by Sax Rohmer
“I have said it before,” Weymouth declared, “but I’ll say it again; if only Nayland Smith could join us!”
“You refer of course, to Sir Denis Nayland Smith,” said Forester, “one of the assistant commissioners at Scotland Yard? I know people who know him. Used to be a police official in Burma?”
“He did,” Petrie replied. “He also saved the British Empire, by the way. But if we have many unknown enemies, we have at least one unknown friend.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“The well-informed stranger,” Petrie replied, “who wired me in Cairo—and who wired Weymouth. Whoever he may be, he takes no chances. Dr. Fu-Manchu was master of a method for inducing artificial catalepsy. It was one of the most dangerous weapons in his armory. I alone, as I believe, possess a drop of the antidote. The man who sent that telegram knew this!”
“So much for unknown friends,” said Weymouth. “As to unknown enemies, either you have a Dacoit amongst your workmen or there was a stranger in camp last night.”
“You’ve found a clue!” Rima cried.
“I have, Miss Barton. There’s only one fact of which I have to make sure. If I am wrong in that, maybe all my theory falls down.”
“What’s the fact?” Forester asked, with an eagerness which told how deeply he was impressed.
“It’s this,” said Weymouth. He fixed a penetrating gaze upon me. “Was Sir Lionel completely undressed when you found him?”
“No,” I replied promptly. “It was arranged that we all turned out at four to work on the job.”
“Then he was fully dressed?”
“Not fully.”
“Did he carry the key of this hut?”
“He carried all the keys on a chain.”
“Was this chain on him when you found him?”
“Yes.”
“Did you detach it?”
“No. We laid him here as we found him.”
“Partially dressed?”
“Yes.”
Weymouth slowly crossed to the mummy case at one end of the hut. The lid was detached and leaned against the wall beside the case.
“Both you, Greville,” he went on, turning, “and Forester were present when Sir Lionel’s body was brought in here?”
“Ali and I carried him,” Forester returned shortly. “Greville supervised.”
“Did Ali leave when you left?”
“He did.”
“Good,” Weymouth went on quietly. “But I am prepared to swear that not one of you looked into the recess behind this sarcophagus lid.”
I stared blankly at Forester. He shook his head.
“We never even thought of it,” he confessed.
“Naturally enough,” said Weymouth. “Look what I found there.”
A lamp stood on the long table; and now, taking a piece of paper from his pocket, and opening the paper under the lamp, the superintendent exposed a reddish, fibrous mass. Rima sprang forward and with Forester and myself bent eagerly over it. Petrie watched.
“It looks to me like a wad of tobacco, said Forester, “chewed by someone whose gums were bleeding!”
Petrie bent between us and placed a lens upon the table.
“I have examined it,” he said. “Give me your opinion, Mr. Forester. As a physician you may recognize it.”
Forester looked, and we all watched him in silence. I remember that I heard Ali Mahmoud coughing out in the wâdi and realized that he was keeping as close to human companionship that night as his sentry duties permitted.
Shrugging, Forester passed the glass to me. I peered in turn, but almost immediately laid the glass down.
Petrie looked at Forester; but:
“Out of my depth!” the latter declared. “It’s vegetable; but if it’s something tropical I plead ignorance.”
“It is something tropical,” said Petrie. “It’s betel nut.”
Weymouth intruded quietly, and:
“Someone who chewed betel nut,” he explained, “was hiding behind that sarcophagus lid when you brought Sir Lionel’s body into this hut. Now, I’m prepared to hear that before that the door was unlocked?”
“You’re right,” I admitted; “it was. We locked it after his body had been placed here.”
“As I thought.”
Weymouth paused; then:
“Someone who chewed betel nut,” he went on, “must have been listening outside Sir Lionel’s tent when you decided to move his body to this hut. He anticipated you, concealed himself, and, at some suitable time later, with the key which Sir Lionel carried on his chain, he unlocked the door and removed the body!”
“I entirely agree,” said Forester, staring very hard. “And I compliment you heartily. But—betel nut?”
“Perfectly simple,” Petrie replied. “Many Dacoits chew betel nut.”
At which moment, unexpectedly:
“Perhaps,” came Rima’s quiet voice, “I can show you the man!”
“What!” I exclaimed.
“I think I may have his photograph… and the photograph of someone else!”
CHAPTER THREE
TOMB OF THE BLACK APE
I might have thought, during that strange conference in the hut, that life had nothing more unexpected to offer me. Little I knew what Fate held in store. This was only the beginning. Dawn was close upon us. Yet before the sun came blushing over the Nile Valley I was destined to face stranger experiences.
I went with Rima from the hut to the tent. All our old sense of security was gone. No one knew what to expect now that the shadow of Fu-Manchu had fallen upon us.
“Imagine a person tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan… long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green…”
Petrie’s description stuck in my memory; especially “tall, lean, and feline… eyes of the true cat-green…”
A lamp was lighted in Rima’s tent, and she hastily collected some of her photographic gear and rejoined me as Ali came up shouldering his rifle.
“Anything to report, Ali Mahmoud?”
“Nothing, Effendim.”
When we got back to the hut I could see how eagerly we were awaited. A delicious shyness which I loved—for few girls are shy— descended upon Rima when she realized how we were all awaiting what she had to say. She was so charmingly petite, so vividly alive, that the deep note which came into her voice in moments of earnestness had seemed, when I heard it first, alien to her real personality. Her steady gray eyes, though, belonged to the real Rima—the shy Rima.
“Please don’t expect too much of me,” she said, glancing round quickly. “But I think perhaps I may be able to help. I wasn’t really qualified for my job here, but… Uncle Lionel was awfully kind; and I wanted to come. Really all I’ve done is wild-life photography— before, I mean.”
She bent and opened a paper folder which she had put on the table; then:
“I used to lay traps,” she went on, “for all sorts of birds and animals.”
“What do you mean by ‘traps,’ Miss Barton?” Weymouth asked.
“Oh, perhaps you don’t know. Well, there’s a bait—and the bait is attached to the trigger of the camera.”
“Perfectly clear. You need not explain further.”
“For night things, it’s more complicated; because the act of taking the bait has to touch off a charge of flash powder as well as expose the film. It doesn’t work very often. But I had set a trap—with the camera most cunningly concealed—on the plateau just by the entrance to the old shaft.”
“Lafleur’s Shaft!” I exclaimed.
“Yes. There was a track there which I thought might mean jackal— and I have never got a close-up of a jackal. The night before I went to Luxor something fell into my trap! I was rather puzzled, because the bait didn’t seem to have been touched. It looked as though someone might have stumbled over it. But I never imagined that anyone would pass that way at night—or at any other time, really.”
She stopped, lo
oking at Weymouth. Then:
“I took the film to Luxor,” she said. “But I didn’t develop it until today. When I saw what it was, I couldn’t believe my eyes! I have made a print of it. Look!”
Rima laid a photographic print on the table and we all bent over it.
“To have touched off the trigger and yet got in focus,” she said, “they must have been actually coming out of the shaft. I simply can’t imagine why they left the camera undisturbed. Unless they failed to find it or the flash scared them!”
I stared dazedly at the print.
It represented three faces—one indistinguishably foggy, in semiprofile. That nearest to the camera was quite unmistakable. It was a photograph of the cross-eyed man who had followed me to Cairo!
This was startling enough. But the second face—that of someone directly behind him—literally defeated me. It was the face of a woman—wearing a black native veil but held aside so that her clear-cut features were reproduced sharply…
Brilliant, indeterminably oblique eyes… a strictly chiselled nose, somewhat too large for classic beauty… full lips, slightly parted… a long oval contour…
“That’s a Dacoit!” came Petrie’s voice. “Miss Barton, this is amazing! See the mark on his forehead!”
“I have seen it,” Rima replied, “although I didn’t know what it meant.”
“But,” I interrupted excitedly, as:
“Greville,” Forester cried, “do you see!”
“I see very plainly,” said I. “Weymouth—the woman in this photograph is Madame Ingomar!”
“What is Lafleur’s Shaft?” Weymouth asked. “And in what way is it connected with Lafleur’s Tomb?”
“It isn’t connected with it,” I replied. “Lafleur’s Tomb—also known as the Tomb of the Black Ape—was discovered, or rather suspected to exist, by the French Egyptologist Lafleur, about 1908. He accidentally unearthed a little votive chapel. All the fragments of offerings found were inscribed with the figure of what appeared to be a huge black ape—or perhaps an ape-man. There’s been a lot of speculation about it. Certain authorities, notably Maspero, held the theory that some queer pet of an unknown Pharaoh had been given a freak burial.
“Lafleur cut a shaft into a long zigzag passage belonging to another burial chamber, which he thought would lead him to the Tomb of the Black Ape. It led nowhere. It was abandoned in 1909. Sir Lionel started from a different point altogether and seems to have hit on the right entrance.”
“Ah!” said Weymouth. “Then my next step is clear.”
“What is that?”
“I want you to take me down your excavation.”
“Good enough,” said I, “shall we start now?”
“I think it would be as well.” He turned to Forester. “I want Greville to act as guide and I want you and Petrie to look after Miss Barton in our absence.”
“We shall need Ali,” I said, “to go ahead with lights.”
“Very well. Will you please make the necessary arrangements?”
Accordingly I relieved Ali Mahmoud of his sentry duties and had the lanterns lighted. They were kept in the smaller hut. And presently Weymouth and I were on the ladders…
The first part of our journey led us down a sheer pit of considerable depth. At the bottom it gave access to a sloping passage, the original entrance to which had defied all our efforts to discover it.
This was very commonplace to me, but I don’t know how that first glimpse of the pit affected Weymouth. The night was black as pitch. Dawn was very near. Outlined by the light of the lanterns Ali carried, that ragged gap far below, to reach which we had been at work for many months, looked a likely enough portal to ghostly corridors.
An indescribable smell which characterizes the tombs of Upper Egypt crept up like a hot miasma. Our ladders were fairly permanent fixtures sloping down at easy gradients from platform to platform. The work had been fenced around; and, as we entered the doorway, watching the Arab descending from point to point and leaving a lantern at each stopping place, a sort of foreboding seemed to grab me by the throat.
It was unaccountable, or so I thought at the time, but it was well founded, as events were soon to show. I glanced at Weymouth. The big man was looking doubtfully at the ladders, but:
“It’s safe enough,” I said, “even for your weight. The chief is as heavy. I’ll lead the way.”
And so we set out, descending slowly. When at last the rubble-covered floor of the tunnel was beneath our feet, Weymouth paused, breathing deeply.
“That’s the way to the original entrance,” I said, pointing, “up the slope. But it’s completely blocked fifteen yards along. There must be a bend, or a series of bends, because where it originally came out heaven only knows. However, this is our way.”
I turned to where the shadowy figure of Ali waited, a lantern swinging in either hand so that the light shining up onto his bearded face lent it an unfamiliar and mask-like appearance. I nodded; and we began to descend the tunneled winding slope. At a point just before we came to the last bend, Ali paused and held up one of the lanterns warningly.
“There’s a pit just in front of us, Weymouth,” I explained. “It doesn’t lead anywhere but it’s deep enough to break one’s neck. Pass to the left.”
We circled cautiously around the edge of this mysterious well, possibly designed as a trap for unwary tomb robbers. Then came the sharp bend, and here Ali left one of his two lanterns to light us on our return journey. The gradient became much steeper.
“We were starting on a stone portcullis which the chief believed to be that of the actual burial chamber,” I explained, as we stumbled on downward in the wake of the dancing lantern. “He had a system of dealing with these formidable barriers which was all his own. Probably a few hours’ work would have seen us through. Here we are!”
Ali paused, holding the lantern above his head… And, as he did so he uttered a loud cry.
I pushed past Weymouth in the narrow passage and joined the headman. He turned to me in the lamplight. His face was ghastly.
“Good God!” I clutched the Arab’s arm.
A triangular opening, large enough to admit a man, yawned in the bottom left-hand corner of the portcullis!
Ali raised his lantern higher. I looked up at a jagged hole in the right top corner…
“What does this mean?” Weymouth demanded hoarsely.
“It means,” I replied, in a voice as husky as his own, “that someone has finished the job… and finished it as Sir Lionel had planned!”
The Tomb of the Black Ape was extraordinary.
Whilst structurally it resembled in its main features others with which I was familiar, it was notable in its possession of an endless fresco of huge black apes. There were no inscriptions. The sagging portcullis, viewed from the interior of the chamber, created an odd hiatus in the otherwise unbroken march of the apes.
Low down in the corner of one wall was a square opening which I surmised must lead to an antechamber such as is sometimes found. The place contained absolutely nothing so far as I could see except a stone sarcophagus, the heavy lid of which had been removed and laid upon the floor. Within was a perfectly plain wooden mummy case, apparently of sycamore, its lid in position.
I was defeated. Either the mummy case was the least valuable object in the burial chamber, and everything else had been looted, or the thieves had been interrupted in the very hour of their triumph!
I hope I have made the scene clear, Ali standing almost as still as a statue, holding his lantern aloft; Weymouth a dim figure at one end of the sarcophagus, and I facing him from the other; the black apes marching eternally around us. Because this was the scene, deep there in the Egyptian rock, upon which eerily a sound intruded…
“What’s that?” Weymouth whispered.
We stood listening, reduced to that frame of mind which makes sane men believe in ghosts.
And, as we listened, the sound grew nearer.
It was made by soft footsteps…
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Weymouth recovered himself first; and:
“Quick,” he whispered to Ali, “through the opening!”
He pointed to that square gap which I have mentioned and which I supposed to communicate with an antechamber.
“Quiet!” he added. “Not a sound!”
Led by Ali, we crossed the chamber, and as the headman stooped and disappeared only a dim and ghostly light shone out to guide us.
“Go on!” Weymouth urged.
I ducked and entered. Weymouth followed.
“Cover the lantern!”
Ali began to speak rapidly in Arabic, but:
“Cover the lantern!” Weymouth repeated angrily. “Be quiet!”
Ali threw something over the lantern and we found ourselves in utter darkness.
In a low tone, the headman began to speak again, but:
“Silence!” Weymouth ordered.
Ali Mahmoud became silent. He was one of the bravest men I have ever known, but now his broken tones spoke of fear. Partially, I had gathered what he wanted to say. My recognition only added to the horror of the situation.
That quiet shuffling had ceased. The air was indescribably stuffy, as one finds in such places. I knelt, resting my shoulder against the side of the opening, hoping that I might have some view of the outer chamber if anyone carrying a light should enter it.
Hard breathing in my ear told of Weymouth’s nearness.
Of the size or shape of the place in which we were hiding I had formed no impression whatever.
Then, they began to advance again… soft footsteps.
“Whoever comes,” Weymouth whispered, “don’t stir!”
There was absolute silence. I found myself listening to the ticking of my wrist watch. A minute passed.
Then dawned a dim light. It outlined the triangle beside the portcullis.
