[continuation of last summary]

A few days have passed, and trials and tribulations overcome. As you probably know, the air in the city has been.... tense... with the conflicts between Egyptian (students? protesters? both? stories vary) and British soldiers. A few of us thought it wise to try walnut juice baths to darken our skin; it seems to have made us slightly less conspicuous.

Our dapper friend did some more investigation of the Carlyle Expedition; he discovered more of the same types of rumors we'd already heard. There were rumors of great finds at Dashur; Carlyle and Miss Masters were very ill; things were tense towards the end of their stay in Cairo. As far as our friend's informant was concerned, Ms. Bune was a 'hired woman' that Carlyle brought with him. He did gain the name of the expedition's supplier, though: Omar Shatki.

Later that day, our dapper friend and W. went to Omar's place of business (he's in the cotton business, and aids expeditions 'on the side'). The secretary suggested going to Mr. Shatki's house up-river. It's about 10 miles North of Cairo on the Nile.

Figuring Omar may well be involved with our enemies, we searched more at the American and British embassies. He was described at both as having impeccable manners and being a very astute businessman; things said about him were quite positive. Interestingly enough, both had experienced fires recently that took out all mention of him from their directives. Hmmmm. (And one of the expeditions he's currently helping is the Clyve expedition.)

While our dapper friend was making his initial forays, some of the rest of us went to our contact's house and discovered that he was missing. Quite worried, we gained the names of places we could start looking (mosques, some of the seedier coffee bars). Since one of the things he was investigating for us is the antiquities seller Faraz Najir, we thought we'd do a little investigation on that front as well. He seems remarkably well-regarded; the only people we talked to that had anything bad at all to say were his competitors. Those who did not have a vested interest in stealing our business from him described him as an extremely devout and honest man who had a total change of heart when his shop burned down. (Apparently, and not surprisingly, he used to make his money by basically scamming tourists and other such things.)

Heartened by such news, we decided to ask Najir for aid fairly directly. We didn't quite understand the depth of his change of heart, though; at mention of involvement with Carlyle two of our number were forcibly removed from the shop. Najir went into hiding in a back room, and a large man removed them and closed the shop up completely. A. managed to slip a note explaining that we were not in any way allied with Carlyle and in fact needed Najir's help under the door. We hope to return soon, as that is our best lead to date.

[Our contact in Cairo eventually caught up with us again.]

We also discovered something disturbing about A.; while he was out, he somehow fell asleep, and then woke up and re-joined us (with a radically different viewpoint about magic). When some of us confronted him about his change of heart, he admitted that he didn't remember falling asleep. Subsequent questioning of area candy vendors gave us the answer: he didn't fall asleep. He was sitting on the park bench, a black man in black robes came up to him, they talked, the black man left, and after a little while, A. left. Most disturbing.

Though I realize now how this sounds on top of that last paragraph, A. had a magical success these past few days. He finally tried the shapeshifting spell we procured from London. While it was highly disturbing to watch, I must say that it proved quite useful. For a few days, A. passed exactly as a native. (This proved to be quite useful.)

A few of us did a bit more direct investigation of Mr. Shatki; we drove to near his house at night, and then sneaked around his compound for the rest of the night, watching. His grounds include a large house, garage, stables, dock, and quarters for his cotton workers (perhaps 75 of them? that number seems rather small, but they are all we saw.). There were no visible guards, but the dockhouse seems an ideal set-up for smuggling, so there must be some sort of security. We didn't really discover anything more than that.

That's it, really. More frustrating days and little information to share. At least we are still in good health.

Yours-

[Summary of a second letter, given to Saul for safekeeping]

This missive contains the details of our meeting with our new potential allies. At their request, I did not mention them to Hatch. However, for those who come after us, transfer of information is important.

(At the time of this writing, Bloch does not know of our contact with them. Saul indicated that we should let them know about him and wait for them to contact him themselves.)

So. Saul, when he was missing, was passing some sort of test. The sons eventually decided that they wanted to meet with us, and arranged a meeting through Saul. On my life, I have no idea even remotely where we met. We eventually wound up at a coffeehouse, where we waited for approximately 4 hours before we were contacted. We told them quite a bit about ourselves. Eventually, they were satisfied that we were telling the truth and trustworthy enough, and invited us to one of their hide-outs to discuss things further.

We met 3 people; a man called Nigil, a man called Kalfour, and a man called Kareem. Kareem can be found at the Mosque library at the University. However, I would strongly suggest against this unless there is no other alternative. Much better would be to try and get Saul to arrange things, I think.