Henry Bedford-Jones

The Bride of the Sphinx

Warsaw 2022

Contents

The Bride of the Sphinx

The Bride of the Sphinx

Now almost in our own day the Sphinx Emerald turns up
in Cairo to work its malign magic in a memorable drama.

I FOUND that by any standard postwar Cairo was a tough place. It was booming with gamblers, hashish-runners, wealth, Levantine riffraff of all sorts, and hatreds. Not only the half-scotched racial and religious hatreds of the old days, but the newer hatred of Pan-Arabs for Christians, of Syrians for French, of Greeks for English, and so on. As an American, and as traffic agent for the new Consolidated Airlines, I was fairly immune to these passions; but blood was shed of nights, and the fine art of murder was being carried to a 33° peak with little pretense of concealment.

Getting the local offices established for my company was a slow business, and I had plenty of time to see the sights–which of course I had seen often enough during the war, when our first tanks dropped in to lend a hand. Running into Tom Keating in Cairo was pure accident. One morning he came walking into the hotel dining-room while I was at breakfast, and recognizing me, came straight to my table.

“Jack Hawkins! Never expected to see you here again–this is simply great!” he exclaimed heartily.

I would never have known him. We had become good friends during the final Alamein campaign, when his unrivaled knowledge of the desert had been of immense value to our tank people. Tom Keating had been doing archaeological work in Upper Egypt for some years, and in those days was a stalwart, handsome giant. Now he was a frail shadow of himself, massive frame shrunken, face deeply lined and leathery, with the rapt distance-eyes of the desert-dweller. But when he dropped into a chair and we gripped hands, his radiant smile broke out in all its old charm.

“I’m glad, glad,” he said. It struck me that he was lonely–a strange thing for Sahib Keating, as his English crowd used to call him. We chatted for a bit, until I asked what he was doing now. He gave me an odd unsmiling look.

“Seeking, Hawk. Just seeking. I’ve been tracking down something that doesn’t exist, you’d say offhand; yet I’ve found it. Something so fantastic that they all term me a fool. Something I’ve now proved true, though I doubt if my findings will be accepted. That’s one thing. Beyond it lies another search even more fantastic, for something I can’t ever hope to find.”

KEATING was very much the scholar, but he was an idealist, a bit of a dreamer, apt at strange fancies and odd imaginings. In the war days we had been quite close, and the momentary magic of this unexpected meeting drew us close again, so I did not hesitate now to put the question bluntly.

“What is it you’ve found, Sahib?”

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