Then he began scraping the earth away with
his hands, and soon afterwards searched in his clothes which were lying
near for a piece of rope, with which he stepped into the grave, and in a
moment reappeared again with both ends in his hands. Then, standing
astride the grave, he pulled strongly, and one end of the coffin
appeared above the ground. He chipped a piece of the lid away to make
sure that he had the right end, and then, setting it upright, wrenched
off the top with his knife and there faced us leaning against the coffin
lid, the small shrivelled figure of the dead Abdul, swathed like a baby
in white. I was just about to motion the spirit of Black Magic to make his
appearance, when Machmout’s words came into my head: “He has with him
the Black Magic which can raise the dead,” and sudden overwhelming
curiosity, which froze disgust and horror into chill unfeeling things,
came over me. “Wait,” I whispered to Weston, “he will use the Black Magic.”

Again the wind dropped for a moment, and again, in the silence that came
with it, I heard the chiding of the hawk overhead, this time nearer, and
thought I heard more birds than one. Achmet meantime had taken the covering from off the face, and had undone
the swathing band, which at the moment after death is bound round the
chin to close the jaw, and in Arab burial is always left there, and from
where we stood I could see that the jaw dropped when the bandage was
untied, as if, though the wind blew towards us with a ghastly scent of
mortality on it, the muscles were not even now set, though the man had
been dead sixty hours. But still a rank and burning curiosity to see
what this unclean ghoul would do next stifled all other feelings in my
mind. He seemed not to notice, or, at any rate, to disregard that mouth
gaping awry, and moved about nimbly in the moonlight. He took from a pocket of his clothes, which were lying near, two small
black objects, which now are safely embedded in the mud at the bottom of
the Nile, and rubbed them briskly together. By degrees they grew
luminous with a sickly yellow pallor of light, and from his hands went
up a wavy, phosphorescent flame. One of these cubes he placed in the
open mouth of the corpse, the other in his own, and, taking the dead man
closely in his arms as though he would indeed dance with death, he
breathed long breaths from his mouth into that dead cavern which was
pressed to his. Suddenly he started back with a quick-drawn breath of
wonder and perhaps of horror, and stood for a space as if irresolute,
for the cube which the dead man held instead of lying loosely in the
jaw, was pressed tight between clenched teeth. After a moment of
irresolution he stepped back quickly to his clothes again, and took up
from near them the knife with which he had stripped off the coffin lid,
and holding this in one hand behind his back, with the other he took out
the cube from the dead man’s mouth, though with a visible exhibition of
force, and spoke. “Abdul,” he said, “I am your friend, and I swear I will give your money
to Mohamed, if you will tell me where it is.”

Certain I am that the lips of the dead moved, and the eyelids fluttered
for a moment like the wings of a wounded bird, but at that sight, the
horror so grew on me that I was physically incapable of stifling the cry
that rose to my lips, and Achmet turned round. Next moment the complete
Spirit of Black Magic glided out of the shade of the trees, and stood
before him. The wretched man stood for a moment without stirring, then,
turning with shaking knees to flee, he stepped back and fell into the
grave he had just opened. Weston turned on me angrily, dropping the eyes and the teeth of the
Afrit. “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. “Oh, Jim, it sounds too heavenly,” she said. “It makes me feel cool to
think of it. Just fancy, in a fortnight’s time we shall all four of us
be there, in our own shooting-lodge----”

“Farm-house,” said Jim.