Thieves, too, have been responsible for the loss of most valuable evidence. The Egyptian natives are born pilferers. They have a natural aptitude for causing things to vanish, and when a discovery has been made the discoverer has seldom been able to preserve his find in its entirety. There have been cases where the greater part of a find has disappeared in a night, and once it is gone you might as well seek to find a particular grain of sand in the desert. Statues, vases, jewels, furniture—all have been carried off, and the finders have wakened to discover that their labour has been wasted, and that instead of enriching our knowledge of the world they have merely enriched a few native thieves. The natives, too, often seize the opportunity of digging in places where they know they will not be disturbed. They do not go to the trouble of obtaining a permit to dig. The last thing they desire to do is to call the attention of the authorities to their work, so they run the risk and dig surreptitiously. While it is obvious they must waste a lot of energy in conducting these illegal searches, it is also obvious that they are often rewarded by finding objects of value. The things they find, they smuggle to their huts, and in due course sell to some traveller, who places them in his private collection, where they are as completely lost to sight as if they had never existed. Then there are things that the natives stumble on accidentally. If their find is not portable, they may inform the authorities, but if it is easy to handle, there is little prospect of their discovery becoming known. No one has the faintest idea how much material has been lost in these ways. Its scientific value must be incalculable. CHAPTER III When Professor Flinders Petrie first set foot in Egypt he was a young man, only twenty-seven years of age. The older men of other nations who had spent their lives delving in the past smiled at the idea of the new-comer bringing about a revolution in the work they knew so well. They had done so much themselves that there seemed little more for him to do. They had found tombs and statues and papyri that took them back some five thousand years to what they thought was the beginning of Egyptian history. What else was there to discover? Nobody knew then. Nobody knows now. When men start digging up the earth in search of relics of the past, it is beyond human foresight to foretell what will come to light. Men may dig 50 feet and find nothing. They may say there is nothing to be found in that particular spot. Another man may come along, set up his tent a few yards away, just scratch the surface of the soil, and find a buried city. This is what lures men to the work; it is one of the fascinations and provides much of the romance.