"desert trip" which, from her, I hadn't taken seriously. Sir Marcus was
actually planning it. Kruger had written that some of the passengers
were clamouring for a few days' camping, and the idea was to send them
off in my care, after three days in Cairo, while the others remained in
charge of Antoun, who wasn't yet ready to leave. Fenton said:

Somebody's trying to defeat my scheme for getting the sheikh's tomb
moved. I don't know who it is yet. Meanwhile my time and my head are so
full, that in the few hours of the night I put aside for sleep, I dream
queerer dreams than the visits of ghostly sheikhs. Apropos of dreams,
do you know by chance a man who answers this description: elderly,
stoutish, red face, gray hair, black moustache, pale eyes with sharp
look in them. Sounds commonplace, doesn't it?

But I have a recurring dream of such a man, whose face I never saw
elsewhere. For the last three nights, as soon as I shut my eyes, he
comes. He seems to interrupt some scene between you and Lark, and
myself, and I see him looking over Lark's shoulder. Then he turns
quickly away, and tiptoes off to a very low, closed door in a deep
recess. There he disappears into shadow--and I wake up with a jump, or
slide off into another dream--but generally this rouses me, for there's
an impression of something stealthy in the shadow round the door. That
so ordinary a type of person should be in a dream. You'll laugh at my
asking if you've ever known such a man, and say that I'm back at my old
tricks again, as a dreamer of dreams. Never mind, I scored, dreaming of
our Mountain of the Golden Pyramid the night before I got your letter
with Ferlini's papers. I can't help feeling that there may be something
in dreams--in mine, anyhow, though I never have any except in Egypt.
This one about the red-faced man and the closed door in the deep recess
is getting a bit on my nerves.