3. The letters with which Layard was provided secured him a gracious reception from this amiable personage, who allowed him to begin operations on the great mound of Nimrud with the party of Arab workmen whom he had hired for the purpose. Some time after, it came to the Pasha's knowledge that a few fragments of gold leaf had been found in the rubbish and he even procured a small particle as sample. He immediately concluded, as the Arab chief had done, that the English traveller was digging for hidden treasure--an object far more intelligible to them than that of disinterring and carrying home a quantity of old broken stones. This incident, by arousing the great man's rapacity, might have caused him to put a stop to all further search, had not Layard, who well knew that treasure of this kind was not likely to be plentiful in the ruins, immediately proposed that his Excellency should keep an agent at the mound, to take charge of all the precious metals which might be discovered there in the course of the excavations. The Pasha raised no objections at the moment, but a few days later announced to Layard that, to his great regret, he felt it his duty to forbid the continuation of the work, since he had just learned that the diggers were disturbing a Mussulman burying-ground. As the tombs of true believers are held very sacred and inviolable by Mohammedans, this would have been a fatal obstacle, had not one of the Pasha's own officers confidentially disclosed to Layard that the tombs were _sham ones_, that he and his men had been secretly employed to fabricate them, and for two nights had been bringing stones for the purpose from the surrounding villages. "We have destroyed more tombs of true believers," said the Aga,--(officer)--"in making sham ones, than ever you could have defiled. We have killed our horses and ourselves in carrying those accursed stones." Fortunately the Pasha, whose misdeeds could not be tolerated even by a Turkish government, was recalled about Christmas, and succeeded by an official of an entirely different stamp, a man whose reputation for justice and mildness had preceded him, and whose arrival was accordingly greeted with public rejoicings. Operations at the mound now proceeded for some time rapidly and successfully. But this very success at one time raised new difficulties for our explorers.