Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/154

136 the Professor's 'find' any day had it not been for the unworthy espionage of the police."

"You think that's mere swagger, do you? Isn't it possible that he may have discovered more tombs than he ever confessed to?"

"Well, he himself never confessed to any. It was his dear brother Mohammed who performed that act of repentance on his behalf."

"But did Mohammed make an absolutely clean breast of it, do you think?"

"Probably not. An Arab seldom performs that operation with completeness, either in the moral or in the physical sense. But it is fourteen years, you must remember, since the confession was made; and during the last few years, at any rate, we have been digging pretty industriously out here. So that I imagine we have opened up everything that the Abd-er-Rasûl family could have known of, and more to boot."

"How did they first light upon the tombs?"