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act of taking the bait has to touch off a charge of flash powder as well as expose the film. It doesn’t work very often. But I had set a trap—with the camera most cunningly concealed—on the plateau just by the entrance to the old shaft.”
    “Lafleur’s Shaft!” I exclaimed.
    “Yes. There was a track there which I thought might mean jackal— and I have never got a close-up of a jackal. The night before I went to Luxor something fell into my trap! I was rather puzzled, because the bait didn’t seem to have been touched. It looked as though someone might have stumbled over it. But I never imagined that anyone would pass that way at night—or at any other time, really.”
    She stopped, looking at Weymouth. Then:
    “I took the film to Luxor,” she said. “But I didn’t develop it until today. When I saw what it was, I couldn’t believe my eyes! I have made a print of it. Look!”
    Rima laid a photographic print on the table and we all bent over it.
    “To have touched off the trigger and yet got in focus,” she said, “they must have been actually coming out of the shaft. I simply can’t imagine why they left the camera undisturbed. Unless they failed to find it or the flash scared them!”
    I stared dazedly at the print.
    It represented three faces—one indistinguishably foggy, in semiprofile. That nearest to the camera was quite unmistakable. It was a photograph of the cross-eyed man who had followed me to Cairo!
    This was startling enough. But the second face—that of someone directly behind him—literally defeated me. It was the face of a woman—wearing a black native veil but held aside so that her clear-cut features were reproduced sharply…
    Brilliant, indeterminably oblique eyes… a strictly chiselled nose, somewhat too large for classic beauty… full lips, slightly parted… a long oval contour…
    “That’s a Dacoit!” came Petrie’s voice. “Miss Barton, this is amazing! See the mark on his forehead!”
    “I have seen it,” Rima replied, “although I didn’t know what it meant.”
    “But,” I interrupted excitedly, as:
    “Greville,” Forester cried, “do you see!”
    “I see very plainly,” said I. “Weymouth—the woman in this photograph is Madame Ingomar!”
    “What is Lafleur’s Shaft?” Weymouth asked. “And in what way is it connected with Lafleur’s Tomb?”
    “It isn’t connected with it,” I replied. “Lafleur’s Tomb—also known as the Tomb of the Black Ape—was discovered, or rather suspected to exist, by the French Egyptologist Lafleur, about 1908. He accidentally unearthed a little votive chapel. All the fragments of offerings found were inscribed with the figure of what appeared to be a huge black ape—or perhaps an ape-man. There’s been a lot of speculation about it. Certain authorities, notably Maspero, held the theory that some queer pet of an unknown Pharaoh had been given a freak burial.
    “Lafleur cut a shaft into a long zigzag passage belonging to another burial chamber, which he thought would lead him to the Tomb of the Black Ape. It led nowhere. It was abandoned in 1909. Sir Lionel started from a different point altogether and seems to have hit on the right entrance.”
    “Ah!” said Weymouth. “Then my next step is clear.”
    “What is that?”
    “I want you to take me down your excavation.”
    “Good enough,” said I, “shall we start now?”
    “I think it would be as well.” He turned to Forester. “I want Greville to act as guide and I want you and Petrie to look after Miss Barton in our absence.”
    “We shall need Ali,” I said, “to go ahead with lights.”
    “Very well. Will you please make the necessary arrangements?”
    Accordingly I relieved Ali Mahmoud of his sentry duties and had the lanterns lighted. They were kept in the smaller hut. And presently Weymouth and I were on the ladders…
    The first part of our journey led us down a sheer pit of considerable depth. At the bottom it gave access to a sloping