“My grandfather and my father were stay-at-homes, and I’m the first of the family to come back here. I brought with me the old papers and the diary that was with them more as idle curiosities--happened to notice them when I was on leave before coming back from France to Mespot in 1916. “Having nothing much to do, I read them through on board ship, and after that I read them fairly often, until I know bits, I think, by heart. “A lot of them are mere scrappy notes about his journeys, rough drawings of places and types, and it’s only after he struck east from Urumchi that the real interest comes into the diary. Pass me over that box, will you?” Forsyth reached the box across to Wrexham, who undid it, and took out a small shabby leather-covered notebook. “I’m going to read you something,” he said, “that will tell you why I went north. As I said before, once is nothing, twice is a coincidence, three times is a moral cert. This is the ‘once’; part of the ‘twice’ you’ve both seen in the shape of that coin; the ‘three times’ I’ve got here, and will show you presently.” He put the box on the table by him, opened the notebook--stained yellowish paper and crabbed writing in faded brown ink--and began to read aloud. He read for a quarter of an hour, and at the end of that time both Forsyth and I had let our pipes go out, and were hanging on his words. CHAPTER II OLD JOHN WREXHAM’S DIARY _20th Jany. 1822_ I wonder if any one who read these lines would ever believe that I, John Wrexham, am writing naught but the sober truth. When I think over the events of the last month, it seems to me as if it were all a wild dream fantasy. And yet.... Islam Akhun’s story of a king and his army engulfed in the sands and of the buried cities set me wandering, and lo! the city seems to be there after all these hundreds of years, and I, John Wrexham, am the first to have seen its gates. Or, stay, after what I saw in the valley, perhaps it were more true to say the first living man, for others less fortunate than myself would seem to have reached the entrance to the Gates, to find them only the Gates of Death. But I must stop me musing, and set down the bare happenings ere my memory plays me tricks and fever come on anew. It was the 2d December that I conceived my ill-fated trip, at least it was ill-fated for Islam and Arslan Bai. Was it ill-fated for me? Time alone can tell. Northeast they pointed over the wastes of sand, and said that many days out into the desert lay a buried city, rich with treasures, in whose streets you might walk as though men left them yestereve, and gather up riches if you could but escape from the wiles of the spirits that guarded them, spirits that called you by name and bade you stay.