Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/115

Rh well reach for the farthest star, he thought. And so Bennett took his tools and pressed on and on.

As he traveled higher the way became still rockier. The sand had given way now to jagged rock and occasional patches of gravel. He pressed on.

After several hours he came to what he realized could be nothing else than the tomb of the Little Princess. For a long time Bennett sat at the base of the big marble structure, wondering. What infinite labor must have been involved in the building of this tomb far from the beaten paths of mankind! It was lost in the maze of rock and sand, forgotten in the rush of centuries.

Then with crowbar and chisel and ax Bennett set about to open the tomb about which a desert legend of horror had evidently been created. It had been sealed well by the dust of years, and it was not many minutes until the sweat was leaping in beads from his forehead and trickling down his face.

He worked on and finally cleared away the mortar from the cracks where the door fitted into the body of the structure. When he had done this he was amazed to find how easily the heavy door came away. He swung it clear with improvised block and tackle, and there swirled out to him the reek of dead centuries.

He found, after a time, the usual papyrus scroll covered with hieroglyphic writing. By the dim light that entered the tomb he could clearly make out the outline of the elaborately inlaid sarcophagus which very probably contained the mummy of the Little Princess. Bennett left the close room and went out to sit on the marble base, which even the centuries had failed to wear down. There he began to translate the paper he had found.

It was the story of the life of the girl of long ago. It was a tale all of tragedy—of hopes shattered and dreams destroyed and ideals fallen. Misery was apparent in every line, and Bennett found himself muttering under his breath, "Poor little girl, poor little girl!"

She was a Pharaoh's daughter, but she loved a soldier in her sire's army. Love had come upon her like a great overpowering flame, and she had gone to him. But finding them together, another—a man who desired her, a man high in the ruler's esteem—had hastened away to the monarch with his strange story. And the Pharaoh, being a just man, who observed the law, demanded that one of the two should die, that one should kill the other; and when by a hideously slow lottery he had discovered that, the Little Princess should be the one to go beyond, be placed the blade in the hands of her lover and ordered him to strike.

But she had looked through the outer veil of his soul and read the mockery in his heart.

And then, said the record written by the king's high priest, the steel had pierced to its poisoned hilt So died the Little Princess of Egypt. Her body had been preserved and the rites performed.

"But," the great ruler had spoken decisively, finally, "she sinned. It is not fitting then that she should lie with her fathers."

So the Little Princess was taken a way across the gigantic waste which had seldom been traversed. Piece by piece the marble for her tomb was