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It was Ferlini who ransacked the pyramids all about Meroe, that so-called island in the desert, where in its days of splendour reigned the queens Candace. Fenton, stationed at Khartum, an eager dabbler in the old lore of Egypt, sent me an enthusiastic telegram the moment he read the documents. They confirmed legends of the Sudan in which he had been interested.
The notebook he had to sell had been the property of a distinguished distant relative, long since dead; the Italian, Ferlini, who about 1834 ransacked the ruins of Meroee in the kingdom of Candace. Ferlini had given treasure in gold, scarabs, and jewels to Berlin, all of which he had discovered in a secret cache in the masonry of a pyramid, in the so-called "pyramid field" of Meroee.
We had a two-berthed compartment together, and talked most of the night, in low voices; of the mountain; of the legends concerning it, and the papers of the dead Egyptologist Ferlini, which indirectly had brought Fenton into Monny Gilder's life, and given Brigit back to me. There was the out-of-doors breakfast party, too, on the terrace at Shepheard's.
But you must remember that nobody except Ferlini and a few superstitious blacks ever believed that the mountain had a secret. Incredulity has protected it. And Corkran had to work like a thousand devils if he hoped to get hold of anything before he was found out. I believe he has got hold of something, and that it then got hold of him. But we shall see." "Yes, we shall see," I repeated.
Ferlini, a student of the Demotic writings which had superseded hieroglyphics, doubted not that he had translated the revelation aright, though he admitted supplying many missing words in accordance with his own deductions.
Nobody, within the memory of man, had ever searched for the problematical tomb: and as tales of more or less the same character are common in Egypt, I did not place much faith in the enthusiastic jottings of Ferlini. However, my love of the unknown, the mysterious and romantic, made me feel that the possession of the notebook was worth the price asked: two thousand lire.
He was in disfavour at the time he tried to organize an expedition in search of the queen's hoard, and though legends of the mountain confirmed the writings which Ferlini was the first to translate, the Italian could induce no one to finance his scheme.
In the notebook which had come down with other belongings of Ferlini the Egyptologist, to Ferlini the artist, was a copy of certain Demotic writing, of a peculiar and little known form. The original had existed, according to the dead Ferlini's notes, on the wall of an antechapel in one of the most ruinous pyramids at Meroee, decorated in a peculiarly barbaric Ethiopian style.
This is not the moment to tell how I got the papers that revealed the secret, before I passed them on to Anthony Fenton at Khartum, for him to say whether or not the notes were of real importance. But the papers had been left in Rome by Ferlini, the Italian Egyptologist, seventy years ago, when he gave to the museum at Berlin the treasures he had unearthed.
The Greek invasion began by modifying the style of Egyptian gold-work, and ended by gradually substituting Greek types for native types. The jewels of an Ethiopian queen, purchased from Ferlini by the Berlin Museum, contained not only some ornaments which might readily have been attributed to Pharaonic times, but others of a mixed style in which Hellenic influences are distinctly traceable.
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