soar through the sky and see the face of the beloved; I shall obtain
love enough for a year and will return, O dove, in a day.' The night!
The night! O those sweet hands! Gather of the dewy peach! Whence
were ye, and whence were we, when ye ensnared us?"

The Arab who was singing it was considered quite a musician amongst his
fellow-workmen. He had earned his living for some years by singing
love-songs on the small boats which drift up and down the Nile and in
the cafes in Luxor. To English ears his talents as a singer would not
have been recognized; the particular qualities which ensured the
approval of his native audience would have caused much laughter in an
English music-hall. Freddy Lampton, who knew something of Arab music,
was able to recognize the singer's talents, but he was not near enough
to hear the grunts of intense satisfaction and longing which the song
was calling forth from the blue-shirted _fellahin_.

And so the hours of the morning wore on, until the sun was too powerful
to allow even the natives to work, and Freddy Lampton wandered off to
the tomb in which his friend was painting. The _fellahin_ instantly
untied the bundles which held their simple food and began their midday
meal. Many of them prayed before eating; many of them did not.

When the meal was eaten, each man sought some vestige of shade, behind
a mound of rock or an ash-heap of debris, or in the excavated channels
of the site; there with full stomach and contented mind he would lay
himself down to sleep, amid the heap of ruins which thousands of years
ago had been the field of vast numbers of toilers, such as were he and
his fellow-toilers, slaving for the glorification of an absolute
monarch, whose kingdom was the civilized world. He cared not one jot
nor tittle for what he had uncovered or what secrets the valley or
hills had hidden from men for countless centuries. Filling baskets
full of rubbish was his work, his method of earning a living, and it
mattered nothing to him whether the rubbish was culled from the golden
sand of the most wonderful valley in the world, or thrown out of the
filthy ashbins in the native city of Cairo. Toil was all one thing to
him; it had no interest, it suggested no varieties. Allah had willed
it. The clear blue sky and the sunlit hills, with their tombs and
tombs and endless tombs stretching further and further into the western
valley, they, too, were Allah's will, as were the dark, evil-