but, taking no chances, we went through those rooms most thoroughly with pick and crowbar, finding nothing, but leaving them considerably better ventilated than ever they had been before.

And so we worked our way downwards with the fixed intention of pulling the Khan's private apartments to the ground, our only regret that we had not the Khan himself to bury in their ruins.

As the Colonel led the way down from the second floor, he stopped on the small landing between the two floors, and stood gazing intently at the outer wall of the staircase well; then, still looking at the wall, he called out, "Run upstairs somebody and see whether any other landing has these funny little arches cut in the wall."

While one departed at speed, the rest of us looked at the wall, and saw three very shallow arches, apparently cut for ornamentation. Now this wall was obviously an outer wall, having windows to light the stairs, and outer walls had hitherto received very scant attention; but when a voice came pealing down from above, "All the other walls quite plain, sir," interest visibly quickened, and the Colonel called to one of the gunners, "Come along, M'Carthy; try a pick on these arches."

Down the stairs swung M'Carthy, reputed to be the biggest man in the army of

on the arch next to the side wall. A few minutes of strenuous hacking and he had dug out large chunks of sun-dried brick, and made a considerable hole in the wall.

"Now the middle one."

Up went the pick with a full swing, and "whung-g-g,' a grunt from M'Carthy heralding a general shout of WOOD!

There was no mistaking that sound. After days of the dull thud of pick and crowbar meeting clay, the sound of metal on wood brought our blood up to fever-point again, and another brawny gunner hustling down with a crowbar, the two soon peeled off the thick coating of baked clayand there stood revealed a door, an indubitable door!

No means of opening it being apparent, pick and crowbar went to work again, and after some very arduous minutes the door was wrenched open, disclosing a very narrow passage, which led into uttermost darkness. Lanterns having been lit, the Colonel took one and went ahead, the rest filing after him in a darkness that could be felt, so blanketthick it seemed, the feeble little flicker from the lanterns penetrating no distance at all as we emerged into what appeared to be a vast illimitable cavern.

"Now, S, take the other lantern, and go along to the right while I go to the left. Half of you follow me, the rest with Captain S. Be careful

All groped their way carefully along the walls to right and left for a few paces, when the leaders called out almost simultaneously, "Ends here; wall at right angles," and turned in the new direction.

Suddenly one of the two young subalterns, whose eyes, being younger, were presumably sharper than those of the rest of his party, plunged forward with a yell of "Look

there." All halted and watched a dim figure struggling with some large quite indistinguishable object: a ripping sound and "Oh, Hell!

A distinct sniff followed, and then, "How perfectly putrid.”

nothing, the men were beginning to dig up the floor, when Captain S, who was standing in the far corner by the oil-jars, called out, "Give me a pick," and began tapping gently at the wall above his head, very near the ceiling.

Looking closely one could see, high up and almost in the corner, a very slight, almost imperceptible bulge, and it was at this bulge that Captain S was tapping.

After a few moments the distinct tinkle of metal on metal brought us all crowding round, and the excitement grew intense as the persistent pecking peeled off the clay facing of the wall, and disclosed a metal something that shone in the light of the torches.

A few more gentle pecks and there stood revealed a padlock, one of those large cylindrical affairs, common in the East, so formidable in appearance but so completely useless in reality; but whatever might be its utility there could be no question as to the interest which this wonderful padlock excited, for whoever before had found a padlock embedded in a brick wall seven feet from the ground?

S- handed over his pick and retired into the background, while two lusty mountain gunners, stripped to the waist, set to with a will. A few minutes of earnest endeavour played havoc with the sun-dried brick, and again came the welcome sound of pick

point meeting wood; but it took some time to clear away all the covering brick-work, and more than one pair of exhausted gunners had to be relieved, overcome by the heat and choked by the dust from the crumbling clods of clay, before the wood was all visible, and again there appeared a door.

And now the why and wherefore of that ridiculous padlock became apparent, for driven into the wood, one at the top of the door and the other into the lintel, were two stout staples, long enough to protrude over the protecting brickwork. What was not quite so apparent was why any one should have gone to the trouble of padlocking a door which he meant to cover with nine inches of brick.

A crowbar made very short work of the staples, and the same weapon soon prised open the door, when there appeared the head of a very narrow and steep stairway, leading apparently into the very bowels of the earth, so utter was the darkness down below.

Down we went with lanterns and torches, treading on each other's heels in our excitement, until we emerged into another cellar, a smaller one this time, with an opening on the far side, and, on our right, a huge door with three heavy bolts, each secured by a very serviceable padlock.

made by human hands being able to withstand those muscles for long, off they flew; the bolts were drawn back, the door flung open, and there at last!

From roof to floor, a veritable cascade of silver, glittering and twinkling in the rays of the torches, met our enraptured gaze, the resemblance to a waterfall curiously heightened by dark objects, like rocks, protruding from the face of the silver mass, while odd coins in twos and threes slid tinkling down.

It seemed impossible that one man, in the short span of a human life, could have collected all that mass of silver coins, but there they were, six million two hundred thousand no less, all bright shining rupees, a fact which must stamp the Khan as the champion miser of this or any other age.

Closer examination showed that the protruding rocks were really the ends of boxes, and that the silver was not a solid mass as it had appeared from the door. Some of the boxes had burst open and allowed their contents to escape, but the greater part of the treasure was

securely packed, 8000 rupees to a box, which was fortunate for us, as we had to count them later, and the handling of six million odd individual rupees would have taken some doing!

The narrow opening in the cellar wall, outside the treasure chamber, was found to lead

in a very solid wooden trapdoor: this trap was let into the floor of the Khan's third room and carefully covered by the floor-boards, the bed with the golden legs standing guard over it!

The discovery of this trapdoor solved the mystery as to how all that silver could have been stowed away in the cellar without anybody being any the wiser, One can see the old miser pulling up his floorboards in the dead of night, raising the trap-door, and slinking down the stairs with his bags of rupees to add to his hoard; very possibly the large amount of loose silver was left so intentionally, something to handle and to gloat over, much more solacing than a lot of ugly boxes.

Having solved one problem by finding the treasure, we now

had to tackle another-how to get away with it.

Counting the loose silver, checking and sealing the full boxes, and getting them out of the Miri was comparatively easy, but the removal of all that bullion to Quetta was a task of some magnitude.

It took nearly 400 camels to carry the treasure, and 400 camels cover quite a lot of ground, offering golden-or should it be silver-opportunities for a cutting-out party. Luckily we were dealing with Brahuis and not with Mahsuds. Precious little of that silver would have got out of Waziristan!

And that is the story of the Khan's Treasure. What happened to it is the secret of the Indian Government. All I know is that none of it came our way.

OVER against where we sit at table is the hole in the wall which is Tuk-Tuk's front door. It is placed some four feet from the cobbled gutter, and a primitive ladder made of slats nailed across a pole, a ladder of which many of the slats are missing, others awry, affords a precarious method of mounting from the street. Still Tuk-Tuk, being a cockerel, has an excellent sense of balance, and no laxity on the part of the human owners disturbs his ingress or egress from the hen-house. The hen-house itself is no mere henhouse. It is the corner of a human house, itself the corner of a square, or rather of a triangular place, the chief place indeed of that part of the little French village where we have our summer lodging. Nor is the hen-house only a hen-house. It is a small room on the groundfloor, unlighted and unventilated except for the hole of about the size of a brick, TukTuk's front door, but in the room are housed a colony of rabbits, enclosed in a barrel, and a hutch of young and staggering ducks.

The roof of Tuk-Tuk's residence makes a flat narrow terrace enclosed by a balcony of old and beautiful ironwork, and shaded by a thick pergola in which the grapes are already in the greyish transition be

tween green and purple, and all about the pergola the house is stained a fine blue-green with the copper sulphate spraying of the vines, sprayings intended to keep off the green-fly and other pests which the country people assert are deposited by mist. We face Tuk-Tuk's front door across a street, a street debouching from the triangular place, so that just around the corner the other door leading into the basement or basse-cour of the house is full in the place itself, the whole of which we can see from our dining-table beneath the acacia-trees.

This other door to the house of the owners of Tuk-Tuk is a semi-submerged door; you go down to it by a series of steps, for the place itself lies at a steep angle, so that the Romanly-arched lintel of the door is on a level with your knees; and as we sit at we sit at our table tasting the first mouthfuls of Mother Soltress' excellent soupe tinged with a dash or two of pinard, we watch this door with some anxiety. Indeed, the full enjoyment of our meal is delayed until that door has opened: we finish our soupe with its sodden bread-crusts; we eat our bread; we pour out glasses of red pinard, of the red wine brought in casks from the slopes about Gaillac; we eat our fresh river trout from