Thomson had a splinter in one shoulder, and lost a quantity of blood; the wound was difficult to dress; but Lake escaped intact. Observations showed that they were about Sixty miles west of the British lines. They had, and could carry, sufficient rations and water, sparingly shared, to last them for three days. Their radio had cracked up. It would have been grim enough under normal conditions: being in enemy country made it worse.
They started to trek back; "and," said Borrodale, "only those who know the gritty, shelterless hell called the Libyan desert can begin to imagine those days and nights."
Both were bitten by some unidentified crawling thing while they slept in the shadow of a wadi, and Thomson developed a high temperature. His injured arm swelled to nearly twice its normal size and he began to laugh out loud and talk nonsense. Lake, a man of slighter physique, was not in much better shape. But he did his best to drag Thomson along.
Just before dawn of the third day, Thomson fell into a sort of coma from which Lake was unable to rouse him. Weak as a kitten, himself, he waited until the end. It meant the loss of eighteen precious hours and of nearly all the water. Then, he scraped out a shallow pit and dragged the largest bits of stone which he could carry from a neighbouring mound to make a cairn over his dead companion. It was the best he could do to protect him from the jackals and the vultures.
Lake was picked up, a whole day later, by a reconnaissance party from an Indian unit and rushed to a hospital in Cairo.
"I may as well tell you," said Tom Borrodale, "that he was a pretty desperate case. He looked more like a mummy than a man; and for a long time he hovered on the border line."
No one followed the stages of his slow recovery with greater interest than Moria. You see, so far, he had been quite unable to tell the story of that dreadful march. Incoherent rambling formed his only conversation; and the grim facts were fearfully awaited.
When, at last, a sick man but a sane one. Lake told his story, Moira was among the first to hear it. Much to most peo ple's surprise, she took the news of Thomson's death very badly. The thing that seemed to worry her, and it was a queer thing to worry about in the circumstances, was the possibility that Lake, in his weakened state, had made an inadequate cairn — the possibility that Thomson's body might become the prey of carrion birds and beasts. Lake did his best to reassure her, but he was not altogether successful, as will appear.
Whether the thought of the dead man lying out there in the Libyan desert preyed on her mind or whether overwork at the hospital where she was stationed was responsible has little to do with the matter; but Moira had a breakdown and became a patient herself.
However, she made a good recovery, and was given sick leave. This was the cool season, and she decided to go up to Luxor. Lake was still reporting to the MO when she left, but he had never failed to send flowers, fruit and such offerings to Moira throughout her illness. They lunched together at Shep-heard's on the day she left, and Lake saw her off. About a week later he was given a clean bill, and he lost no time in heading upriver, too. He, also, decided to spend his leave in Luxor.
"This brings me," explained Tom Borrodale, "to the mystery I promised; and here is the mystery."
"There is something I want you to do for me," Moira said to Lake one morning as they sat in the hotel garden.
Lake, stretched beside her in a long chair, looked at Moira smilingly. She was well worth looking at, too: one of those chestnut blondes with warm, creamy colouring whose production in the climate of Ireland seems so odd. With her deep violet eyes and her daintiness, she looked like a flower of the sunny south. Actually, of course, Moira was born in Australia, but both her parents came from Ireland. Lake was a goodlook-er, also — a man of medium build, fairish, and always groomed perfectly, whether in uniform or out of it. He looked quite fit by this time, and so, for that matter, did Moira. They used to take long rides together on the other side of the Nile, Lake loving to act as her guide to the city of dead kings.
"You know I would do anything for you," he replied — and he meant it; his brown eyes glowed as he watched her. "What is it you want?"
That he was hopelessly, blindly in love with her no one who saw them together could doubt. She was his religion; for Lake there was no God — only Moira.
She hesitated a while before she answered, staring out over the river to where a native dahabeah moved slowly through morning haze like a giant hawk moth with lifted wings. Except for the clanking of an ancient water wheel near by, there was hardly a sound. The pair of them just lay there in a peaceful world that didn't seem to know that Hitler had ever been born. At last, Moira spoke.
"I want you to let me go down Schroeder's shaft," she said.
This was not the first time she had made that request. But Lake, gently, and evidently inspired by sincere anxiety to spare her pain, had always headed her off. In their many expeditions among the tombs and temples he had avoided showing her the spot upon which he and Thomson had been at work when war interrupted them. Moira didn't even know quite where it was located.
At first, thinking that she understood the motives of delicacy which prompted him, Moira had dropped the subject; but she had returned to it later; and now she made the request in a manner which invited no evasion.
"Very well," said Lake, "of course. It's not a pleasant business from any point of view, but if you are set on it we can go, say, on Tuesday morning. The shaft has been closed up, of course, but not permanently. I'll go into the town and gather up a few men to prepare the way. Men who know the work are easy to find."
Moira just replied, "Thank you, Vernon," and didn't refer to the matter again.
"If you want to picture Schroeder's shaft to yourself," said Tom Borrodale; "don't confuse it in your mind with an elevator shaft. It wasn't straight and it wasn't smooth; it was more like the inside of a Swiss chimney. It went sheer down for about ten feet and then it had been cut in at a pretty sharp angle to avoid solid granite. That part was shored up. Beyond, it went straight down again, a rugged, rock-studded pit. At this point Schroeder had met more rock and had had to give the job up. Thomson, later, tunnelled around this obstruction and broke into the antechamber from the south."
Lake (so Borrodale told me), although a man of proved courage, had an almost morbid horror of snakes. So that when, early on the appointed Tuesday morning he and Moira arrived at the reopened shaft. Lake sent the Arabs down first to report if all was clear.
They were an experienced crew, one of whom had worked with Thomson and Lake before. "These fellows are born excavators," said Borrodale, "whose fathers dug for Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter. The ghafir of one of the Luxor temples, a white-haired veteran who remembered Maspero, was in charge, and although already he had assembled a gang of six, he had roped in an odd man who came from the Faiyum, a big, bearded fellow, who seemed, for all his physique, since he kept well in the background, to be work-shy. I need not say that such a mob was unnecessary, but the old boy had jumped at the chance to employ all his friends and relations. It's their way."
Lines had been rigged and arrangements made for forming a sort of human escalator by means of which Moira and Lake could be passed down to the foot of the shaft. From the moment that they proceeded beyond the angle, daylight disappeared: but Lake had a big army flashlight which he housed in the hip pocket of his shorts.
They managed the descent successfully and then squeezed around that narrow semicircular cutting which gave access to the anteroom. It was very still down there, when the Arabs had been told to clear out, and it smelled of Ancient Egypt. "That smell of Ancient Egypt," said Tom Borrodale, "is something which no one has ever been able to define. But although it isn't strictly pleasant, it has some hypnotic quality which, even over a bridge of years, can call a man back to the Old Land."