The seller also showed me a heavy gold ring, fashioned like the ring of Akhnaton, but lacking an inscription on the face of it. For this he asked £8, but I remembered a tale told me by an excavator to the effect that in December of 1900 a man of Qus took a gold ring to his camp at Derr-el-Ballas. On the face was the name of an eighteenth-dynasty queen. Careful examination showed that the ring was a forgery. Four months later the excavator saw the same ring in the shop of a dealer in Luxor, who had paid £5 for it, and this made me cautious. The following day the man returned with a friend, and again we proceeded to bargain for the two large necklaces. Hamid Ibrahim, to whom I am much indebted for his assistance, and in whose shop the transaction was taking place, was suspicious and uneasy. Time after time he examined the necklaces with a powerful magnifying glass. The men watched him calmly, never showing by the quiver of an eyelid that they minded his examining them as much as he liked. We had narrowed the transaction down until now there was little separating us in price, when again Ibrahim took up the bottle necklace, and began looking at it with his glass. Suddenly he made a quick movement which I understood at once, and then he laid the necklace down. Silently he handed me the glass, and pointed out a bottle. I took up the necklace, and there on the bottle he had indicated, was a very fine line where the gold had been folded over. I handed the necklace back to Ibrahim, who took a needle and ran it along underneath the edge of the gold, which he thus turned back. Then we saw that it was no thicker than a sheet of thin paper, while the bottles had been cast in plaster of Paris, and the gold foil very cleverly folded over them. I did not buy the necklaces, but I obtained the loan of one of them (No. 2, Plate II). As I have said, the men made no objection to our examination of the bottles. They looked us frankly in the face; they would have cheated us if they could, but they had failed. They did not consider that they were in any way to blame for their attempt. They told us frankly, after we had found them out, that the gold forgeries were all made by one man, who was such a wonderful artist that he had been offered a high rate of pay to go to Europe to work there, but that he had refused. It is certain that more will be heard of this man’s work, for, said my informant, “There is no one in the world so clever as he is in making gold imitations.” I have purposely refrained from describing the gold forgeries made and sold by Europeans in Egypt, preferring to keep entirely to the Egyptians and their work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III LAPIS LAZULI FIGURES AND IRIDESCENT GLASS