intimacy with his own race. Still, although this step of mine forced me
to leave Cairo and go to Assouan, then a little-known place, to practise
chiefly among the natives, God knows we were happy enough together till
the plague took her, and with it my joy in life.

I pass over all that business, since there are some things too dreadful
and too sacred to write about. She left me one child, a son, who, to
fill up my cup of sorrow, when he was twelve years of age, was kidnapped
by the Mardi's people.

This brings me to the real story. There is nobody else to write
it; Oliver will not; Higgs cannot (outside of anything learned and
antiquarian, he is hopeless); so I must. At any rate, if it is not
interesting, the fault will be mine, not that of the story, which in all
conscience is strange enough.

We are now in the middle of June, and it was a year ago last December
that, on the evening of the day of my arrival in London after an absence
of half a lifetime, I found myself knocking at the door of Professor
Higgs's rooms in Guildford Street, W.C. It was opened by his
housekeeper, Mrs. Reid, a thin and saturnine old woman, who reminded and
still reminds me of a reanimated mummy. She told me that the Professor
was in, but had a gentleman to dinner, and suggested sourly that I
should call again the next morning. With difficulty I persuaded her at
last to inform her master that an old Egyptian friend had brought him
something which he certainly would like to see.

Five minutes later I groped my way into Higgs's sitting-room, which Mrs.
Reid had contented herself with indicating from a lower floor. It is a
large room, running the whole width of the house, divided into two by
an arch, where once, in the Georgian days, there had been folding doors.
The place was in shadow, except for the firelight, which shone upon a
table laid ready for dinner, and upon an extraordinary collection of
antiquities, including a couple of mummies with gold faces arranged in
their coffins against the wall. At the far end of the room, however, an
electric lamp was alight in the bow-window hanging over another table
covered with books, and by it I saw my host, whom I had not met for
twenty years, although until I vanished into the desert we frequently
corresponded, and with him the friend who had come to dinner.

First, I will describe Higgs, who, I may state, is admitted, even by his
enemies, to be one of the most learned antiquarians and gre