In the midst was a plain stone coffer with its lid removed and set on end against it.  In the coffer lay a tall man’s skeleton, with the chin still bound in linen browned with age.  There were other fragments of linen here and there, but the skeleton’s bones had been disturbed and had fallen more or less apart.

Over in one corner were two large bundles done up in modern gunny-bags, and Grim went over to examine them.

“Hello!” he said.  “Here’s Scharnhoff and his lady friend!”

He ripped the lashings of both bundles and disclosed the Austrian and the woman, gagged and tied, both almost unconscious from inability to breathe, but not much hurt otherwise.

The Sikhs herded the prisoners, old alligator-eyes among them, into another corner.  Grim tore my shirt into strips to bandage my arm with.  Goodenough talked with Narayan Singh, while we waited for Scharnhoff to recover full consciousness.

“Those murderers!” he gasped at last.  “Schweinehunde!”

“Better spill the beans, old boy,” Grim said, smiling down at him.  “You’ll hang at the same time they do, if you can’t tell a straight story.”

“Ach!  I do not care!  There were no manuscripts—­nothing!  I don’t know whose skeleton that is—­some old king David, perhaps; for that is not David’s real tomb that the guides show.  Hang those murderers and I am satisfied!”

“Your story may help hang them.  Come on, out with it!”

“Have you caught Noureddin Ali?”

“Never mind!”

“But I do mind!  And you should mind!”

Scharnhoff sat up excitedly.  He was dressed in the Arab garments I had seen in his cupboard that day when Grim and I called on him, with a scholar’s turban that made him look very distinguished in spite of his disarray.

“That Noureddin Ali is a devil!  Together we would look for the Tomb of the Kings.  Together we would smuggle out the manuscripts —­translate them together—­publish the result together.  He lent me money.  He promised to bring explosives.  Oh, he was full of enthusiasm!  It was not until last night, when I had broken that last obstruction down and discovered nothing but this coffin, that I learned his real plan.  The devil intended all along to fill this tomb with high explosive and to destroy the mosque above, with everybody in it!  Curse him!”

“Never mind cursing him,” said Grim, “tell us the story.”

“He sent oranges here, all marked with the labels of a Zionist colony.  When I told him that the explosive would arrive too late, he said I should use it to smash these walls and find another tomb.  He himself disappeared, and when I questioned his men they told me the explosive would be brought in hidden under fruit in baskets.  I waited then in the hope of killing him myself—­”

“Hah-hah!” laughed Grim.

“That is true!  But they bound me, and later on bound the woman, and laid us here to be blown up together with the mosque.”