Saville Grainger will long be remembered by the public as a brilliant
journalist and by his friends as a confirmed misogynist. His distaste
for the society of women amounted to a mania, and to Grainger a pretty
face was like a red rag to a bull. This was all the more extraordinary
and, for Grainger, more painful, because he was one of the most
handsome men I ever knew--very dark, with wonderful flashing eyes and
the features of an early Roman--or, as I have since thought, of an
aristocratic Oriental; aquiline, clean-cut, and swarthy. At any mixed
gathering at which he appeared, women gravitated in his direction as
though he possessed some magnetic attraction for the sex; and Grainger
invariably bolted.
His extraordinary end--never explained to this day--will be remembered
by some of those who read of it; but so much that affected whole
continents has occurred in the interval that to the majority of the
public the circumstances will no longer be familiar. It created a
considerable stir in Cairo at the time, as was only natural, but
when the missing man failed to return, the nine days' wonder of his
disappearance was forgotten in the excitement of some new story or
another.
Briefly, Grainger, who was recuperating at Mena House after a rather
severe illness in London, went out one evening for a stroll, wearing a
light dust-coat over his evening clothes and smoking a cigarette. He
turned in the direction of the Great Pyramid--and never came back. That
is the story in its bald entirety. No one has ever seen him since--or
ever reported having seen him.
If the following story is an elaborate hoax--perpetrated by Grainger
himself, for some obscure reason remaining in hiding, or by another well
acquainted with his handwriting--I do not profess to say. As to how it
came into my possession, that may be told very briefly. Two years after
Grainger's disappearance I was in Cairo, and although I was not staying
at Mena House I sometimes visited friends there. One night as I came
out of the hotel to enter the car which was to drive me back to the
Continental, a tall native, dressed in white and so muffled up that
little more of his face than two gleaming eyes was visible, handed me
a packet--a roll of paper, apparently--saluted me with extraordinary
formality, and departed.
No one else seemed to have noticed the man, although the chauffeur, of
course, was nearly as close to him as I was, and a servant from the
hotel had followed me out and down the steps. I stood there in the dusk,
staring at the packet in my hand and then after the tall figure--already
swallowed up in the shadow of the road. Naturally I assumed that the man
had made some mistake, and holding the package near the lamp of the car
I examined it closely.
It was a roll of some kind of parchment, tied with a fragment of thin
string, and upon the otherwise blank outside page my name was written
very distinctly!
I entered the car, rather dazed by the occurrence, which presented
several extraordinary features, and, unfastening the string, began
to read. Then, in real earnest, I thought I must be dreaming. Since I
append the whole of the manuscript I will make no further reference to
the contents here, but will content myself with mentioning that it was
written--with dark-brown ink--in Saville Grainger's unmistakable hand
upon some kind of parchment or papyrus which has defied three different
experts to whom I have shown it, but which, in short, is of unknown
manufacture. The twine with which it was tied proved to be of finely
plaited reed.
That part of Grainger's narrative, if the following amazing statement
is really the work of Grainger, which deals with events up to the time
that he left Mena House--and the world--I have been able to check. The
dragoman, Hassan Abd-el-Kebîr, was still practising his profession at
Mena House at the time of my visit, and he confirmed the truth of
Grainger's story in regard to the heart of lapis-lazuli, which he had
seen, and the meeting with the old woman in the Mûski--of which Grainger
had spoken to him.
For the rest, the manuscript shall tell Grainger's story.