The Fortieth Door | Page 2

laden camels and jostling donkeys.
It was a glorious day, a day of Egypt's blue and gold. The sky was a
wash of water color; the streets a flood of molten amber. A little wind
from the north rustled the acacias and blew in his bronzed face cool
reminders of the widening Nile and dancing waves.
He remembered a chap he knew, who had a sailing canoe--but no, he

was going to get a costume for a fool ball!
Disgustedly he turned into the very modern and official-looking
residence that was the home of his friend, Andrew McLean, and the
offices of that far-reaching institution, the Agricultural Bank.
A white-robed, red-sashed and red-fezed houseboy led him across the
tiled entrance into the long room where McLean was concluding a
conference with two men.
"Not the least trace," McLean was saying. "We've questioned all our
native agents--"
Afterwards Ryder remembered that indefinite little pause. If the two
men had not lingered--if McLean had not remembered that he was an
excavator--if chance had not brushed the scales with lightning wings--!
"Ever hear of a chap called Delcassé, Paul Delcassé, a French
excavator?" McLean suddenly asked of him. "Disappeared in the desert
about fifteen years ago."
"He was reported, monsieur, to have died of the fever," one of the men
explained.
McLean introduced him as a special agent from France. His companion
was one of the secretaries of the French legation. They were trying
every quarter for traces of this Delcassé.
Ryder's memory darted back to old library shelves. He saw a thin,
brown volume, almost uncut....
"He wrote a book on the Tomb of Thi," he said suddenly. "Paul
Delcassé--I remember it very well."
Now that he thought of it, the memory was clear. It was one of those
books that had whetted his passion for the past, when his student mind
was first kindling to buried cities and forgotten tombs and all the
strange store and loot of time.

Paul Delcassé. He didn't remember a word of the book, but he
remembered that he had read it with absorption. And now the special
agent, delighted at the recognition, was talking eagerly of the writer.
"He was a brilliant young man, monsieur, but he was of no importance
to his generation--and he becomes so now through the whim of a
capricious woman to disinherit her other heirs. After all this time she
has decided to make active inquiries."
"But you said that Delcassé had died--"
"He left a wife and child. Her letters of her husband's death reached his
relatives in France, then nothing more. They feared that the same
fever--but nothing, positively, was known.... A sad story, monsieur....
This Delcassé was young and adventurous and an ardent explorer. An
ardent lover, too, for he brought a beautiful French wife to share the
hazards of his expedition--"
"An ardent idiot," thrust in McLean unfeelingly. "Knocking a woman
about the desert.... Not much chance of a clue after all these years," he
concluded with a very British air of dismissal.
But the French agent was not to be sundered from the American who
remembered the book of Delcassé.
From his pocket he brought a leather case and from the case a large and
ornate gold locket.
"His picture, monsieur." He pressed the spring and offered Ryder the
miniature. "It was done in France before he returned on that last trip,
and was left with the aunt. It is said to be a good likeness."
Ryder looked down upon the young face presented to his gaze with a
feeling of sympathy for this unlucky searcher of the past who had left
his own secret in the sands he had come to conquer--sympathy mingled
with blank wonder at the insanity which had brought a woman with
it....

McLean couldn't understand a man's doing it.
Jack Ryder couldn't understand a man's wanting to do it. Love to Ryder
was incomprehensible idiocy. Woman, as far as he was concerned, had
never been created. She was still a spectacle, an historical record, an
uncomprehended motive.
"Nice looking chap," he commented briefly, fingering the curious old
case as he handed it back.
"I'll keep up the inquiries," McLean assured them, "but, as I said,
nothing will come of it.... It's been fifteen years. One more grain lost in
the desert of sand.... By luck, you know, you might just stumble on
something, some native who knew the story, but if fever carried them
off and the Arabs rifled their camp, as I fancy, they'll jolly well keep
their mouths shut. No white man will know.... I don't advise your
people to spend much money on the search."
"Odd, the inquiries we get," he commented to Ryder when the
Frenchmen had completed their courteous farewells. "You'd think the
Bank was a Bureau of