There are certain shocks that numb the brain. This was one of them. My recollection of the period immediately following those words of Abû Tabâh is hazy and indistinct. My narrow escape from decapitation at the hands of the ferocious Arab assassin and the tangled love-affairs of that aged Othello became insignificant memories. (I seem to recollect that we left him in tears.) My next clear-cut memory is that of walking beside the mysterious _imâm_ along the Darb el-Ahmar and of stopping before the closed door of my newly acquired premises! The street was quite deserted again. Those muffled Nubians who seemed to constitute a bodyguard for my inscrutable companion had disappeared in company with the bereaved Sheikh. "This is your house?" said Abû Tabâh sweetly. My habit of thinking before I speak or act asserted itself automatically. "I recently leased it on another's behalf," I replied. "In that event," continued the _imâm_, "unless the information lodged with me to-night prove to be inaccurate, that other must speedily proclaim himself." He tested the cumbersome lock, and, as I knew would be the case, since Mizmûna had recently entered, found it to be unfastened, opened the door and stepped in. "Have you a pocket lamp?" he asked. I pressed the button of my electric torch and directed its rays fully upon the stack of boxes. It was the great sage, Apollonius of Tyana, who said "loquacity has many pitfalls, but silence none"; therefore I silently watched Abû Tabâh consulting the label on the topmost chest. Presently-- "Ahmed Ben Tawwab," he read aloud; "is that the name of the friend on whose behalf you secured a lease of this house?" "It is," I answered. "If you will rest the light upon this box and assist me to open one of the others, I shall be obliged to you," said Abû Tabâh. Knowing, as I did, that this strange man was in some way connected with the native police and with the guardianship of Egyptian morals, I recognized refusal to be impolitic if not impossible. But, as we set to work to raise the lid of the chest, my mind was more feverishly busy than my fingers. Ere long our task was successful, and the contents of the chest lay exposed. These were: two hundred Osiris statuettes, twelve one-pound tins of mummy heads ... _and fifty packets of hashish_. Silence was no effort to me now; I was dumbfounded. The musical voice of my companion broke in upon my painful reverie.