"Haggard, H Rider- Queen Sheba's Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haggard H. Rider)

thing to do, for I was always a master of my trade.

My fortieth birthday found me practising at Cairo, which I mention
only because it was here that first I met Ptolemy Higgs, who, even
then in his youth, was noted for his extraordinary antiquarian and
linguistic abilities. I remember that in those days the joke about him
was that he could swear in fifteen languages like a native and in
thirty-two with common proficiency, and could read hieroglyphics as
easily as a bishop reads the /Times/.

Well, I doctored him through a bad attack of typhoid, but as he had
spent every farthing he owned on scarabs or something of the sort,
made him no charge. This little kindness I am bound to say he never
forgot, for whatever his failings may be (personally I would not trust
him alone with any object that was more than a thousand years old),
Ptolemy is a good and faithful friend.

In Cairo I married a Copt. She was a lady of high descent, the
tradition in her family being that they were sprung from one of the
Ptolemaic Pharaohs, which is possible and even probable enough. Also,
she was a Christian, and well educated in her way. But, of course, she
remained an Oriental, and for a European to marry an Oriental is, as I
have tried to explain to others, a very dangerous thing, especially if
he continues to live in the East, where it cuts him off from social
recognition and intimacy with his own race. Still, although this step
of mine forced me to leave Cairo and go to Assouan, then a little-
known place, to practise chiefly among the natives, God knows we were
happy enough together till the plague took her, and with it my joy in
life.

I pass over all that business, since there are some things too
dreadful and too sacred to write about. She left me one child, a son,
who, to fill up my cup of sorrow, when he was twelve years of age, was
kidnapped by the Mardi's people.

This brings me to the real story. There is nobody else to write it;
Oliver will not; Higgs cannot (outside of anything learned and
antiquarian, he is hopeless); so I must. At any rate, if it is not
interesting, the fault will be mine, not that of the story, which in
all conscience is strange enough.



We are now in the middle of June, and it was a year ago last December
that, on the evening of the day of my arrival in London after an
absence of half a lifetime, I found myself knocking at the door of
Professor Higgs's rooms in Guildford Street, W.C. It was opened by his
housekeeper, Mrs. Reid, a thin and saturnine old woman, who reminded
and still reminds me of a reanimated mummy. She told me that the
Professor was in, but had a gentleman to dinner, and suggested sourly