by Sax Rohmer
Fashionable women of Europe and America moved about him, with black-coated manhood hovering in attendance. Desmond felt uncomfortable—as every public school man, even though he be Irish, and strive how he may to defy the conventionalities, must ever feel when he is conscious of not being “correct”. Dress suits are unnecessary in the desert, and Desmond was arrayed in a serviceable outfit of washable linen. He concealed his discomfort, however, for in his secret heart he despised the sheeplike trooping of society equally with the gilded glory of Goldberger, and sought to crush that within him which was allied to the ways of the fold.
He turned to his companion, who sat beside him in the gayly lit lounge, and a slight smile disturbed the firm, straight line of his mouth.
Desmond’s smile had once been described by an American lady as “worthwhile”. He was one of those grim six-footers, prematurely grey, and straight as a mast. His short moustache was black, however. When he smiled, he revealed his lower teeth—small, even, strong-looking teeth—and his deep-set, rather sinister blue eyes lit up. The stern face became the face of a lovable schoolboy—and a bashful schoolboy, at that. With his fine appearance his romantic name, and his smile, he was fatal to women; but he didn’t seem to know it.
“It is good of you to consent to be with me,” he said, in his slow, hesitating fashion; “for, although I am neither distinguished nor wealthy, I dare to be shabby.”
Mme. de Medicis dropped the cigarette from her tapered fingers into the little bowl upon the table at her side. Women were there tonight whose reputation for smartness was well deserved, and who, covertly watching madame, knew her to be dressed with a daring yet exquisite tastefulness which they might copy but could never equal. Women were there whom society called beautiful, but their beauty became very ordinary prettiness beside the dazzling loveliness of Desmond’s companion.
She wore a gown of Delhi muslin with golden butterflies wrought upon its texture, and over it, as a cloud, floated that wondrous gauze which is known in the East as “the breath of Allah”. No newest tenet of Paris was violated in its fashioning; no line of the wearer’s exquisite shape was concealed by its softness.
Madame smiled dreamily, protruding one tiny foot cased in a shoe of old gold. Under her curved black lashes her eyes turned momentarily, glancing at Desmond. Those eyes were such as have never been bestowed by the gods upon woman save as a scourge to man. They possessed the hue seen in the eyes of a tigress, yet they could be as voluptuously soft as the shadows of some dim lagoon. Her carmine lips were curved with a high disdain, and, though her hair was black as the ebony pillars of the Hall of the Afreets, her lovely cheeks glowed like the petals of a newborn rose and her velvet skin was as fair as the almond blossom.
“You lack the courage of the soi-disant grand duke,” she murmured.
Desmond turned languidly in his chair, fixing his queer, lingering regard upon the speaker.
“You refer to the eccentric royal personage who braves the wrath of Alexandria arrayed in a frock coat fastened by a piece of string? Poor fellow! His estates are confiscated, and he wears a pair of canvas shoes and a straw hat with a crown that permits the genial rays to caress his scalp.”
Mme. de Medicis laughed softly.
“But he is so clever an artist!” she said.
Desmond shrugged cynically.
“There you are!” he protested. “An artist and a grand duke—all is forgiven!”
Madame laughed again, adjusting the filmy scarf that caressed her white shoulders as lightly as the amorous cloud which of old enveloped Io, the beauteous.
“You are so English!” she declared. “Oh, no—please forgive me! You are Irish—but so absurdly sensitive! You fly to the Winter Palace because you are weary of the Theban solitude, and here you find yourself more lonely than when you camp in wilderness!”
“But you have taken pity upon me,” said Desmond, leaning toward her; “and now wild horses could not drag me back to my camp.”
“Ah!” sighed madame, archly lowering fringes of black lashes. “So you are not so English that you cannot make love!”
“On the contrary,” he replied, “I am so Irish that I cannot help it!”
She rose slowly to her feet. Her moving robe diffused a faint perfume. For a moment Desmond feared that he had offended her. Naïvely, he revealed his concern.
“Come, my desert man!” she said. “Walk with me beside holy Nile, and tell me that I am beautiful, in that deep, deceptive voice which has such tender notes! With what sweet English maids have you rehearsed the ballad of love, my friend! You strike its chords with rare proficiency!”
* * *
Many regarded Desmond’s naïveté as a pose. It was not a conscious pose; yet he knew a certain sense of pagan triumph as he came out from the Winter Palace, past the bench upon which were seated the picturesque dragomans, and so on into the shadowed part of the street between the hotel entrance and the arcade of shops.
Beside him walked the most beautiful and elegant woman of all that gay gathering. An old roué whose name may be found in Debrett bowed to madame in mid-Victorian fashion, and eyed her cavalier unkindly. Lord Abbeyrock, said to be the handsomest man in Europe, who had been haunting the foyer for an hour past, bit savagely at his moustache and turned brusquely to re-enter the hotel. Quite a company of young cosmopolitan bloods followed with longing eyes the exquisite figure in the amazing cloak of flamingo red. With manifest reluctance, a stolid New York business magnate—whose wife was in Cairo—quitted his strategic post near the dragomans’ bench, hitherto held against all comers.
Mystery is woman’s supreme charm. It is the mystery of dark eyes peeping from a mushrabiyeh lattice that constitutes the love lure of the East. Mme. de Medicis was utterly mysterious—tempting, taunting, unfathomable—at once a Sibyl and a Cleopatra.
Who was she, and from whence did she come? She was steeped in mysticism, spoke intimately of the strange writings of Eliphas Levi, and quoted Pythagoras and Zarathustra with the same facility where with Desmond, of catholic literary sympathies, quoted Kipling and Yeats. She had tremendous intellectual fascination. At one moment she made him feel like a child; in the next, her wondrous eyes would look into his own, and they were the luresome eyes of a ghaziyeh, setting his blood more quickly coursing.
Groups of tourists lingered around the native shops, volubly chattering of their travels. Boatmen and donkey boys sat upon the low parapet, watching the idle throng and smiling their inscrutable Egyptian smiles. In the river lay the lighted dahabeahs. From one of them—that of Diamond Jake—came the softened tones of a sweet violin.
“Art lays its treasures at the feet of Mammon,” murmured madame.
For a moment she paused, resting her slender hand upon Desmond’s arm. The strains of a Spanish caprice of Sarasate’s, played by one of Europe’s greatest violinists, floated across the waters of the Nile.
It was Luxor reborn—Luxor, that has known so much of peace and war, of fashion and art; Luxor, that once was Thebes, beloved of Amen, the city of temples and palaces. And near them, beside them, cloaked in velvet night, swooned the deathless mystery of that historic land.
Desmond looked long and ardently at his companion, as she moved onward again. Only she had a true place in a picture of the greater city which now was rising up before him. The modern, empty Luxor was fading, and upon rich banks of the ancient river; looming shadowly, were the stately walls of the city of a hundred gates.
He seemed to be pacing beside the Nile with a Pharaoh’s queen on a night of long, long ago.
“Tell me about your work in the temple,” she said, breaking an eloquent silence. “You are looking for the sacred ornaments of the Princess Taia, are you not?”
“Yes,” Desmond answered dreamily, “under the floor of what is sometimes called the Treasure Room.”
“You know that the Egyptian government expedition, under. Van Kuyper, is similarly engaged at Biban el Muluk?”
“Van Kuyper is wrong,” snappe
d Desmond, with sudden animation; for the enthusiast within him was awakened by the challenge in her words. “He confuses the princess with the queen, whereas they belonged to different families. I am glad he is wrong. He deserves to fail.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because,” said Desmond grimly, “Van Kuyper is no true Egyptologist. He is an impostor and the so-called government expedition is no more than a marauding expedition. It is subsidised by a millionaire collector, and if the jewels were found by Van Kuyper they would mysteriously disappear and reappear in New York. It’s a scandal! Such things belong neither to the Egyptian government nor to any purse-proud collector rich enough to pay to have them stolen. They belong to the world.”
His enthusiasm was infectious. Covertly, Mme. De Medicis watched him; and in the dusk the man’s strong, rugged profile resembled that of the great Rameses who holds eternal court amid the ruins of his great temple-palace.
“You, then, seek for love of seeking?” she asked softly.
“I revere the grandeur that was Egypt,” he replied. “To commercialise such majesty is intolerable!”
“May it not also be dangerous?”
“Well!” Desmond laughed. “Princess Taia certainly had an odd reputation!”
“You refer to the fact that she was a sorceress?”
Desmond started, glancing aside at his lovely companion. Then he laughed again. “You seem to know everything!” he declared. “At times, when you question me on some point of Egyptology, I feel that you are amusing yourself. Yes—the princess was famous for her beauty and notorious for her witchcraft.”
“Beware, then, that you are not playing with fire,” said Mme. de Medicis softly. “Others have suffered—is it not so?”
Desmond pulled up suddenly. They had passed the shops, and passed the imitation temple gateway which marks the boundary of a hotel garden. They were alone with the night mystery of the Nile, upon a footpath leading to an old shadoof.
Something sombre, a new fascination, had come into the woman’s silver voice. The moon poured its radiance quenchingly upon the flaming figure of this strange woman who warned him to beware of a sorceress dead twelve hundred years before the dawn of Christianity. Her tigress eyes looked fully into his own; and now-their glance chilled him coldly, as but a moment ago it had warmed him like wine.
“You speak in riddles,” he said awkwardly, again become the boy who questions the Sibyl.
“Have you then heard and seen nothing strange in the temple?” she whispered, and looked about her fearfully.
“I have seen nothing,” he replied, “but I have heard much. Some of the Arabs in these parts regard the ruins of Medinet Habu as haunted, I am aware; but if one listened to natives, one could not avoid the conclusion that the whole of Egypt is haunted. My headman and several others come from Suefee, in the Fayum, and are of different mettle.”
“And so they camp in the temple?”
“Well,” Desmond admitted, “not exactly. They sleep in the village, as a matter of fact—or have been doing so for some little time past.”
“And you sleep in Luxor?”
He stared fully into the lovely, sombre face.
“You don’t seriously believe that I am afraid to sleep in the temple?” he inquired slowly.
“Not at all; but I think you are wise to avoid doing so.”
Awhile longer he watched her, betwixt anger and perplexity, until her carmine lips softened, parted, and hinted the gleam of pearly teeth. She dropped her heavy lashes, then raised them again; and her wonderful eyes were changed. They chilled no longer. Mme. de Medicis raised one slender, round ivory arm and laid her jewelled fingers caressingly upon Desmond’s breast. The flaming cloak fell back, revealing a peeping shoulder wooed by the daring moon.
“How I love the English character!” she whispered, lending the words a bewitching little foreign intonation. “Ah, my Irish friend, forgive me—but you are so perfectly English! Look!” She moved her hand and pointed out across the silvery Nile. “There is my dahabeah!”
Desmond stared across the water toward where a vessel showing but few lights lay moored in the stream.
“Your dahabeah?” he said in surprise. “But I thought—”
“That I was one of the Goldberger party?” she suggested. “Oh no! I have my own dahabeah; but because I was lonely, too, I came, as you came, to the Winter Palace.”
“I am grateful to the gods of Egypt!” said Desmond in a low voice.
She turned and laid her hand upon his breast again. He clasped his own tightly over the little jewelled fingers, crushing them against his heart, which was beating wildly, tumultuously.
Across the waters of the river of romance there came, faintly, magically, the sound of a throbbing darabukkeh and the wail of a reed pipe—that ancient music which the ages have not changed, and which accompanied the gliding of Cleopatra’s golden barge down the mystic Nile to meet the great Roman soldier.
A man’s voice—a light baritone, possessing in a marked degree the wild, yearning note peculiar to oriental vocalists—rose upon the night’s silence. The song was a ghazal of that sweet-voiced singer of old Shiraz whom men called Chagarlab, “the sugar-lipped.”
“If a cup of wine is spilled and I have spilled it, what of that? If ripe, tender lips be crushed and mine have crushed them, be it so!”
Transfixed by something compelling and magnetic in the vibrant tones, Desmond stood, tightly clasping madame’s jewelled fingers. The final syllable of the verse died away, to ever diminishing beats of the dram and a softly sustained wailing note of the reed.
“You have Persians among your crew?” he said, and drew his lovely companion closer to him.
“But why?” she whispered, looking up into his eyes. “Do you recognise the words of Hafiz?”
“Perfectly! May I translate?”
Her reply was barely audible.
“If you wish!”
Desmond stooped and kissed her upon the lips.
* * *
Desmond always began working the temple at an early hour. His enthusiasm ran higher than ever, but his ideas had taken a strange twist. He began to study his men, to listen to their conversations with a new interest, and to interpret what he saw and what he heard from a different angle.
His excavators laboured with skill and good will; and, once having penetrated the six or eight feet of tightly packed stone which closed the top of the opening, Desmond’s task became a mere job of shovelling. Clearly enough, he had blundered upon a shaft opened in very early times, the lower part of which had apparently been filled up with sand. His only fear was that it might prove to be the work of early tomb robbers, and not of those who had hidden the sacred ornaments.
Medinet Habu affords a lively enough scene in the daytime during the Egyptian season, being visited by hundreds of tourists from Luxor. Hence Desmond’s early starting of operations. There were many visitors to the temple during the day, and not a few penetrated to the barrier and read the notice posted there. None of them, however, had the necessary official permit to enter the closed Treasure Room of Rameses, and work proceeded without interruption.
Evening came, the labourers departed, and Desmond was left alone—save for the headman, Ali Mahmoud—in the wonder of Egypt’s dusk. He watched the pale blue merge into exquisite pink, and the two colours, by some magical transmutation, form that profound violet which defies palette and brush. He became lost in reverie.
Not a sound came to disturb him, save a faint clatter of kitchen utensils from the tent under the ruins, where Ali Mahmoud was preparing dinner. A dog began to howl in the nearby village, but presently ceased. From the Nile, borne upon a slight breeze, came the plaintive note of a boatman’s pipe. Presently the breeze died away, and silence claimed the great temple for its own.
Desmond bathed in the extemporised bath which the headman had filled. Then he shaved, changed into his best linen outfit, and dispatched his dinner.
“Ali Mahmoud!�
� he called, stepping to the tent door.
Out of deepening shadows the tall Egyptian appeared.
“I shall be away for some hours,” said Desmond. “Keep a sharp lookout!”
“But you will return before morning?”
There was an odd note of anxiety—almost of reproach—in the man’s voice. Desmond felt his cheeks flush.
“Of course I shall return before morning,” he answered sharply. “‘For some hours,’ I said. The temple ghafir will keep you company.”
Ali Mahmoud shook his head.
“That Coptic robber has departed,” he replied simply.
“What?” Desmond cried. “Since when?”
“Since the opening to the passage was made, he has departed each night at dusk.”
“Then you have been here alone?”
“It is so.”
“He had orders to remain!”
“It is true; but he is an unclean insect and an eater of pork.”
“Has he been bribed?”
“How can I say, Desmond Effendi? But I will keep a sharp lookout, as you direct.”
Ali Mahmoud saluted with graceful dignity, turned, and walked away.
For a long time Desmond stood looking after the headman, his mind filled with misgivings. From what he had overheard of the men’s conversation he had been forced to conclude that superstition was working among them like a virus. The source of the strange rumours passing from man to man he had been unable to trace. He wondered if definite human enmity might not be at the bottom of the trouble. The desertion of the official watchman of the temple was significant.
Clearly, in the circumstances, it was unfair to leave Ali Mahmoud alone on guard. Desmond hesitated. A mental picture uprose before him, and he seemed to hear a soft voice whispering his name:
