It Happened in Egypt

It Happened in Egypt

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Title: It Happened in Egypt
Author: C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9799] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 18, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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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 Caf�� 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 Mero?, 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 Antiquit��s 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