“Such an inscription was in itself a matter so startling as to arrest attention from anyone anywhere at any time; but you can have no conception of the effect which it had upon us.  Though our eyes were not the first which had seen it, they were the first which could see it with understanding since first the slab of rock was fixed in the cliff opening nearly five thousand years before.  To us was given to read this message from the dead.  This message of one who had warred against the Gods of Old, and claimed to have controlled them at a time when the hierarchy professed to be the only means of exciting their fears or gaining their good will.

“The walls of the upper chamber of the Pit and the sarcophagus Chamber were profusely inscribed; all the inscriptions, except that on the Stele, being coloured with bluish-green pigment.  The effect when seen sideways as the eye caught the green facets, was that of an old, discoloured Indian turquoise.

“We descended the Pit by the aid of the tackle we had brought with us.  Trelawny went first.  It was a deep pit, more than seventy feet; but it had never been filled up.  The passage at the bottom sloped up to the sarcophagus Chamber, and was longer than is usually found.  It had not been walled up.

“Within, we found a great sarcophagus of yellow stone.  But that I need not describe; you have seen it in Mr. Trelawny’s chamber.  The cover of it lay on the ground; it had not been cemented, and was just as Van Huyn had described it.  Needless to say, we were excited as we looked within.  There must, however, be one sense of disappointment.  I could not help feeling how different must have been the sight which met the Dutch traveller’s eyes when he looked within and found that white hand lying lifelike above the shrouding mummy cloths.  It is true that a part of the arm was there, white and ivory like.

“But there was a thrill to us which came not to Van Huyn!

“The end of the wrist was covered with dried blood!  It was as though the body had bled after death!  The jagged ends of the broken wrist were rough with the clotted blood; through this the white bone, sticking out, looked like the matrix of opal.  The blood had streamed down and stained the brown wrappings as with rust.  Here, then, was full confirmation of the narrative.  With such evidence of the narrator’s truth before us, we could not doubt the other matters which he had told, such as the blood on the mummy hand, or marks of the seven fingers on the throat of the strangled Sheik.

“I shall not trouble you with details of all we saw, or how we learned all we knew.  Part of it was from knowledge common to scholars; part we read on the Stele in the tomb, and in the sculptures and hieroglyphic paintings on the walls.