“By this time I was in a state of suppressed frenzy, and when I heard that sound I wanted to shriek. The old woman gave me a warning glance, whispered, ‘Don’t fret, honey child; it will sure be all right,’ and went and stood by the door.
“I heard footsteps outside; the door was unlocked — and Dr. Fu-Manchu came in!
“He was dressed as I remembered him in London — but the horrible thing was that he seemed to be much younger! I must have been nearer to crashing than I knew at the time; for I can’t recall one word that he said to me, except that he made me understand, Shan, that your life depended upon me.
“Evidently he saw that I was likely to collapse at any moment. He spoke to the old negress in some language I had never heard — and then forced me to drink a glass of some rather sweet white wine.
“After that I remember him watching me very intently and speaking again. His voice seemed to fade away, and his awful eyes to grow larger and larger—”
