The Fortieth Door

towards the west and shadows were begin

ze of tattered, indigo-robed, ebony figures, baskets on heads, against a cloudless cobalt sk

pon the stream of sand through the wire screens. Patiently he discarded the unending pebbles, discovering at rare intervals some lost bead,

d shelter cloth stuck on two tottering sticks, and distributed indiscriminatingly were a t

th and south and west the wide sands swept out to meet the sky, and to the east, s

, and within one of these tombs was another white man. He was conducting his own siftings in high solitude,

rminable weeks. They were the longest, the dullest, the dreariest, th

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 chee

otony of desert.... Round and white, it lighted up the eternal sameness of life....

t wasn't as if he wanted to be a grump. He would have been glad t

ng of sameness and dullness that made nothing seem worth while.... A feeling th

he dug up Hathor herself, or Cleopatra, or t

have cast more aspersions upon

hing 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

he c

or's lantern, on the sanded floor at the end of the Hall of Offerings-of course, he was sorry for the gir

on modern ideas. If they kept the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they ough

ven in. She was Turkish, through and through. Submissive. Docile.... And a darned good thing she

gain. No more masked young things with their stolen keys and their har

his No Mores. Recollection had a wa

ld forget it. He would forget her. Work, that w

a morning, he had lost that glow of accomplishment which had buoyed him,

nds 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 wi

licate carvings in the white limestone walls were exceptional examples. And there were some

t 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

wn at exactly the same thing before-that subconscious feeling of the repetition of events whi

Those visiting Frenchmen and that locket they

e same ponderous effect of the coat of arms-if it sh

ithin, but it was not the picture of Monsieur Delcassé. Ryder was looking down upon the face of a girl, a beautiful, spir

face of the girl who had gazed after him in the m