Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/32

542 but the one shot had been enough. A dark blotch was slowly widening on the chest of Achmet Bey, who stared at the stars with sightless eyes. Out from the night came the sound of his horse's hoofs, growing fainter with each passing second.

An hour later I galloped into the great courtyard of the House of a Thousand Lights and the small army of black attendants that were there, to be quickly ushered within its halls to the waiting Captain Sabbatier.

days I remained at the House of a Thousand Lights, while final repairs were being made on the great plane that was to carry me far inland to the awaiting Midnight Lady.

The castle itself was a massive structure of some distant era. The few words I could get from the tight-lipped black attendants were enough to show that its great towers had risen to the Sahara skies long before the first Crusade. It had been razed several times in past centuries by pirates and wandering desert tribes, but there still remained parts of the original building, as well as a vast series of underground passages and dungeons.

I found Captain Sabbatier to be a gloomy, taciturn man, who seemingly took my presence as a necessary nuisance. During my stay at The House of a Thousand Lights I doubt if he spoke fifty words to me till the night of our departure, when he mentioned that the journey on the morrow would take us two thousand miles inland.

"The Lost Oasis is our destination, Monsieur; an ancient well and a cluster of palm trees, beside which stands a tiny mud fort, long forgotten; far beyond the last outpost, and in the very heart of the Sahara."

"But why so far from the coast?" I asked him. "I knew the trip would take us inland, but your mistress mentioned nothing to me of any such distance."

"You are going to find the entire business surprising in more ways than one, before you have finished, Monsieur," he answered with a sneer he made no effort to conceal; adding almost immediately: "To begin with, it is near her own strange country, amid the sands and mountains she loves so well. This castle she uses only on those rare occasions that mark her appearance from the great interior. Then again, if the expedition organizes far inland, it is much less likely to cause the notice and comment that a caravan starting from the coast is certain to do.

"We ourselves shall leave at some black hour when there is less chance of spying eyes to see us—and indeed there is cause for that same haste and caution. Rumor has it that within a half-hour of his landing Manuel De Costa left in his own great plane for some unknown destination to the waste-lands in the east."

I made no mention of the fact that I no longer had the scroll, nor was I certain that my presence would be welcomed by The Midnight Lady, now that I had lost it. It came to me also that Manuel De Costa was not the one to waste either time or opportunity and perhaps at this very minute the wily Spaniard was claiming the contents of the tomb.

I liked the whole affair less when I was routed out of a warm bed the following morning in the black hours before the dawn, and led to the waiting plane behind the great castle that was "The House of a Thousand Lights." Clean-shaven and dressed in riding-breeches and khaki shirt, together with the heavy automatic strapped around my waist, I was a different person from