been that she died of some sudden illness, and, owing to the lack of embalming facilities, was buried under the shifting sands of the desert, the failure of the archives of Sheba to mention the royal demise being charged plausibly enough to existing lapses in the record of this period. So, little by little, the legends have spread broadcast over the universe, shrouding the end of Balkis in veils of impenetrable mystery. Any student of the subject is familiar with the superstitions that cluster around her name-that she sleeps to this day in some secret place and will return in her own appointed time 1; that once in every hundred years on the night preceding May Day she revisits the earth and appears in human form, the last reported materialization having taken place in 1823 on the Yale Campus, at New Haven, Connecticut.2

With such old wives' tales to embellish the issue, with so complete a dearth of historical data, so widespread a failure on the part of scholars to dispel the mystery, the human race might have continued for ever in ignorance of the solution were

1

1A belief which suggests to Steinkopf the origin of the Brunnehilda and Barbarossa myths.

'This has been officially denied by the University authorities, but persists, nonetheless, in undergraduate tradition.

it not for some extraordinary discoveries, themselves the fruit of arduous and painstaking labors, here presented to the world for the first time in this work.

"What happened to Balkis?"

Such is the question which has so vexed humanity, and at last now it can be told, and in so doing there is more that must be told.

4

In 1906 the present writer had occasion to spend several weeks in a deserted farmhouse near the fishing village of Beeswax, Maine, while passing through the tedious period of convalescence after a severe attack of temporary insanity. Left to his own resources during the long solitary evenings, he formed the habit of rummaging through the attic, searching for lost wills, hidden documents and rare books such as are not infrequently found in such repositories.

His zeal had already been rewarded by the discovery of a first folio Shakespeare, two hitherto unknown volumes by Benjamin Franklin, and a complete set of the Bowdoin College Alumni Bulletin much sought after by collectors, when in moving a large Sheraton sideboard he came

across a heavy little trunk of ancient design, the ponderous iron hinges of which had rusted and fallen apart with age.

Upon inspection, this was found to contain several thousand fragments of torn paper of different sizes and quality, closely covered with faded writing in varying colors of ink, which at a glance was seen to be in monkish Latin by the same hand. As may be imagined, such a find could only appeal as one of absorbing interest to the discoverer who forthwith purchased the farmhouse and all its contents, and set himself to the task of reconstituting the document.

After ten years of unremitting labor, guided by the various colored inks and the different textures of parchment, the writer was able to piece together the manuscript which under his hand took the form of a thick volume several hundred pages in length, the contents of which he then proceeded to translate with such eagerness of spirit as even a layman will no doubt appreciate. Judge of his disappointment, therefore, when after a feverish perusal of the thickly lettered pages the book revealed itself to be merely a school reader, in use probably in some monastic academy, and of interest only to pedagogues as will be seen from the following ex

tracts chosen at random from the body of the text:

"I have a pig, a little more piggy than other pigs. He has an understanding heart. His name is Aeschilus Aesop Aeneas Epaminondas. He waits patient waits for me at the door and makes joy squeals.

I have a lamb. His name is Genseric Attila Nebuchadnezzar Hannibal. He has needs to be clipped.

Down the road where I do live there are two tall trees. Bohunkus is the name of one, Josephus is the other.

Under the trees there does sit a dog who gives me tremblings. He has not an understanding heart. His name is Tamburlane Appolyon Theodoric Bajazet, and he gives me long crooked looks. . . ."

With a heavy heart the writer, embittered by a decade of fruitless toil, was on the point of sending the manuscript to a Boston magazine, when by the merest chance he came upon a startling discovery. On the margin of the two hundred and thirteenth page unmistakable indications of erasure were observed. A meticulous examination of other margins revealed a similar state of affairs.

The manuscript was unquestionably a palimpsest!

With renewed hope the margins were subjected page by page to all the standard tests, as a result of which it became apparent that the original writing had been done with ink made from the juice of the gall apple, which in turn had been erased with a mixture of milk, cheese and lime. Whereupon the entire volume was washed discreetly with water, and treated with dilute muriatic acid and finally with prussiate of potash.1

This task consumed two years, at the end of which a complete manuscript in an unknown tongue had emerged from beneath the superimposed Latin. What long forgotten treasure was now about to be restored to mankind-that was the question!

It was now late in the summer of 1918.

Another year was spent in the identification of this lost language, requiring, as may be imagined, the most searching investigations and comparisons, until success crowned these efforts and it became established beyond a shadow of doubt that the document was in Neurotic, a little known, and entirely extinct, dialect of central Arabia. It then became

1Tinctura Giobertina.