ant
virginal atmosphere.

Freddy came back to the sitting-room, evidently satisfied. His quick
eye had noticed that the "boy" had carried out his orders.

"Meg's an awful girl for books," he said, as he carried off a bundle of
yellow-paper-bound French novels and one or two volumes of the Temple
Classics to her room.

"She'd better begin on this," he said, as he returned in search of
still more. "She can't do better"--he lifted up the weighty tome of
Maspero's _Dawn of Civilization_.

"A bit dry, isn't it, for a beginner?"

"Not for Meg," Freddy said. "She can tackle pretty stiff stuff. At
college she used to suck the guts out of a book like a weasel sucking
blood from a rabbit."

"Blue stocking!" Michael said to himself. He abhorred the type of
ardent, eager, studious woman with whom he had come in contact during
his university life. "Able and abominable" he called them.

In less than ten minutes the two companions had separated; the one,
with his paint-box and camp-stool in his hand, made his way to the tomb
where he was copying with delicate and extraordinary exactitude the
exquisite figures and heads painted on the walls and pillars of the
vast building; the other directed his steps to the site where the band
of native excavators was already at work.

What a strange sight it presented in the brilliant morning sunshine!
To the untutored eye nothing more or less than a vast rubbish-heap of
sand and stones and broken rocks, with here and there patches of
sparsely-clad natives working away with pickaxes and the tall figure of
a white-robed _gaphir_, standing on a hillock of sand, watching them
with unremitting care. On the sides of the vast ashpits long lines of
"boys," toiling like ants up steep inclines, were carrying rush-baskets
full of rubbish on their shoulders.

Yet these ignorant _fellahin_ were playing their part, and an
indispensable one, in laying bare to modern eyes the history of the
world's first civilization. This vast rubbish-heap, where men with
pickaxes and boys with baskets, full of the dust and sand of ages,
toiled from dawn until sunset, would in the course of time yield
perhaps to the Egyptologist one of the long-looked-for links in the
lost centuries of Egypt's story, or be transformed into a wonderful
picture-gallery of Egyptian art.

Nothing could look less inviting, less interesting, as Freddy
approached it, for as yet there was little or nothing for the untutored
eye to s