Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/113



HE true beginning of the tale I have to tell lies in the almost impenetrable obscurity of ages past, long before civilization in the modem sense of the word had touched that vast uncertain thing which we have called Africa; long even before the vaunting ambition of Alexander the Great had led him to dream of establishing perpetual world empire, a dream which resulted in his hurling rank on rank of fighting men to death in the useless, vain struggle to attain the unattainable. For the tale begins with the very dawn of history—with the reign of the ruthless Pharaohs of Egypt. And though it is a far cry from that time to this and, too, a far cry from the pyramids of the Nile valley to the heart of the immutable Sahara, it seems not so far but that the spirit of the Little Princess might span the sneering centuries.

is the old story of those who loved too well, of love that betrayed itself, and of love that palled.

Bennett had come to Africa, and the girl had died. But to Bennett she was alive. He saw her in the African night. He saw her in the African noon. There was about the phantom that haunted him something tangible and real, something living; and so, being of the Occident, he cursed the phantom and tried to put it aside as one would discard an old coat. But he could not, and ultimately his Arab comrade, Hadji, read his secret.

"Put her from thy thoughts, heart of my heart," he said in his execrable Arabic-French-English. "For what is one woman more, or one woman less? Does the sea sorrow that one of its fish is taken?"

"But I love her even yet," said Bennett; whereupon the Arab threw out his arms, hands extended, in a gesture at once suggestive of patience and impatience, of disdain and tolerance. In his strange fatalistic philosophy he could find no place for regret over that which was of the past, and he muttered something about "women being as plentiful as lice in a Jew's beard."

But throughout that terrible trek across the desert the ghost of the dead followed Bennett. After the hardest march he could not sleep for hours. The terrible heat from the equatorial sun in the daytime and the sudden bitter cold of the night began to wear down his nerves. The endless stretches of rock and sand and gravel reflecting the light from the heavens seared his eyes till they were red and swollen. And ever before him' in the light of the sun, the moon, the stars, danced the apparition.

By thoetime the little caravan had covered half its journey Bennett had lost every sense of fairness and decency. Even to Hadji he was as ugly as he dared be: on Hadji depended in a large measure the success or failure of the expedition which had set out to find the lost tomb of the Little Princess. Hadji had told the Americans in Tripoli who were interested in such things that he was one of the few men who ever had approached the sacred place which was regarded with a supersti-