Oriental, and for a European to marry an Oriental is, as I have tried to
explain to others, a very dangerous thing, especially if he continues
to live in the East, where it cuts him off from social recognition and
intimacy with his own race. Still, although this step of mine forced me
to leave Cairo and go to Assouan, then a little-known place, to practise
chiefly among the natives, God knows we were happy enough together till
the plague took her, and with it my joy in life.

I pass over all that business, since there are some things too dreadful
and too sacred to write about. She left me one child, a son, who, to
fill up my cup of sorrow, when he was twelve years of age, was kidnapped
by the Mardi's people.

This brings me to the real story. There is nobody else to write
it; Oliver will not; Higgs cannot (outside of anything learned and
antiquarian, he is hopeless); so I must. At any rate, if it is not
interesting, the fault will be mine, not that of the story, which in all
conscience is strange enough.



We are now in the middle of June, and it was a year ago last December
that, on the evening of the day of my arrival in London after an absence
of half a lifetime, I found myself knocking at the door of Professor
Higgs's rooms in Guildford Street, W.C. It was opened by his
housekeeper, Mrs. Reid, a thin and saturnine old woman, who reminded and
still reminds me of a reanimated mummy. She told me that the Professor
was in, but had a gentleman to dinner, and suggested sourly that I
should call again the next morning. With difficulty I persuaded her at
last to inform her master that an old Egyptian friend had brought him