The All-Story, March 1914 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE WOMAN OL THE PYRAMID. al-Murtadi had spoken about? Was this the Woman of the Pyramid? He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Steadily, as steadily as though he had a full glass of water in his hand which he didn't want to spill, Carlton got up from his chair and started for- ward, his eves still on the enchantress, real or imaginary—whatever she was. While this had been in progress an extremely fat and bald-headed gentle- man, accompanied by two extraordt- narily slim and hirsute young women, had been making his way down the cen- ter of the crowded room. With a polite nod he moved toward the table which Carlton had just vacated, blocking Carlton’s view for a moment. When Carlton could look again the woman was gone. That same evening. obedient to some instinct which led him as surely as the homing instinct directs a pigeon to its destination, Carlton found himself on the long road that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the pyramids. They reared their mountainous. stl- houettes — the imperishable Three, as mighty and mysterious as Egypt is in the history of mankind — shininering gold and purple against the western sky. The pyramids! The sun went down. Night crept in upon him like an ancient spell. Still the pyramids hung nebulous in front of hin—as real and as unreal as a fig- ment of his imagination. What was reality and wnreality, anyway ? Were these mysterious mountains of hewn stone any more real or any less real than the other legacies handed ‘down to man from the remote past— the legacy of memories and experi- ences which every man, however poor. carries round in the back of Ins head? The lebbek-trees were black—blacker than they had ever appeared before. The entire landscape had taken on a magical aspect, holy, solemn, brooding. There was no sound. Carlton hada peculiar sensation of being all alone in 491 the world — of having passed into a sort of cosmic anteroom—the ordinary world behind him, the palace of the un- known just ahead, yet unexplored. Then it was as though a servant had appeared from the palace and bade him enter. Every nerve in his body was crisping. He stood there looking into the young night-sky, hypnotized by the dim and slender crescent that he saw there. . It was the night of the new moon. CHAPTER V. INTO THE DARK. f It may be said with perfect con- fidence that everything depends on a inail's personality, on his temperament, anyway. The Society for Psychical Research, both in England and in America, has paid a good deal of atten- tion to this phase of a man. The majority of people never see a ghost, never have even a ghostly feeling, ex- cept a sort of “creepiness,” perhaps. when something or other occurs that they do not immediately understand. Yet. over against this truth is the other—that the annals of the world. both written and unwritten, in every language, from every country and every century, are filled with ghost stories. Not only that, but the learned society mentioned above has investigated no end of such stories in a purely scientific spirit and has found them to be true. It results that what are vulgarly called ghosts are real, and that, while the vast majority of the earth's popula- tion can’t see them, there are others who can; and that there always have been such. This. to some extent, is merely a re- fection of what was passing through George Carlton’s mind as he stood there on the edge of the desert, the pyrainids soaring into the mystic; ‘shadowy air to one side of him, that other vast shadow of the sphinx—he could understand why dhe parakeets