t. It could wait till the morrow,
when the fire would be out and the air pure. Only for this desecrator of
the royal dead that morrow never came, as was discovered afterwards.

When at length Smith struggled into the open air the stars were paling
before the dawn. An hour later, after the sky was well up, Mahomet
(recovered from his sickness) and his myrmidons arrived.

"I have been busy while you slept," said Smith, showing them the mummied
hand (but not the rings which he had removed from the shrunk fingers),
and the broken bronze, but not the priceless jewellery which was hidden
in his pockets.

For the next ten days they dug till the tomb and its approach were quite
clear. In the sand, at the head of a flight of steps which led down to
the doorway, they found the skeleton of a man, who evidently had been
buried there in a hurried fashion. His skull was shattered by the blow
of an axe, and the shaven scalp that still clung to it suggested that he
might have been a priest.

Mahomet thought, and Smith agreed with him, that this was the person who
had violated the tomb. As he was escaping from it the guards of the holy
place surprised him after he had covered up the hole by which he had
entered and purposed to return. There they executed him without trial
and divided up the plunder, thinking that no more was to be found. Or
perhaps his confederates killed him.

Such at least were the theories advanced by Mahomet. Whether they were
right or wrong none will ever know. For instance, the skeleton may not
have been that of the thief, though probability appears to point the
other way.

Nothing more was found in the tomb, not even a scarab or a mummy-bead.
Smith spent the remainder of his time in photographing the pictures
and copying the inscriptions, which for various reasons proved to be of
extraordinary interest. Then, having reverently buried the charred bones
of the queen in a secret place of the sepulchre, he handed it over to
the care of the local Guardian of Antiquities, paid off Mahomet and the
fellaheen, and departed for Cairo. With him went the wonderful jewels
of which he had breathed no word, and another relic to him yet more
precious--the hand of her Majesty Ma-Mee, Palm-branch of Love.

And now follows the strange sequel of this story of Smith and the queen
Ma-Mee.

II

Smith was seated in the sanctum of the distinguished Director-General
of Antiquities at the new Cairo Museum. It was a very