right rays of Akhnaton.

"Freddy said that I am to act as a curb on your unpractical tendencies,
Mike. I felt very deceitful. He doesn't know how much I've aided and
abetted them."

"He never imagined that he'd a practical mystic for a sister, did he?"

"Never," Meg said.

"But that's what you are, dearest--a practical mystic. You are a woman
with two sides to your nature--the intensely practical and the
subconsciously mystic. Egypt has developed the mystic half--your
Lampton forbears are responsible for the other."

"The Lampton half of me keeps my two feet firmly planted on the earth,
Mike."

"The mystic half loves this silly drifter." He pressed her to him.

"The practical half says, come back to the hut and help Freddy."

And so they went.

PART II

CHAPTER I

Michael's travels in the Eastern desert had barely extended over a three
days' journey by camel and some hours spent on the Egyptian State
Railway, which runs by the banks of the Nile.

The town of Luxor lies on the right or east bank of the Nile, four
hundred and fifty miles to the south of Cairo. Tel-el-Amarna, or "The
City of the Horizon," Akhnaton's capital, lies about a hundred and sixty
miles south of Cairo. Michael could very easily have gone almost all the
way to the modern station of Tel-el-Amarna, or Haggi Kandil, by boat or
by train from Luxor, which faces the Theban Hills, in whose bowels lies
the great Theban necropolis, the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, which
had been his home for some months. But that was not his idea; he wished
to spend all his days in the solitude of the desert, so he started his
journey at a point half-way between Luxor and Tel-el-Amarna.

This was not his first pilgrimage to the eastern desert.

Luxor and Assuan both lie on the east bank of the Nile; the great Arabian
Desert in Egypt stretches from the Suez Canal to Assuan; after Assuan it
is called the Nubian Desert. The Libyan Desert stretches from Cairo to
Assuan, but on the western bank of the Nile. Michael's desire was for
the uninterrupted ocean of sand which stretches from the shores of the
Atlantic to the cliffs which give the Nile its sunsets. Its infinity of
space drew him to it.

In the desert, where a traveller begins his day at dawn and ends it at
sundown, where the slow tread of his camel is only interrupted by a short
halt for the midday meal, and the days roll on and into each other as the
sand-dunes roll on and into