Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  So they changed part of the plan. It was decided that secrecy would solve the problem. Laws were passed forbidding anyone to know where a Pharaoh was buried. The head undertakers enjoyed a monopoly, and held their tongues for business reasons. Undertakers’ helpers came cheap, so they were all killed and shipped along with Pharaoh to be useful to him in the next world. The mausoleum was underground, out of sight, in an unfrequented spot, and the sand was tidily arranged on top to look as if nothing but the desert wind had ever ruffled it. The living nobility breathed again.

  But all they had accomplished was to add a sporting zest to what had hitherto been humdrum certainty. The boys had to go prospecting now, and there’s no doubt whatever they found the loot, getting away with it all the more profitably because there were no expensive imported guards to be bribed. So the upper classes had to think again.

  They did not abandon the secrecy theory. Rather they proceeded to improve on it. A Pharaoh would start to build his tomb as soon as he came to the throne and had finished maligning his predecessor. He constructed false tombs nearby to deceive prospectors. Then, to the real tomb, he had long dummy tunnels driven, leading to a pit, which was dumped full of rock; and on the far side of the pit was the real passage leading to the place where his corpse would lie in state.

  But the prospectors soon discovered that trick, and it got so that a Pharaoh couldn’t be certain of getting to heaven with a small coin in his jeans.

  About that time the easiest way to make money in Egypt was to come along with an intricate plan for an undiscoverable tomb; but as they had no Patent Office, and anyone who had the price could imitate the plans, tombs soon got stereotyped again, and once one real entrance had been discovered it became a comparatively simple matter to repeat the process and open every rich man’s tomb on the country-side.

  Things had reached the point where Pharaoh and his friends didn’t know what the rising generation was coming to, when who should ascend the throne but Khufu, otherwise known as Cheops. He went through the usual process of removing his predecessor’s signature from all the public monuments in order to call attention to his own omnipotence, and then proceeded to entertain a distinguished stranger.

  Some say that this stranger was Job, the hero of the Old Testament drama. He was certainly an architect and a man of genius. He laughed when Pharaoh told him of the hard work it was for a decent fellow to get to heaven nowadays without arriving like a common tramp.

  “Suppose I show you a real idea,” he suggested. “If I draft out a plan by which nobody will ever find your real tomb, Khufu, will you give me the contract for the job?”

  The plans were produced, and they were marvelous. No doubt there was a cost-plus-basis contract attached with red tape and sealing-wax. Pharaoh signed that, and for thirty years the labourers — the tax-payers that is — of Egypt toiled at the building of what they were told was to be the largest and most magnificent tomb the world had ever seen.

  Meanwhile, very secretly and quite a long way off, other workmen were digging the real tomb; and it was into the real one, when Khufu died, that his body and most of his treasure were smuggled, although the public funeral was held at the base of the Great Pyramid, while the population stood around and cursed the tyrant who had forced them to build such a mausoleum for his bones.

  The pyramid was so well built, and on such a titanic scale, that the tax-payers, who had built it, knew better than to try to open that; so for thousands of years it stood intact, with Khufu’s bones and Khufu’s treasure presumably inside. Nobody hunted for his real grave, because everybody knew that he was buried in the pyramid.

  But when at last a conquering Moslem, Mahmoun by name, forced his way into the pyramid to get the treasure out, he found it absolutely empty, except for a great stone chest that had no lid. He naturally jumped to the conclusion that tomb robbers had been in there ahead of him. But how I came to know that Mahmoun was wrong and what Joan Angela Leich and the man in the street in the U.S.A. had to do with it shall all be unfolded in the proper order.

  CHAPTER II. Moustapha Pasha

  I NOW go forward to the Geiger Trail, one dark night. I was driving a Ford up the winding, seven-mile grade toward Virginia City, wondering at the prodigious guts of the men and women who crossed a continent to tear the inside out of those mountains with pick and shovel. I still maintain that the accident was Joan Angela’s fault entirely.

  Her Ford, coming down-hill, struck mine very nearly head-on. Her lights were out and her brake-bands burning, so she enjoyed the full advantage of surprise as well as impetus, and it was only a friendly rock at the edge of the road that caught my front axle and saved car and me from falling a couple of hundred feet.

  “Why didn’t you get out of the way?” laughed a musical voice. “Are you hurt?”

  I proved I wasn’t by scrambling out.

  “Joan Angela Leich,” I exclaimed, “or I’m a Dutchman!”

  “Why, Jeff Ramsden! Shake hands! I saw you last in Egypt, laying out about a hundred natives with a pick-handle!”

  “You got me into that mess!” I laughed. “Here’s some more of your doing! D’you expect me to walk all the rest of the way up-hill?”

  “You enjoyed the last mess I got you into,” she retorted. “Your car’s in the way. Push it right over, and I’ll buy you a new one.”

  “Tisn’t mine,” I said. “I hired it.”

  “I’ll give him this in place of it. This is less than a month old. It’s a fair swap. Go on, push yours over.”

  I made the attempt, but the front axle was bent and had caught on the rock like a yoke. I started to hunt in the dark for something that would do, but she backed her car far enough up the trail to descend again and bunt mine over. I had forgotten to turn off the switch, so the thing caught fire and looked pretty good as it went catapulting down the cliff-side.

  “Now what’ll we do?” she demanded. “My brakes won’t, hold. Think of something, quick!”

  I found a place where there was room to turn by manoeuvring carefully, and stood guard at the edge of the precipice while she did the shunting. Then I climbed in.

  “Drive up-hill, drop me at Virginia City, and return to where you came from,” I suggested.

  “Nothing doing! I’m on my way to Reno, and you’re the very man I need. Fun going down-hill backwards!”

  You need no education to enjoy Joan Angela, so there were compensations. Her granddad crossed the continent in ‘49 or ‘50. He was about seven years old at that time, and he crossed the Six-mile Desert on the back of the last remaining mule. He left his son with a claim or two that proved bonanzas; and when the son died he left Joan Angela about a million dollars and a hundred-thousand acre ranch in California.

  She had sat on my knee scores of times until either she or I, or both of us, had outgrown that, and then she went traveling. During her absence abroad, her manager, the son of her father’s closest friend, found oil on her ranch, so there’s no real reason why she should select a Ford to make long journeys in.

  She’s tall-maybe a mite too tall for some folks’ notions-and mid- Victorian mammas would never have approved of her, because she’s no more coy, or shy, or artful than the blue sky overhead. She has violet eyes, riotous hair of a shade between brown and gold, a straight, shapely little nose, a mouth that is all laughter, and a way of carrying herself that puts you in mind of all out-doors. I’ve seen her in evening dress with diamonds on; and much more frequently in riding-breeches and a soft felt hat; but there’s always the same effect of natural-born honesty, and laughter, and love of trees and things and people. She’s not a woman who wants to ape men, but a woman who can mix with men without being soiled or spoiled. For the rest, she’s not married yet, so there’s a chance for all of us except me. She turned me down long ago.

  “Someone told me you’d gone into business with Meldrum Strange; that’s why I was so glad to meet you,” she explained as we backed down-hill.

  I swallowed that compliment, and ans
wered truthfully.

  “D’you suppose he’d sell out to me?” she asked, and again I told truth.

  “He feels like a great strong spider in the middle of a web, and he loves the sensation.”

  “Well, would he let me buy into the firm?”

  “Not if he takes my advice, Joan Angela!”

  “What have you got it in for me about?”

  “We’re steady-going, plodding, conservative, cautious, patient, counting on the long swing, and exceedingly careful before we leap into anything.”

  “Old fogies! Well, would you timid old ladies let me hire your firm for an investigation?”

  “It all depends,” I said. “We’re at the foot of the trail now; you can turn round and go forward.”

  “Thanks! Depends on what? Where were you going when I ran into you?”

  “Can’t let mines alone,” I answered. “Have to go, look, see. My trade, you know. Had a case not far from here. The man got drowned in Lake Tahoe, and the woman was a poor fish, anyhow; the case against her has just been dropped.”

  “Who was the woman?”

  “A Mrs. Aintree.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Nothing very funny about her; she’s—”

  “It’s extremely funny,” Joan Angela corrected. “Do you believe in coincidences?”

  “Partly. And Mrs. Aintree. So she’s—”

  “A crook,” I said, preferring to put the conversation on a basis of solid fact.

  “Um-m-m! That accounts for a whole lot,” said Joan Angela.

  And for a while after that she sat silent, driving the Ford without lights at much higher speed than the law permits or than the manufacturer intended.

  “I’m on the way to Reno more or less on Mrs. Aintree’s account,” she said, slowing down at last. “She gave a man a letter of introduction to me, and he’s in Reno now. Now that I know Mrs. Aintree is a crook, I want this man investigated more than ever.”

  “What’s his name, for instance?”

  “Moustapha Pasha.”

  I whistled. If you go there often enough, and stay long enough, you are likely to meet almost anyone in Reno.

  “You know him?”

  “Noureddin Moustapha Pasha, of Cairo, Egypt? You bet I know him.”

  “He’s a crook, too, isn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t lend him a match,” I answered. “Is he after your money?”

  “No. He wants to pay me money. You remember I went to Egypt. They were having a side-show there, you remember-trying to shoot the King, or to go democratic or ditch the English-sort of five and ten cent revolution. And I hadn’t a visa — forgot to get one. I had a hard time getting into the country, and an even harder time to stay there after they found I wouldn’t sit still and be ornamental at Shepheard’s Hotel. I had to flirt with fat generals, until at last one of them told me that the way to work it was to transfer lots of money to Cairo; then they’d have to let me stay for business reasons. So I did. And I began to wonder what to do with the money. After that I found a statesman with brass arteries who’d do anything on earth if you let him hold your hand and gurgle. He signed all the necessary papers and even invented extra ones. So then I went and bought a lot of land that everybody said was no good because it was too far from the Nile. You remember the piece?”

  “You bet I remember it! That was where I had to lay out those fellahin with a pick-handle. Lucky for you I made a side-trip to see what tents were doing in such a wilderness!”

  “’Tisn’t a wilderness! There’s a good well. I never found out why those fellahin wanted to drive me away. I’d paid at least three times what the land was worth, and it wasn’t any good to them for crops or anything. However, an officer came along that afternoon, you remember, and conscripted the lot of them for the labour gang. Arrested you, too, didn’t he, for being in Egypt without a permit?”

  “Yes. It meant nothing in his life that permits weren’t being issued in Abyssinia. He took me down to Cairo in a sheep-truck on my own first-class ticket; but go on.”

  “Well, you know I get notions. I had a notion to see what could be done with that piece of land. About half the Egyptian babies that survive the flies are either blind or going to be. And I knew a number one eye doctor in Colorado, and I supposed if I should build an eye hospital he’d be keen to run it. It was only after I had hired an architect and had the plans all drawn that I learned he had married a chorus girl and financed a musical comedy on Broadway to provide her with a star part. So that was that. And then I had to come home. There’s oil on my place, you know, and all the sharks in California, and a whole lot more from the East, were trying to get options on the property from my manager. I wish you’d seen the rush when I showed up! I listened to more black-faced lies and blarney in five days than I’d heard even in Egypt, but they got wise finally, and we’ve got the thing going in first-class shape now — rigs and pumps all over the place, and our own pipe-line. Never borrowed a nickel.”

  “Who are ‘we’?” I asked her.

  “Just me and the manager. I own the whole shooting-match. Well, I kept the title to those acres in Egypt. You couldn’t have sold them for a song. I’d about forgotten that I owned the land, although I left a British ex-Tommy in charge of it, just to see that the Gyppies didn’t steal the holes out of the ground. However, about a month ago along comes this Moustapha Pasha, and wants to buy the land. I thought it funny he should come all that way, when he could have done as well by mail, but I’d have sold him the property for almost any price he’d cared to offer if his lies hadn’t made me suspicious. There wasn’t any sense in them. I asked him out of curiosity what he proposed to do with the property, and he said some friends of his intended to make a hotel out of it!

  “You could no more make a hotel out of that place than out of a pig-sty in the sage-brush. Nobody would go there. There wouldn’t be anything to do if they did go there. It’s too far from the railway, too far from the mountains, too far from everybody. When I was using it we had to bring supplies in lorries a whole day’s run, and one of the chief reasons why the British didn’t come and turn me off it was that their red-tape specialists were too lazy to come and argue.

  “Well, I refused to name a price, but told this Moustapha Pasha I’d think it over. He got pretty impudent then — tried to tell me that I didn’t know my own business, and that as a foreigner I had no right to own land in Egypt that I couldn’t use, and so on. So I gave him the gate. I said if he wanted to negotiate on that basis he could do it through the courts, or through his embassy, or whichever way Gyppies do their long-range cheating. He went off to San Francisco in a huff.

  “Within the fortnight, though, he came back I with a letter of introduction from Mrs. Aintree, whom I once knew slightly. Its terms were far more affectionate and intimate than she’d any right to use to a practical stranger, and I grew more suspicious than ever.

  “I asked him what he thought the land was worth, and he hesitated for about a minute, and then said a hundred pounds. Wasn’t that like a Gyppy, to come all that way and then offer five hundred dollars for a thousand acres? I laughed, so he offered a thousand pounds, and then, when I still laughed, five thousand. He had brought the money with him, too. A draft on New York.

  “But there’s something about that Gyppy that stirs all the fight in me. His atmosphere suggests a plastered fake. He seems to think he’s talking down to you all the time. I know he’s a faker of some kind, and—”

  “Well?”

  “I want to ditch the brute! Need help!”

  By that time we were running into Reno. A man stepped out under a street-lamp and held his hand up.

  “Driving without lights,” he said. “Excuses don’t go. Hell! It’s Joan Angela! Okay. If anyone stops you farther along, Miss Joan, just tell ’em I said it’s all right!”

  “You seem popular,” I suggested.

  “If they knew your dad, and liked him, and know you’re on the level, that’s all there is to it,” sh
e answered. “I’m going to this hotel. You’d better come too.”

  CHAPTER III. “You talk like the British government”

  The hotel was full, but the proprietor surrendered his own suite to Joan, and caused two house-maids, two page-boys, one Chinaman and a darky to sweat furiously. There was nothing whatever to it but friendship — which of course includes respect, or it isn’t of the first water by a long way. There were no strings; I saw her bill next morning. And she was charged four dollars fifty for the use of two rooms, supper and breakfast.

  After I had found a place to sleep I returned to the hotel for supper. The proprietor came and sat with us while we tackled a scratch feed that his sister threw together in the absence of the cook. For a while the talk was of folk well known to both of them, and of the ups and downs of local celebrities, all worth recording but not bearing on this tale, unless to show that there is a sort of masonry among old-timers and their sons and daughters that is as a sealed book to all outsiders.

  You might cheat such people; in fact it might be easy — once. But for all their open-handed kindness you’d never succeed in being one of them until you’d assayed “honest-to-God” before their eyes — after which it wouldn’t matter whether you were broke or a billionaire; you’d be on the inside, looking out.

  “Anybody staying here named Moustapha Pasha?” Joan Angela asked after a while.

  “Yes. M. Pasha. Here a week. Some kind of an Ayrab or something — maybe a nabob — seems to think he owns the place because he can pay. Tips the bell-hops half a dollar and expects ’em to call him ‘Excellency’ or some such bunk. He’s hitched up with a shady gang of lawyers here in town, but I don’t know what the game is. I’d layoff him, if you asked me.”