stood ajar, throwing a spurt of yellow light across
the passage. "Come in here!" said the attendant shortly.

Vansittart Smith hesitated. He had hoped that he had come to the end of
his adventure. Yet his curiosity was strong within him. He could not
leave the matter unsolved, so he followed his strange companion into the
lighted chamber.

It was a small room, such as is devoted to a _concierge_. A wood fire
sparkled in the grate. At one side stood a truckle bed, and at the other
a coarse wooden chair, with a round table in the centre, which bore the
remains of a meal. As the visitor's eye glanced round he could not but
remark with an ever-recurring thrill that all the small details of the
room were of the most quaint design and antique workmanship. The
candlesticks, the vases upon the chimneypiece, the fire-irons, the
ornaments upon the walls, were all such as he had been wont to associate
with the remote past. The gnarled heavy-eyed man sat himself down upon
the edge of the bed, and motioned his guest into the chair.

"There may be design in this," he said, still speaking excellent
English. "It may be decreed that I should leave some account behind as a
warning to all rash mortals who would set their wits up against workings
of Nature. I leave it with you. Make such use as you will of it. I speak
to you now with my feet upon the threshold of the other world.

"I am, as you surmised, an Egyptian--not one of the down-trodden race of
slaves who now inhabit the Delta of the Nile, but a survivor of that
fiercer and harder people who tamed the Hebrew, drove the Ethiopian back
into the southern deserts, and built those mighty works which have been
the envy and the wonder of all after generations. It was in the reign of
Tuthmosis, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, that I
first saw the light. You shrink away from me. Wait, and you will see
that I am more to be pitied than to be feared.

"My name was Sosra. My father had been the chief priest of Osiris in the
great temple of Abaris, which stood in those days upon the Bubastic
branch of the Nile. I was brought up in the temple and was trained in
all those mystic arts which are spoken of in your own Bible. I was an
apt pupil. Before I was sixteen I had learned all which the wisest
priest could teach me. From that time on I studied Nature's secrets for
myself, and shared my knowledge with no man.

"Of all the questions which attracted me there were none over w