hankful for, but still I would
that I had more after all these years to search. To think that I should
be so close to him and he know nothing of it."

After the ceasing of the song and the departure of my son, there
appeared upon the back of the idol three Fung warriors, fine fellows
clad in long robes and armed with spears, and behind them a trumpeter
who carried a horn or hollowed elephant's tusk. These men marched up and
down the length of the platform from the rise of the neck to the root of
the tail, apparently to make an inspection. Having found nothing, for,
of course, they could not see us hidden behind the bushes on our little
plateau, of which no doubt they did not even know the existence, and
much less that it was connected with the mountain plain of Mur, the
trumpeter blew a shrill blast upon his horn, and before the echoes of it
had died away, vanished with his companions.

"Sunset tour of inspection. Seen the same kind of thing as at Gib.,"
said the Sergeant. "Oh! by Jingo! Pussy isn't lying after all--there
he is," and he pointed to a figure that rose suddenly out of the black
stone of the idol's back just as the guards had done.

It was Higgs, Higgs without a doubt; Higgs wearing his battered
sun-helmet and his dark spectacles; Higgs smoking his big meerschaum
pipe, and engaged in making notes in a pocket-book as calmly as though
he sat before a new object in the British Museum.

I gasped with astonishment, for somehow I had never expected that we
should really see him, but Orme, rising very quietly from his seat
beside Maqueda, only said:

"Yes, that's the old fellow right enough. Well, now for it. You,
Shadrach, run out your ladder and cross first that I may be sure you
play no trick."

"Nay," broke in Maqueda, "this dog shall not go, for never would he
return from his friends the Fung. Man," she said, addressing Japhet, the
Mountaineer to whom she had promised land, "go you over first and hold
the end of the ladder while this lord crosses. If he returns safe your
reward is doubled."

Japhet saluted, the ladder was run out and its end set upon the
roughnesses in the rock that represented the hair of the sphinx's tail.
The Mountaineer paused a moment with hands and face uplifted; evidently
he was praying. Then bidding his companions hold the hither end of the
ladder, and having first tested it with his foot and found that it hung
firm, calmly he walked across, being a brave fellow, and presently