“You spoiled it all,” he cried. “It would perhaps have been the most interesting ...” and his eye lighted on the dead Abdul, who peered open-eyed from the coffin, then swayed, tottered, and fell forward, face downwards on the ground close to him. For one moment he lay there, and then the body rolled slowly on to its back without visible cause of movement, and lay staring into the sky. The face was covered with dust, but with the dust was mingled fresh blood. A nail had caught the cloth that wound him, underneath which as usual were the clothes in which he had died, for the Arabs do not wash their dead, and it had torn a great rent through them all, leaving the right shoulder bare. Weston strove to speak once, but failed. Then: “I will go and inform the police,” he said, “if you will stop here, and see that Achmet does not get out.” But this I altogether refused to do, and, after covering the body with the coffin to protect it from the hawks, we secured Achmet’s arms with the rope he had already used that night, and took him off to Luxor. Next morning Mohamed came to see us. “I thought Achmet knew where the money was,” he said exultantly. “Where was it?” “In a little purse tied round the shoulder. The dog had already begun stripping it. See”--and he brought it out of his pocket--“it is all there in those English notes, five pounds each, and there are twenty of them.” Our conclusion was slightly different, for even Weston will allow that Achmet _hoped_ to learn from dead lips the secret of the treasure, and then to kill the man anew and bury him. But that is pure conjecture. The only other point of interest lies in the two black cubes which we picked up, and found to be graven with curious characters. These I put one evening into Machmout’s hand, when he was exhibiting to us his curious powers of “thought transference.” The effect was that he screamed aloud, crying out that the Black Magic had come, and though I did not feel certain about that, I thought they would be safer in mid-Nile. Weston grumbled a little, and said that he had wanted to take them to the British Museum, but that I feel sure was an afterthought. THE SHOOTINGS OF ACHNALEISH The dining-room windows, both front and back, the one looking into Oakley Street, the other into a small back-yard with three sooty shrubs in it (known as the garden), were all open, so that the table stood in mid-stream of such air as there was. But in spite of this the heat was stifling, since, for once in a way, July had remembered that it was the duty of good little summers to be hot. Hot in consequence it had been: heat reverberated from the house-walls, it rose through the boot from the paving-stones, it poured down from a large superheated sun that walked the sky all day long in a benignant and golden manner. Dinner was over, but the small party of four who had eaten it still lingered. Mabel Armytage--it was she who had laid down the duty of good little summers--spoke first.