covered by a hinged lid, which was held closed by a simple screwhook and eye. 

 It took but a moment to loosen this and raise the cover, when, to my utter astonishment, I discovered an ordinary telegraph instrument clicking away within. 

 “What in the world,” thought I, “is this thing doing here?” 

 That it was a French military instrument was my first guess; but really there didn’t seem much likelihood that this was the correct explanation, when one took into account the loneliness and remoteness of the spot. 

 As I sat gazing at my remarkable find, which was ticking and clicking away there in the silence of the desert night, trying to convey some message which I was unable to interpret, my eyes fell upon a bit of paper lying in the bottom of the box beside the instrument. I picked it up and examined it. Upon it were written but two letters: 

 D. I. 

 They meant nothing to me then. I was baffled. 

 Once, in an interval of silence upon the part of the receiving instrument, I moved the sending-key up and down a few times. Instantly the receiving mechanism commenced to work frantically. 

 I tried to recall something of the Morse Code, with which I had played as a little boy—but time had obliterated it from my memory. I became almost frantic as I let my imagination run riot among the possibilities for which this clicking instrument might stand. 

 Some poor devil at the unknown other end might be in dire need of succor. The very franticness of the instrument’s wild clashing betokened something of the kind. 

 And there sat I, powerless to interpret, and so powerless to help! 

 It was then that the inspiration came to me. In a flash there leaped to my mind the closing paragraphs of the story I had read in the club at Algiers: 

 Does the answer lie somewhere upon the bosom of the broad Sahara, at the ends of two tiny wires, hidden beneath a lost cairn? 

 The idea seemed preposterous. Experience and intelligence combined to assure me that there could be no slightest grain of truth or possibility in your wild tale—it was fiction pure and simple. 

 And yet where WERE the other ends of those wires? 

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