Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/159

Rh written in the books of Baedeker and Budge? The little game lasted for several years—long enough, at any rate, to enable Ahmed to lay by a comfortable provision for his old age, though, no doubt, he must have sold many things at prices vastly below their real value."

"I never could quite make out how the 'find' was found out by the authorities."

"Well, the wonder to me is that it was not spotted before. There surely must have been some of the mummy ornaments, sepulchral vessels, and so forth, which bore the signatures of the dead to whom they belonged, and thereby proved that the seller or the person from whom he acquired them must have obtained access to some hitherto unknown tomb. However, it was the funeral papyrus of Queen Netemet, of the twenty-first dynasty—a scroll taken straight from that lady's tomb—which put Egyptologists on the scent, and finally enabled them to run the ingenious Ahmed to earth. However, they wouldn't have managed