CHAPTER XXII. A SUMMONS FROM THE PRINCESS “I have reached a decision,” declared Professor Blackwell, “upon a point that has been worrying me.” Dinner dispatched, they sat around the table in council, pipes and cigars going. Safîyeh had reported that her charge had found the soup, the fried chicken, the Château y’Quem--of which they had only three bottles--and the peaches entirely to her satisfaction. “What point?” asked John Cumberland. “Distinctly,” the Professor resumed, “distinctly she is the property of the Department of Antiquities.” “What’s that!” cried Barry. “What on earth are you talking about?” “He’s talking sense,” Danbazzar’s deep voice broke in. “There are no two ways about it. She is.” “Are you all mad?” said Barry. “You behave as though the Department of Antiquities were an orphanage!” “Or a harem agency,” prompted the Professor. “Yet the fact remains that they and no one else have a legal claim upon her person. We are no more entitled to remove her from the country, alive, than we should have been entitled to do so had we found her in what I may term a normal state. I mean dead. She is as much the property of the Department as the sarcophagus she lay in.” “I must agree with you,” John Cumberland admitted. “Our difficulties are enormous. The more I think about them the bigger they get. For instance--since none of us dare testify that he was present at the discovery, how can we ever give an account of it to the world?” “We can’t!” said the Professor. “Distinctly and definitely, I for one should not consent under any circumstances to lend my name to a statement on the subject. In the first place, assuming I were safely out of the country before the issue of such a report, criminal proceedings would undoubtedly be taken by the Egyptian government! This applies to all of us!” Some moments of uncomfortable silence followed, then: “The fact is,” Danbazzar stated, “the greatest find in Egyptology since the game began has got to blush unseen. I hadn’t thought of it. I’ll say so honestly. None of us had thought of it. But there it is all the same. The testimony of this bunch would carry a lot of weight in America. I don’t say we’d go unchallenged. But we’d be taken seriously. We’re not going to get the chance. We started working in the dark. We’ve got to go on that way.” “I wish, now,” said John Cumberland regretfully, “that I had curbed my impatience and formally applied for a permit to excavate.” “You’d never have got it!” Danbazzar assured him. “You might as well apply for a pass-out check to heaven! And once you’d applied and been turned down, to come here as we’ve done would have been to ask for trouble. No, sir, I’d worked on it from that angle before I put up my proposition.” “Then where do we stand?” cried Barry in bewilderment. “What have we gained if our discoveries can’t be published?” Danbazzar regarded him fixedly across the table.