uer rumor
of a rash young American girl, detained for days....

Ryder had always known these stories. They were part of the gossip
and thrill of Cairo. But he had never till now realized how
exquisitely possible was their occurrence.

Anything, everything might happen in these hidden, secret chambers.
These Turks were as much masters here as their old predecessors who
had reared these stones. This black upon his heels might have been
the grinning, faithful executioner of some Khedive or Caliph--he
might have been the very Masrur, the Sworder of Vengeance of Al
Raschid.

He told himself that it was no time to think of the past. His
business--acutely--was the present. If only he could get his hands
untied! If only he could get those untied hands upon that demoniac
Turk!

But, strain as he could upon the knots, they held.

It seemed to him that they had been walking for an interminable
distance, in odd, roundabout ways. Once they had stopped and he had
involuntarily glanced back over his shoulder, but at a word from the
general he had kept his head forward again, while he heard the black
behind him gathering something that clinked. Later, a stolen glance
had revealed the eunuch with some tools in one hand and bag slung
over his shoulder.

The bag disquieted him. Bags filled a foreboding place in the
Eastern literature of vengeance. He wondered if he were to go into
the river in that bag, with the tools for weight.

He decided, feeling now a very odd and definite disturbance in the
region of his stomach, that he would tell that general that he was a
cousin of the late Lord Cromer and a nephew of Lord Kitchener.
Something insistent would have to be done about this.

They were passing now through a strange, open space, between old
arches that for an instant arrested his excavator's interest. He saw
in the shadows about them, a crumpled, crumbling dome and broken
shafts, with half a wall of masonry pierced with Arabesques. Traces
of old ruins, fragments of some old, forgotten mosque over which the
palace had spread its foundations in bygone days.... Buried
treasure, looted, some of it, for the palace overhead, but still
rare and lovely.... That was a gleam of lapis lazuli that winked at
him from the crumbling mortar under his feet.

Then they were between other walls, not crumbling ones, but the
solid, pillared blocks of the palace masonry with here and there
broad arches of old brick.

They stopped. Between two