IT HAPPENED IN EGYPT ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, David Gundry, Michael Lockey, Martin Agren, Tonya Allen and PG Distributed Proofreaders

IT HAPPENED

IN

EGYPT

by

C.N. & A.M. Williamson

_Authors of_

"The Port of Adventure"

"The Heathen Moon", Etc.

1914

TO

D.D. AND F.C.J.

WHO WERE THERE WHEN

IT HAPPENED

[Illustration: "A man with a green turban?" I repeated. "Well, I'll take him."]

WE DEDICATE THIS STORY OF ADVENTURES GRAVE AND GAY IN EGYPT

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. The Secret and the Girl

II. Cleopatra and the Ship's Mystery

III. A Disappointment and a Dragoman

IV. A Man in a Green Turban

V. The Café of Abdullahi

VI. The Great Sir Marcus

VII. The Revelations of a Retired Colonel

VIII. Foxy Duffing

IX. What Happened When My Back Was Turned

X. The Secret Monny Kept

XI. The House of the Crocodile

XII. The Night of the Full Moon

XIII. An Underground Proposal

XIV. The Desert Diary Begun

XV. The Desert Diary to Its Bitter End

XVI. An Oiled Hand

XVII. The Ship's Mystery Again

XVIII. The Asiut Affair

XIX. "If at First You Don't Succeed"

XX. The Zone of Fire

XXI. The Opening Door

XXII. The Driver of an Arabeah

XXIII. Bengal Fire

XXIV. Playing Heavy Father to Rachel

XXV. Marooned

XXVI. What We Said: What We Heard

XXVII. The Inner Sanctuary

XXVIII. Worth Paying For

XXIX. Exit Antoun

XXX. The Sirdar's Ball

XXXI. The Mountain of the Golden Pyramid

XXXII. The Secret

IT HAPPENED IN EGYPT

CHAPTER I

THE SECRET AND THE GIRL

The exciting part began in Cairo; but perhaps I ought to go back to what happened on the _Laconia_, between Naples and Alexandria. Luckily no one can expect a man who actually rejoices in his nickname of "Duffer" to know how or where a true story should begin.

The huge ship was passing swiftly out of the Bay of Naples, and already we were in the strait between Capri and the mainland. I had come on deck from the smoking-room for a last look at poor Vesuvius, who lost her lovely head in the last eruption. I paced up and down, acutely conscious of my great secret, the secret inspiring my voyage to Egypt. For months it had been the hidden romance of life; now it began to seem real. This is not the moment to tell how I got the papers that revealed the secret, before I passed them on to Anthony Fenton at Khartum, for him to say whether or not the notes were of real importance. But the papers had been left in Rome by Ferlini, the Italian Egyptologist, seventy years ago, when he gave to the museum at Berlin the treasures he had unearthed. It was Ferlini who ransacked the pyramids all about Meroë, that so-called island in the desert, where in its days of splendour reigned the queens Candace. Fenton, stationed at Khartum, an eager dabbler in the old lore of Egypt, sent me an enthusiastic telegram the moment he read the documents. They confirmed legends of the Sudan in which he had been interested. Putting two and two together--the legends and Ferlini's notes--Anthony was convinced that we had the clue to fortune. At once he applied for permission to excavate under the little outlying mountain named by the desert folk "the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid." At first the spot was thought to fall within the province given up to Garstang, digging for Liverpool University. Later, however, the _Service des Antiquités_ pronounced the place to be outside Garstang's borders, and it seemed that luck was coming our way. No one but we two--Fenton and I--had any inkling of what might lie hidden in the Mountain of the Golden Pyramid. That was the great secret! Then Fenton had gone to the Balkans, on a flying trip in every sense of the word. It was only a fortnight ago--I being then in Rome--that I had had a wire from him in Salonica saying, "Friends at work to promote our scheme. Meet me on my return to Egypt." After that, several telegrams had been exchanged; and here I was on the _Laconia_ bound for the land of my birth, full of hope and dreams.

For some moments distant Vesuvius had beguiled my thoughts from the still more distant mountain of the secret, when suddenly a white girl in a white hood and a long white cloak passed me on the white deck: whereupon I forgot mountains of reality and dreams. She was one of those tall, slim, long-limbed, dryad-sort of girls they are running up nowadays in England and America with much success; and besides all that, she was an amazing symphony in white and gold against an azure Italian sea and sky, the two last being breezily jumbled together at the moment