how quickly that girl had given in. She was Turkish, through and
through. Submissive. Docile.... And a darned good thing she was,
too! Suppose she had taken him at his fool word. Suppose she had
really wanted to get away!

Lucky, that's what he'd been. And it would be a lesson to him. Never
again. No more masked young things with their stolen keys and their
harem entrances. No more whispered tales of woe in a shady garden.
No more--

Violently he wrenched himself from his No Mores. Recollection had a
way of stirring an unpleasant tumult.

But it was all over. He had forgotten it--he _would_ forget it. He
would forget _her_. Work, that was the thing. Normal, sensible,
every day work.

But there was no joy in this tonic work. Somewhere, between a night
and a morning, he had lost that glow of accomplishment which had
buoyed him, which had made him fairly ecstatic over the discovery of
this very tomb.

For this tomb was his own find. It had been found long before by the
plundering Persians, and it had been found by Arabs who had
plundered the Persian remains--but between and after those findings
the oblivious sands had swept over it, blotting it from the world,
choking the entrance hall and the shafts, seeping through
half-sealed entrances and packing its dry drift over the rifled
sarcophagus of the king and over the withered mummy of the young
girl in the ante-room. The tombs had been cleared now, down almost