“Good!” said Lesty, and settled himself to listen, an example that was followed by Halesowen and myself. Zeda paused for a moment, evidently to collect his ideas, a pause upon which my stolid friend placed a dubious interpretation, for he cleared his throat, significantly. III “The date is no matter,” said Doctor Zeda, “but there was at Gîzeh, to the north of the Sphinx, a temple dedicated to Isis, but wherein the worship was different. We only know of this shrine by the monuments, but they prove it to have been--eh, Mr. Halesowen?” Halesowen nodded. “Here, then, the gods of the dead were adored--but the worship of Anubis took precedence, and was conducted at a shrine apart. Here, locked within three-and-thirty doors, having each its separate janitor who held the key, reposed a sacred symbol--a symbol, my friends, upon which was based the occult knowledge of the initiated; a symbol more precious than the lives of a hundred-hundred warriors--for so it is written!” “I have never met with the inscription!” said Halesowen, drily. Doctor Zeda smiled. “You never are likely to meet it!” he responded. “Your Belzoni and Lepsius, your Birch, Renouf, Brugsch and Petrie, is a mere unseeing vandal, blinded to the great truth--to the ultimate secret that Egypt holds for him who has eyes to see and a brain to realize!” The mysterious foreign gentleman looked about him with a sort of challenge in his glance; then he quietly resumed his story. “At the change of the moon in the sacred month, Methori, a maiden selected from a noble house for her beauty and purity, and for a whole year dedicated to the service of the gods, held in her hands the sacred thing--held it aloft that the initiated might worship, until the first white beam lit up the receptacle, when all bowed down their heads and chanted the ‘Hymn of the Souls Who Are Passing.’ Then was it locked again within the three-and-thirty doors, there to remain for another year. None saw the symbol itself but the high priest, who looked upon it when he was so ordained--for any other that gazed upon it died! It was contained in a holy vase!” He paused impressively. We had all fallen under the peculiar fascination of the speaker’s personality; we felt as though he spoke of matters wherein he had had personal concern. I could almost believe him to have witnessed the strange rites that he told of with such conviction. “In a year so long ago,” he softly resumed, his voice now a kind of jagged whisper, “that to speak of its date were to convey nothing to you, the high-born virgin on whom the exalted office was conferred closed upon her unhappy soul the gates of paradise for ages unnumbered; called down upon her head the curse of the high priest and the anger of the most high gods; was rejected of Set himself! “She let fall from her hands the sacred vase, and the holy symbol was lost to the children of earth for evermore! Lost was the key to the book of wisdom; closed was that book to man for all time!”