Action Mundy, Talbot: The Mystery of Kufu's Tomb V1. 22-AUG-2010

[weatherwax]

Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon) (April 23, 1879 – August 5, 1940) was an English writer. He also wrote under the pseudonym Walter Galt.
Born in London, at age 16 he ran away from home and began an odyssey in India, Africa, and other parts of the Near and Far East. By age 29, he had begun using the name Talbot Mundy, and a year later arrived in the United States, starting his writing career in 1911.
His first published work was the short story "Pig-Sticking in India", which describes a popular, though now outlawed, sport practiced by British forces. Many of his novels, including his first novel Rung Ho!, and his most famous work King of the Khyber Rifles, are set in India under British Occupation in which the loyal British officers encounter ancient Indian mysticism. The novels portray the citizens of Imperial India as enigmatic, romantic and powerful. His British characters have many encounters with the mysterious Thugee Cults. The long buildup to the introduction of his Indian Princess Yasmini and the scenes among the outlaws in the Khinjan Caves clearly influenced fantasy writers Robert E. Howard and Leigh Brackett. Other science-fiction and fantasy writers who cited Mundy as an influence included Robert A. Heinlein, E. Hoffmann Price, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton, H. Warner Munn, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Daniel Easterman. James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon was partly inspired by Mundy's work.

Beginning in the late 1920s Mundy wrote a number of stories about Tros of Samothrace, a Greek freedom fighter who aided Britons and Druids in their fight against Julius Caesar.
Source: Wikipedia

Excerpt:

Khufu was king of Upper and Lower Egypt in those days. Cash dividends did not trouble him much, for he had the taxes to draw on and auditors passed his vouchers without comment. Consequently the man in the street of to-day might be paying higher taxes on account of old Khufu, if Joan Angela Leich hadn't just contrived to miss me with her Ford one dark night on the Geiger Trail; which sounds incredible.
But so is Joan Angela incredible; I'm coming to her presently. Everybody knows her who isn't fenced in by apartment-house blocks. If she had pushed me over the edge of the Geiger that night, you, who read this, would be paying for more armaments.
But it was Khufu who started the trouble. He is better known to fame as Cheops, and we know pretty well what he looked like.

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[The Maverick]

This one also appears to be missing the last chapter, Chapter XVII.