“Do what you like and think necessary, but please alter all names, et cetera, as propose returning via America, and fear interviewers.  Japan jolly place.”  Then follows some private matter which I need not insert.  Oliver is always extravagant where cablegrams are concerned.

I suppose that before entering on this narration, for the reader’s benefit I had better give some short description of myself.

My name is Richard Adams, and I am the son of a Cumberland yeoman who married a Welshwoman.  Therefore I have Celtic blood in my veins, which perhaps accounts for my love of roving and other things.  I am now an old man, near the end of my course, I suppose; at any rate, I was sixty-five last birthday.  This is my appearance as I see it in the glass before me:  tall, spare (I don’t weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds—­the desert has any superfluous flesh that I ever owned, my lot having been, like Falstaff, to lard the lean earth, but in a hot climate); my eyes are brown, my face is long, and I wear a pointed white beard, which matches the white hair above.

Truth compels me to add that my general appearance, as seen in that glass which will not lie, reminds me of that of a rather aged goat; indeed, to be frank, by the natives among whom I have sojourned, and especially among the Khalifa’s people when I was a prisoner there, I have often been called the White Goat.

Of my very commonplace outward self let this suffice.  As for my record, I am a doctor of the old school.  Think of it!  When I was a student at Bart.’s the antiseptic treatment was quite a new thing, and administered when at all, by help of a kind of engine on wheels, out of which disinfectants were dispensed with a pump, much as the advanced gardener sprays a greenhouse to-day.

I succeeded above the average as a student, and in my early time as a doctor.  But in every man’s life there happen things which, whatever excuses may be found for them, would not look particularly well in cold print (nobody’s record, as understood by convention and the Pharisee, could really stand cold print); also something in my blood made me its servant.  In short, having no strict ties at home, and desiring to see the world, I wandered far and wide for many years, earning my living as I went, never, in my experience, a difficult thing to do, for I was always a master of my trade.

My fortieth birthday found me practising at Cairo, which I mention only because it was here that first I met Ptolemy Higgs, who, even then in his youth, was noted for his extraordinary antiquarian and linguistic abilities.  I remember that in those days the joke about him was that he could swear in fifteen languages like a native and in thirty-two with common proficiency, and could read hieroglyphics as easily as a bishop reads the Times.

Well, I doctored him through a bad attack of typhoid, but as he had spent every farthing he owned on scarabs or something of the sort, made him no charge.  This little kindness I am bound to say he never forgot, for whatever his failings may be (personally I would not trust him alone with any object that was more than a thousand years old), Ptolemy is a good and faithful friend.