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There lies the first Zagazig message; here is the second; and you know the context of the note pinned upon the door? It read, if you remember, 'Remove patrol from Joy-Shop neighborhood. Have a theory. Wish to visit place alone on Monday night after one o'clock." "Smith," I said dully, "I have a heavy stake upon this murderous game."

Then he was seized by a fit of violent weeping, while someone at the other end of the theatre was shouting with intense fury: "If I had Lloyd George here, I'd shoot the blighter," and another man was carried out with his head lolling from side to side and saying in mad, amiable tones: "Zig-zag, zagazig, zig-zag," and so on without a break.

The trip by army lorry took us by Zagazig and the Sweet Water Canal where to fall in meant a series of unpleasant injections by the MO. We lazed and swam and ate and sun bathed and for the first time saw little sea horses I found that I could float in the canal whereas I never could in fresh water but I also found that there were leeches in the water and a couple attached themselves to me.

The word "Zagazig" was completed, always, and did not necessarily terminate with the last letter occurring in the cryptographic message. A subsequent inspection of this curious code has enabled Nayland Smith, by a process of simple deduction, to compile the entire alphabet employed by Dr. Fu-Manchu's agent, Samarkan, in communicating with his awful superior.

It consists merely of the word 'Zagazig' repeated six or seven times which can have no possible significance!" "Can't it!" snapped Smith. "Well," I said, "what has Zagazig to do with Fu-Manchu, or to do with us?" "Zagazig, my dear Petrie, is a very unsavory Arab town in Lower Egypt, as you know!"

The first conclusion to which I was borne was this: that the letters comprising the word "Zagazig" were designed merely to confuse the reader, and might be neglected; since, occurring as they did in regular sequence, they could possess no significance. I became quite excited upon making the discovery that the punctuation marks varied in almost every case!

So all his life, the word 'Zagazig' carried memories of a brick shed, the flicker of an oil-lamp's floating wick, a sky full of eyes, and an engine coughing in a desert at the world's end; which memories returned in a restaurant-car jolting through what seemed to be miles of brilliantly lighted streets and factories.

Such a town, for instance, as Zagazig, last seen by a very small boy who was lifted out of a railway-carriage and set down beneath a whitewashed wall under naked stars in an illimitable emptiness because, they told him, the train was on fire. Childlike, this did not worry him.

However, as I have already stated, a native acquaintance there, a very learned Moslem, to whom I had imparted during my residence some idea of the nature of my studies, sent me a long communication containing particulars of the event which had befallen Lady Coverly during her one-night's sojourn in Zagazig.

The treasure discovered at Zagazig in 1878, at Keneh in 1881, and at Damanhûr in 1882, consisted of objects having nothing whatever in common with Egyptian traditions. They comprise hairpins supporting statuettes of Venus, zone-buckles, agraffes for fastening the peplum, rings and bracelets set with cameos, and caskets ornamented at the four corners with little Ionic columns.