A SECRET OF THE SANDS
The siesta was past. The sun was tilting towards the west and
shadows were beginning to jut out across the blazing sands.
Over the mounds of rubbish the bearers had resumed their slow
procession, a picturesque frieze of tattered, indigo-robed, ebony
figures, baskets on heads, against a cloudless cobalt sky, and again
the hot air was invaded with the monotonous rise and fall of their
labor chant.
A man with a short, pointed red beard and an academic face beneath a
pith helmet was stooping over the siftings from those baskets,
intent upon the stream of sand through the wire screens. Patiently
he discarded the unending pebbles, discovering at rare intervals
some lost bead, some splinter of old sycamore wood, some fragment of
pottery in which a Ptolemy had sipped his wine--or a kitchen wench
had soaked her lentils.
Beyond the man were traces of the native camp, a burnt-out fire, a
roll of rags, a tattered shelter cloth stuck on two tottering
sticks, and distributed indiscriminatingly were a tethered goat, a
white donkey with motionless, drooping ears, and a few supercilious
camels.
The camp was in the center of a broken line of foothills on the
desert's edge. North and south and west the wide sands swept out to
meet the sky, and to the east, shutting out the Nile valley, the
hills reared their red rock from the yellow drift.
Among the jutting rock in the foreground yawned dark mouths that
were the entrances of the discovered tombs, and within one of these
tombs was another white man. He was conducting his own siftings in
high solitude, a lean, bronzed young man, with dark hair and eyes
and, at the present moment, an unexhilarated expression.
It had been two weeks since Jack Ryder had returned to camp. Two
interminable weeks. They were the longest, the dullest, the
dreariest, the most irritatingly undelighting weeks that he had ever
lived through.
But bitterly he resented any aspersion from the long-suffering
Thatcher upon his disposition. He wanted it distinctly understood
that he was _not_ low-spirited. Not in the least. A man wasn't in
the dumps just because he wasn't--well, garrulous. Just because he
didn't go about whistling like a steam siren or exult like a cheer
leader when some one dug up the effigy of a Hathor-cow.... Just
because he objected when the natives twanged their fool strings all
night and wailed at the moon.
The moon was full now. Round and white it went sailing blandly over
the eternal monotony of desert.... Round and white, it lighted up
the eternal sameness of life.... He had never noticed it before, but
a moon was a poignantly depressing phenomenon.
He couldn't help it. A man couldn't make himself be a comedian. It
wasn't as if he wanted to be a grump. He would have been glad to be
glad. He wanted Thatcher to make him glad. He defied him to.
He didn't enjoy this flat, insipid taste of things, this dull grind,
this feeling of sameness and dullness that made nothing seem worth
while.... A feeling that he had been marooned on a desert island,
far from all stir and throb of life.
Suppose he did dig up a Hathor-cow? Suppose he dug up Hathor
herself, or Cleopatra, or ten little Ptolemies? What was the good of
it?
Not Jinny Jeffries herself could have cast more aspersions upon the
personal value of excavations.
When he was tired of denying to himself that there was anything
unusual the matter with him, he shifted the inner argument and took
up the denial that anything which had happened in Cairo those two
weeks before had anything to do with it. As if that rash encounter
_mattered_! As if he were the silly, senseless sentimental sort of
idiot to go mooning about his work because of a girl--and a girl
from a harem with a taste for secret masquerades and Turkish
marriages!
As if he cared--!
Of course--he admitted this logically and coldly now to himself, as
he sat there in the ray of his excavator's lantern, on the sanded
floor at the end of the Hall of Offerings--of course, he was sorry
for the girl. It was no life for any young girl--especially a
spirited one, with her veins bubbling with French blood.
The system was wrong. If they were going to shut up those girls,
they had no business to bring them up on modern ideas. If they kept
the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they
ought to keep the kohl on their eyes and the henna on their fingers
and education out of their hidden heads.
It was too bad.... But, of course, they were brought up to it. Look
how quickly that girl had given in. She was Turkish, through and
through. Submissive. Docile.... And a darned good thing she was,
too! Suppose she had taken him at his fool word. Suppose she had
really wanted to get away!
Lucky, that's what he'd been. And it would be a lesson to him. Never
again. No more masked young things with their stolen keys and their
harem entrances. No more whispered tales of woe in a shady garden.
No more--
Violently he wrenched himself from his No Mores. Recollection had a
way of stirring an unpleasant tumult.
But it was all over. He had forgotten it--he _would_ forget it. He
would forget _her_. Work, that was the thing. Normal, sensible,
every day work.
But there was no joy in this tonic work. Somewhere, between a night
and a morning, he had lost that glow of accomplishment which had
buoyed him, which had made him fairly ecstatic over the discovery of
this very tomb.
For this tomb was his own find. It had been found long before by the
plundering Persians, and it had been found by Arabs who had
plundered the Persian remains--but between and after those findings
the oblivious sands had swept over it, blotting it from the world,
choking the entrance hall and the shafts, seeping through
half-sealed entrances and packing its dry drift over the rifled
sarcophagus of the king and over the withered mummy of the young
girl in the ante-room. The tombs had been cleared now, down almost
to the stone floors, and Ryder was busy with the drifts that had
lodged in the crevices about the entrance to the shaft.
It was really an important find. Although much plundered, the walls
were intact, and the delicate carvings in the white limestone walls
were exceptional examples. And there were some very interesting
things to decipher. A scholar and an explorer could well be
enthusiastic.
But Ryder continued to look far from enthusiastic. Even when his
groping fingers, searching a cranny, came in contact with a hard
substance his face did not change to any lightning radiance.
Unexpectantly he picked up the sand-encrusted lump and brushed it
off. A gleam of gold shone in his hand. But it was no ancient amulet
or necklace or breast guard--nor was it any bit of the harness of
the plundering Persians. It was a locket, very heavily and ornately
carved.
He stood a moment staring down at the thing with a curious feeling
of having stood staring down at exactly the same thing before--that
subconscious feeling of the repetition of events which supports the
theories of reincarnationists--and then, quite suddenly, memory came
to his aid.
In McLean's office. That day of the masquerade. Those visiting
Frenchmen and that locket they had shown him. Of course the thing
reminded him--
And it was remarkably alike. The same thick oval, the same ponderous
effect of the coat of arms--if it should prove the same coat of arms
that would be a clue!
With his mind still piecing the recollection and surmise together
his fingers pressed the spring. There was a miniature within, but it
was not the picture of Monsieur Delcassé. Ryder was looking down
upon the face of a girl, a beautiful, spirited face, with merry eyes
and wistful lips--dark eyes, with a lovely arch of brow, and
rose-red lips with haunting curves.
And eyes and brows and lips and curves, it was the face of the girl
who had gazed after him in the moonlight against the shadows of the
pasha's garden.