was the time to pinch himself and wake up! Of all the dark,
eerie nightmares! This slow procession through these underground
halls, the giant black on his heels, the general's lantern throwing
its flickering rays over the huge, seamed blocks of granite
foundations.

It made him think of the Catacombs. It made him think of the
Serapeum. It made him think of those damp, tortuous underground ways
of the Villa Bordoni....

They seemed to be in the wine cellars. He saw bins and barrels and
barred vaults that would have done credit to an English squire, and
he reflected fleetly that wine bibbing was forbidden to Mohammedans
and that Hamdi Bey was a fanatic Moslem.... Then he saw open spaces
of ancient stuffs, broken tables and dismantled caiques and a broken
oar. His earlier observation of the palace had told him that it had
a water gate and he thought now that they might be near some
opening.

He wondered if they were going to throw him, pinioned, into the
river. He wouldn't put it past this livid, silent, shaking man--and
yet the thing appeared so impossible, so theatric, so utterly
unrelated to any of the ways that he, Jack Ryder, might be expected
to end his days, that it couldn't possibly send more than a shiver
of speculation down his spine.

And yet men _had_ been thrown into rivers--this very river. And men
had disappeared from just such palaces as this. There was the story
about young Monkton. He knew it perfectly; he had reminded himself
of it the last evening while he reflected upon this escapade, but he
had never actually appreciated the peculiar poignancy of the thing
until now.

Monkton had met--so rumor reported--a Turkish lady of position,
flirted with her, it was said, while on horseback outside her motor
when caught in the crush at Kasr-el-Nil bridge. There had been a
meeting or two in the back of shops, and then he had boasted,
lightheartedly, of a design to take tea in her harem.

He had never boasted about the tea. No one had ever seen Monkton
again and he was generally reported, after a stifled inquiry, to
have been thrown from his horse in the desert, or spilled out of his
sailing canoe.

The government, English or Egyptian, assumed no interest in the
matter of gentlemen found in other gentlemen's harems.

There were other stories, too. There was one of a little Viennese
actress who after a dramatic escape reported a whole winter of
captivity in one of these old palaces, and there was a vag