Mehmet could be trusted to do exactly as he was told, without asking inconvenient questions of me. After all, that was one chief reason I promoted him from digger to my native gang boss. I watched him meet the workers, who greeted the announcement with pleased exprssions and only a few glances toward the mound of dirt thrown up by the explosion. Presently, Mehmet returned to me with a list of those who received payment and were sent away.

That accomplished, we set to work filling the hole. "Did any ask about the new mound of dirt?" I inquired after we had labored several minutes. "No, Effendi, they were just very, very glad because of holiday and money for no work. They did not ask about anything. They will all go now and buy cigarettes and drink tea at Mahmoud Ismail's tea house." "Capital!"

Since my servant was too accustomed to superior men of civilized parts to press for further explanation, I thought to let sleeping dogs lie and said no more about the miraculous red light and the appearance of the steps and what they might lead to. He might suspect that an undisturbed tomb probably lay at the terminus of the stairs, but that was my business as Archeologist, not his as underling. Between us, always a great gulf remained fixed, and both of us respected it in every matter.

After smoothing over the site with the flat of an English shovel, then scattered random rocks and dirt clods upon the surface to make it look as natural as possible, I instructed Mehmet to stand guard but tell no one anything. Then I rushed off to the "Winter Palace"--Lord Carnarvon's residence in Quna.

He is at Highclere, but from the house we have a private Marconi line strung to the railway telegraph and can wire messages to Alexandria. From there a cable is sent out to Civilisation: to London and thence to Highclere. It is most convenient, but up to now it has never proved so vital nor carried so important a message. Thus I notified my patron to come at once to see the wonderful tomb I knew lay beyond the blocking stones. I should expect him to arrive in three weeks at the latest. If connections were particularly good, he might be here in seventeen.

Great Civilisation has long departed from this wretched country, but oh! these Ancient Peoples of the Nile! I often feel them in the air and dust of this immemorial land--palpable presences, noble ghosts of vanished golden realms, that seem to breathe and talk as living men still, if given half the chance to communicate their great secrets of lost wisdom and knowledge.

So when I returned to site and went and stood beside the recovered steps and gate to Paradise, I could hear the Ancients, most distinctly. It did not surprise me, yet this time it was as if I had stirred a hornets' nest. I felt the pressure of many, many voices beating on my temples. They were shouting and bewailing the fact I had found their long-lost king. "Do not disturb the king's ka, his divine immortality resides in it," they charged me strictly, "lest the dooms of the thousand curses fall on your head, O stranger and robber of the royal grave!"

Nevertheless, serving Modern Science and not my own self-interest and self-gain, I wasn't in the least frightened, since I had no time to cultivate superstitious fancies. Mehmet, his legs ballooning in the wind, also seemed to hear the Invisible Guardians, though his interpretation inspired more fright in him than it could with me, a civilized man. He drew back from the sit. His face turned ashen-colored as he clapped his hands over his ears to no avail. "Dijinn!" he cried. "The old buried ones have sent the guardian dijinni to kill us!"

I let the poor fellow go, and saw him run off once he had found his legs--a droll sight to my eyes, since he was usualy so conscious of his dignity as assistant to the foreign archeologist. "Let him go and spread the tale that dijinni were at work here," I thought as I watched Mehmet's fez fly off and he left it where it lay and kept running. "That wild tale of his will keep the rest from venturing up here for a while, and, meanwhile--" Already I had conceived a plan for I felt it inexpedient to wait for D.P. Once decided, there was no time to waste.

The dirt was very loose and friable now, easy fill to remove. Myself, I knew I could clear the site and regain the door within a couple hours. The time flew almost merrily, and in two hours I was once again at the door. Though it had not been entered since it was shut and sealed--the seal of the ancient necropolis guards and Tutankhamun's royal seal were intact--I was utterly dismayed when I saw a hole. It had been refilled, but it was evidence the tomb had been entered illegally in the long-ago. Would this tomb too be stripped of all valuables, with only a few old, cracked pots to show for all I had sacrificed to get to this point?

Instead of disturbing the two seals, I went in by the robbers' hole, removing its contents and gaining entrance. Inside the door, I entered a slightly inclined tunnel the thieves had dug but fortunately in their haste to depart had not refilled with rubble. Though it I reached yet anoher sealed door of blocking stones. Again, the robbers, I found, rather than disturb the official seals with all their curses and spells, had burrowed like moles round the door. I found Tutankhamun's seal undisturbed, on its original blocking. But the second seal of the necropolis guards was not on its original blocking.

I found this confusing, then decided the guards had also entered by the robber's convenient route, leaving the royal seal intact, to make their inspection. Departing, they relaid a fresh seal over the old one--a sign of how meticulous and akin to my own countrymen the Ancients were in carrying out their duties to their Sovereign Monarch.

Presently, I poked an explanatory hole and peered in beyond the door. I had a candle lit and held it cupped in my hand until the escaping hot air had dissipated sufficiently for me to look in I could not believe at first what I was seeing, exposed to living eyes for the first time in nearly three thousand years. Marvelous things all lay tumbled about--and, as I had dreamed countless times but never seen before this time--everywhere the glint of gold! Gold!

Despite the late hour of the day--eventide was fast falling--he knew good fortune when he saw it. Four or more millenia of indefatigable tomb-robbers, sacking armies, countless impoverished rulers and robber barons looking for ways to fill their empty coffers, and finally swarms of European fortune-hunters and archeologists of modern times had dug up Giza in a million places, all hoping to turn up intact tombs of the Old Kingdom royal officials, noblemen, queens, and princesses. From the pyramids to adjacent tombs of lesser burials, it was thought to be utterly exhausted, where anything valuable was concerned. Yet hadn't he proven the university-trained experts wrong in the Valley of the Kings? Now he was being given a second chance to prove them utter fools at Giza! It flashed upon him too that the unlikely Sphinx was a prime site, precisely because it was not thought to contain anything costly. Since the Sphinx had never been considered a tomb, it had been left virtually alone except for restoration projects in Pharaonic times and later some attempts by religious vandals, including a lucky cannon shot by a French artillery man aiming at the nose, to deface the infidel monument.

He had with him an adze and basket. The blocking stones of dark basalt were quite like he was used to seeing. He soon had one, then two prised out, so that he could slip between. He ruined the adze in the process. Heedless of a cascade of sand from above that threatened to bury him, he climbed down. He found himself in a thick, palpable Egyptian darkness. But an archeologist learns early on in his profession to always carry plentiful matches and candles. He also had a modern battery torch.

Beyond was a corridor, like so many he had explored leading to royal tombs. For a moment, Carter was baffled. Was it another king's tomb? No, the experienced Inspector of Monuments decided. Without few exceptions, the rulers of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt chose to be buried in the pyramids or in the Valley of the Kings. Saqqara, the ancient site near the vanished "Queen City" of Memphis, and El-Amarna, were of course, royal burial sites, but they held few sites of promise compared to the others. So what was this?

With his torch he illuminated a door, very massive with a single stone weighing tons, set between two curiously carved serpent columns, all polished black basalt. Impossible as it seemed to gain entrance, Carter was not the man to give up easily at this point. He started to use the adze to prise the door open, then, with a hiss...a sacred cobra's hiss that congealed Carter's blood, it slid open before him.

Carter cried out, not from spectral, animal fear but a trained professional's surprise. Air rushing out was surprisingly cool, well-ventilated--far to fresh for a tomb buried in hot sand for thousands of years. Loosed by a spastic jerk of his trembling hand, his torch bounded away and rolled forward into the chamber beyond. It rolled quite a distance into the darkness and lay shining at the bases of what appeared to be massive, polished, basalt blocks. Should he proceed?

In the circumstances, it was a good question--not one a coward would ask, for a coward most likely would have run away before this. Carter knew very well the Ancients were capable of devising strategems, elaborate devices to protect their tombs. Some weren't less than devilish. Fortunately, Tutankhamun's was a straightforward affair--no pits, false doors, false walls, access tunnels filled with uncountable tons of giant stones impossible to move, and all the rest. Then Egypt provided, without asking, the usual complement of cobras, scorpions, spiders, heat, and disease to make things all the more sticky for the archeologist.

His excitement was now telling on his moral resolve and stamina. He felt edgy and exhausted, thugh he still didn't know what he was dealing with. If not a tomb, if not anything he could recognize as Ancient Egyptian, what could it be? The serpent columns of the doorway weren't Old Kingdom Egyptian, he knew, though they had worshipped the cobra in ancient times. What was the proof they were foreign to Egypt?

Carter hadn't been digging up, dating, and classifying Egyptian antiquities for so many years without having developed a keen, additional sense--the almost unerring ability to distinguish the fake from the real, the truly ancient from the merely old and worn. How many sellers of "genuine Old or Middle Kingdom artifacts" had approached him with paltry items they had stolen from Ptolemaic and even ridiculously modern Mameluke tombs? No, authentic relics of the earliest ages of mankind all had a certain look and feel that was lost to later generations. It was unmistakable and couldn't possibly be duplicated, skillful as the forgers were in Cairo's teeming faux-antique manufacturing quarter.

For that reason he knew for a certainty that the chamber before him and its unknown contents were immeasurably old--well beyond the Old Kingdom in age. Yet how could that be? Was he going mad from too much desert sun? Everyone knew Civilisation did not extend further back than Pharaoh Menes, who ruled about ANNO 3250 B.C. Professors Newberry and Davis had been adamant about that fact. Before ANNO 3250 the world was sunk in barbarism and chaos. After ANNO 3250 flourished Civilisation and all her artistic and comfort-producing amenities. But just how Civilisation arrived on the scene in Egypt full-blown in glory, as reputed to have happened in the threshold year, was ground Carter could never get Davis and Newberry to tread.

Years of close association with such thorough-going, well-informed skeptics had taken gradual but telling effect. The secret, golden Dream had quietly expired--or nearly so. As Carter dragged cold, wary feet in the doorway of the Unknown, a strange idea--a sport, a maverick notion--slipped into his conscious mind. He immediately dismissed it though it was something of which he had been most fond. He had never forgiven professor Newberry after he had naively tried the idea on Professor Newberry back in his Beni Hasan days, and the Professor had soundly berated him.

"Why, my boy, that is pure drivel, sheer, nonsensical fantasy!" So despite the Professor's attempt to make amends with a few books on the subject, he had not discussed Atlantis again with the man, though the Professor's own library contained the works of a man named Plato, an ancient and still widely-acclaimed Greek philosopher who swore to the once existence of the Mother of all Civilisation, the lost island-continent of Atlantis.

Naturally, Davis and Newberry and their ilk explained that Plato really meant in his reference to Atlantis. It wasn't some lost island-continent far to the west of the Greeks--oh, no!--but the island of Crete, which suffered a collapse of its cities due to an earthquake and possibly even a catastrophic eruption of the volcano on the nearby island of Thera. Atlantis was unquestionably Crete, and a natural cataclysm had put an end to the great Minoan kingdom centered on Knossos, Phaistos, and other palace-cities. So much for the island-continent myth! Plato, the poor old chap, has been grossly misinterpreted, according to these unimpeachable authorities, Davis and Newberry.

"Yet what would they think standing here with me?" the shaking Carter thought. "This isn't the Egyptian antiquity. It's older--far older. And what could be older than Egypt? What?"

Creeping in slowly and carefully, Carter regained his precious torch, shone it around, and quickly discovered that it was as he had always suspected--Egypt's Mysteries, despite all the attempts to push everything behind the Great Wall of ANNO 3250 B.C., had scarcely been plumbed. Scarcely plumbed, indeed!

With pupils pooling enormous wonder in his widened eyes, Carter viewed a room as lofty in height and ample in girth as any respectable church sanctuary, but completely hidden to the world for how many eons? He glanced back toward the doorway. Shouldn't he block it somehow, to prevent his being trapped? What if the stone was a trick and rolled back? It wouldn't take a key even if he could find one. And he had left his broken adze outside the site. "I'm a bloody fool to come in here, without anyone knowing. Something could yet happen to me and not one living soul would know."

Despite real misgivings, he felt drawn toward the objects on the slabs that had begun to glow and show themselves. They seemed to invite closer inspection. "As long as I've come this far, it wouldn't hurt to take a quick look at a few of them," he decided. After that he would go.

His mind spinning with possibilities, he approached the first display. Suddenly, verses flashed through his mind--Bible scriptures he had never memorized, though somewhere in his childhood memory he knew his little Children's Abbreviated Bible by heart.

I destroyed the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and beast. I sent signs and wonders into the midst of you, O Egypt, upon Pharaoh and all his servants...

What? Carter wondered, trying to plumb old recollections of Bible stories read to him by a pious nanny. Wasn't that a reference to Yahweh and Moses and the bondage of his people of Israel? Pharaoh Ramesses was supposed to be the hard-hearted ruler at that time, who slew the infant males of the Israelites and put their parents to hard slavery building his great store cities, Pithom and Ramesses in the Delta--oppressing them to the point they cried out to Jehovah God and He had finally sent a Deliverer, Moses.

What did all that have to do with what he was seeing? There seemed no connection, unless this chamber too was a product somehow of divine judgment and catastrophe, like the Ten Plagues that befell Ancient Egypt in Moses' and Ramesses' time. He picked up the second prism. Lit from within by an undying blue fire, it illuminated the inscription it bore, E=MC, set within a square.

Wasn't that Albert Einstein's famous theorum? It was close enough to be unmistakable, anyway. Most curious, the inscription was fluid, running through every alphabet and numerical system known to man--few of which Carter with his training could recognize, but enough to tell him they were all variants of the same thing. He examined another. Again, he was rewarded when he waited for the right alphanumeric equivalent to cvome up. However, it proved more arcane: N=R*Fp Np Fl Fi FcL. Just the same, he knew he had more than enough to think about with the Einstein theorum. He set the prism back on the basalt slab. His hand clapped his vest and felt the ;pocket. His eyes working wildly in their sockets, Carter considered the matter, then curiosity overcame his shock. He looked and disovered that the other prisms all bore theorums.

What immense troves of knowledge and sciences have I stumbled upon? he marveled, his hours of hard work having paid off wonderfully. But, perhaps, except for the Einstein theorum, they were all gibberish, mere superstition, and antiquated notions like so much of Babylonian medical lore. Yet how could he tell? He wasn't really a scientist in training. He had learned Archeology on the job while plying his trade of draughtsmanship. At school, a little of Euclid's geometry, British history up to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, and double-entry bookkeeping, and he was though educated enough to make a tolerably good shipping clerk, or, failing that, a bank dick.

Passing along the ranks of mathematical prisms, he found something of more than remarkable nature--a mirror-like crystal, concave, raised on a gold pedestal. As he looked closer it began showing scenes--people in white linen passing to and fro on a bridge strung between two immense blue and green spheres, then dazzling whitge, pyramid-shaped structures with blue fire and streams of saucer-like objects exhaling out the apexes, tall, serpent=twined pillars crowned with heroic figures, and many palaces and great, towering cities set amidst orchards and intricately gardened landscapes.

Starting with these scenes, the crystal portrayed the breakup of the cities, palaces, observatories, oratorios, temples, and all the monuments in a vast spreading circle of destruction, apparently by underground explosions and the burning of newborn volcanoes all round the coasts of the great unknown country.

Though shown in miniature, Carter felt involved as he watched multitudes of people rush into ships, which waves overwhelmed and sank. They they rushed into the high mountains, flying in cunningly-fashioned, glistening white spheroids that jetted in convoys from the apexes of the pyramid-shaped structures. They too found doom awaiting them as the mountains burst into flame and consumed nearly all of them. As for the remaining airships, they abandoned not only the site of the lost continent but the planet too as they headed outwards to seek refuge on the Red Planet and even farther places.

By this time Carter sweated all down his back and under his arms. He watched until the entire country broke in pieces like a sheet of ice, which all sank, people still clinging to the fragments and what boats were still seaworthy, many of which sank because they soon became overloaded. All those who did not perish or flee the planet spread to other lands. Darkness fell,b ut whereever the Atlanteans fled great empires arose, and there followed a rapid cavalcade of powers that Carter easily recognized--Pharaonic Egypt, Babylon, Minoan Crete, Mitanni, Hatti, Persia, Greece, Rome, Bysantium, China, the Moche, Toltecs, Incas, and Aztecs, Imperial Spain, the Ottoman Caliphate, and many, many more, until finally the British Empire appared, the largest of all, on which the Sun never set.

The prism went dark, and Carter, shaking his head, contionued. He came to a display different from the rest. A crook and flail? Uraeus? Lotus and papyrus crowns? A golden mace, used for ceremonially smiting Egypt's foes ont he pate? These, Carter knew, were traditionally royal insigne of Ancient Egyptian monarchs. "So this is an Egyptian archive and has nothing to do with fabled Atlantis!" he concluded.

Feeling relieved though unaccountably disappointed, Carter idly picked up the crook, which unlike the specimens in the Cairo Museum, was so charged with an electric current his hand shook. Instantly, there was a rush of air downward and the next thing Carter saw was something large coming at him out of the ceiling. Flinging the crook, he leaped back. Carter had good reason to do so.

In the wildly dashing beam of the torch bits and pieces of both men appeared, only to disappear. Soon the scuffle was over asd Carter got the adze away from the elderly man. Gasping hoarsely, Davis sank to his kneees, Lady Herbert throwing herself between the old man and the triumphant Carter.

"Now just what is the reason for this second outrage against my person?" Carter demanded in a savagely cold voice. "I will see both of you arraigned in court for this unprovoked, completely unjustified attack!"

Lady Herbert began to weep. Professor Davis's gasps became more constricted and tormented. Carter, noticing, shone his light and ilumined the professor's pinched, white features. His hand clutched at his chest.

Despite her boldness, unusual for normally reserved Britons, Carter felt a surge of pride and warmed to the subject in spite of himself. He could not help but say a few words. "Well, yes, I have labored rather hard over the years since coming to this country, in preparation for the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. It didn't fall like a ripe fruit in my lap, I can assure you ladies. Now that the discovery has been made and I am recording the details for Posterity, I feel a certain satisfaction, now that you mention it, and I naturally--"

Miss Peckham, her gray eyes darkening beneath her hat's brim, shook her neat head slowly. "I couldn't feel that way about it at all, Mr. Carter," she broke in. "It's such a dirty, low-bred trade you took up. No matter how the sinful, fallen world presumes to paint it, what you are doing is vile, most vile!"

Carter's ears could not believe what he had just heard. "What do you infer by that?" he protested.

"I am not inferring anything! I mean to say that you are robbing graves! Is that anything to be proud of, Mr. Carter? In our country grave robbers are imprisoned, even hanged! No one at home would dream of calling them "archeologists" and conferring high honors on them for exhuming the dead for their own gain. Is it anything to be proud of, Mr. Carter?"

Carter half rose from his hot-cold seat. "Really, Miss-Miss Burnham!" he exploded.

"Peckham, Mr. Carter! Peck-ham. P, E, C, K, H--"

Peckham? Burnham? What did it matter to Carter? He felt so insulted, he was at a loss of words for a moment. Sputtering, he finally found his footing and started to forward charge once again after nearly shivering his lance. "Everybody knows Archeology is a well-known, respectable branch of the practical sciences!" he informed her as if she were a child. "We are not to be compared with--"

"But those are tombs of real dead people you insist on digging up. Did they ask you, Mr. Carter, to expose him brutally to the light of day, after being buried and left in peace for hundreds and even thousands of years? Why, in a moral sense, you wold be much better off a shipping clerk at the Docks, toiling at honest if poorly paid account=work, than doing something you need to be heartily ashamed of."

Carter again lost or shivered his lance, he was so taken aback by Miss Peckham's charges. Not only had her prim presence and the disapproving glances of her companion upset him, but the grave-robbing charges were hitting home, rather too pointedly. He recovered as best he could. "I hardly see cause to defend my illustrious vocation!" he burst out, perhaps too loudly for a gentleman who had nothing to defend. "And I fail to see how you as mission representatives are in any way qualified to pass judgement on my work and profession!" he added vehemently.

Mrs. Gresham colored and started to say something, but Miss Peckham quickly laid her gloverd hand over her companion's. Instead, Miss Peckham drew out a printed tractate of some sort from her belongings. She was about to serve Mr. Carter ith it, but he gave her a glare that made her draw back her hand.

"No thank you, I am staunch Anglican since birth, Miss, so you are wasting your time," he said icily. "My Christian baptism is registered at St. Cynewulfs on Battenhead, 14 Monks Close, Gloucester Square, Sandringham (had recently filed the information with the Royal Archeology Society in response to an inquiry as to his family background and also when he was able to go and receive its highest awards, so it came freshly to mind).

Silence fell between the bord and bred Anglican and the two evangelicals like an iron portcullis. The train rolled past mud huts of villages strung along the track outside Cairo's dusty sprawl. Dirty, naked children ran to see the people in the carriages. Men stood up to rest backs, their dusky bodies punctuating the green fields.

Carter, meantime, was seeing little of the scene he knew so well. He still wished to put the two females in their place, as they richly deserved. After all, it was a totally unprovoked attack on his profession and attainments. But what good would that do? he had to wonder. Suddenly, a bad thought made him again squirm all the more behind his paper. Two souls were immured alive in a certain underground chamber miles behind him. Hoqw long would they last without food and water? Should he go back, take the cvhance they would denounce him to the world? They ought to feel grateful if he set them free, but could he count on that? What would they charge him with anyway? Being a thief of Tutankhamun artifacts? A breaker of trust with his employer? Or--as Miss Peckham would phrase it--a skulking grave robber? Carter decided he would stay put. He just couldn't go back. He'd lose everything he had worked so hard to achieve in his career.

A smiling porter bustled into the compartment with a large, messy looseleaf notebook and a pencil fixed to a chain that attached to his uniform. "Gentlemens and ladies. What please, you order now. Food have we, and also many much excellent liquors--"

The ladies vigorously shook their heads, having brought a basket from London that answered to all their needs, and as for liquors, their expressions made it plain what they thought of that offer.

The porter went out after taking Carter's order of a whiskey, and Carter returned to his train of thought. It was a pity, he reflected, that Lady Evelyn and Theodore Davis had to experience the misery of being shut up forever in the underground archives. But they had brought it on themselves. Nothing on earth could release them now.

There was quite a bit of rustling noise as the two women engaged the basket's contents, but Mr. Carter paid them no mind.

"Care for a sandwich of beef and mustard, Mr. Carter?" Miss Pekham offered. I have freshly made one up for you from the tins we carry along."

Still feeling insulted, Carter replied rather rudely, "Certainly not! Keep your sandwiches. I'm not hungry in the least!"

"Harold, is that really you?"

Carter was too stunned to respond.

Harold, is that really you?"

Carter nearly sprang from his seat at the second inquiry.

The two women looked over at him with widened eyes, their sandwiches nearly dropping from their hands.

Harold, I heard your voice in here a minute ago," the voice continued. "Is that you, Harold?"

Carter recognized his mother's voice, coming from his midriff of all places, and more particularly from his vest pocket. Tmhough muffled, he had no touble making out her words. He clamped a hand over the spot and thought the problem taken care of. The paper he used to provide a male barricade against the intrusive evangelical femals he now raised to shield himself from the ladies' rigid stares.

"Harold," the voice continued more plaintively, "you must know I never liked jokes being played on me. I heard you shouting something about sandwiches. Are you really here in the house? Have you come back to London again without telling me? You did that before, naughty boy! My heart's broken, because you don't tell me, or come and see me. I am so lonely for you. Do tell me if you are hiding somewhere in here, Harold! Harold!"

This was too much for Carter. Once activated, he knew no way to direct its powers or change the channels. Carter seizeds the blue-glowing crystal "pill" or lozenge he had found in a gilded box inside one of Tutankhamun's Canopic jars. The compartment window was small, but he wrenched it open. "We can use some fresh air, don't you think?" he shouted at the now standing women.

Wind blew in the window and scattered the pages of his paper all around the compartment. At that moment they were passing over a stretch of elevated track, unevenly supported, so that the train rocked hard from side to side alarmingly. Below ran the dark, deep, silty Nile, ready to receive the pitching train if it slipped the rail.

Behind him he heard Miss Peckham say something, then their rapid footfalls and the sound of the compartment door slamming. It would be a lost chance in another moment should they return, but Carter knew when to seize the day. He gave the little talking pill a tremendous fling out the window. It sailed away, straight into the great River.

Then, slowly, with indescribably relief, Carter sank back on his seat as the train rattled down the track toward Asyut and Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. With the women gone for whatever reason, at last he could think of the horrific scenes of the recent past and put them in proper perspective. The vindictive plots and collusion of Theodore Davis and Lady Evelyn, of course, were the main events in question. How well they had kept their suspicions until they could spring them on him when least expected! It was a trying but good lesson for him, he decided. Obviously, the treachery and duplicity of colleagues knew no bounds once you got the edge on them. And as for the vituperative vixen, the sectarian, bigoted Miss Peckham, he knew what to do if she ever served a missionary tractate on him again--he'd have her hauled before the local magistrate and see her jailed for disseminating seditious Christian literature in Islamic society! After all, a man had a right to his own beliefs, and that included the right not to have his profession slighted. If she wished to believe as she did, that was her own folly, but she had no right to proselytize him.

The rest of the journey, Carter was free to smoke and imbibe spirits to his heart's content. He induged himself with several excellent cigars and a bottle of port besides the whiskey. He was, consequently, in fine fettle, able to take on the likes of Miss Peckham and her companion should they show themselves again in the compartment.

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