pt later than the
hour which links us with the day that is past and the morrow which
holds the magic of the future.

For that half-hour only his higher self was conscious of existence, and
it was infinitely nearer to God than he was aware of. The silence of
the desert and its simplicity, which to the complex mind of Western man
is so mysterious, banished all material thoughts and even the
consciousness of his own body, and left him a naked soul, alone in the
world, encompassed with Divinity, a world whose hills and rolling sands
had known neither labour nor strife, nor the despotism of kings.

For the dead Pharaohs, lying in their tombs under the hills, in the
grandest monuments ever wrought by the vanity of man, were forgotten.
His long days of labour in their depths might never have been. Man and
his place in the universe were wiped out.

The cold was intense. Michael shivered and turned up the collar of his
coat. A faint light had appeared on the horizon, a pale streak like a
silver thread, which widened and widened until it spread into the
higher heavens; with its spreading the indefinite forms of moving
figures appeared--ghostly figures of dawn.

Michael knew that they would appear; he knew that, just as soon as the
streak of light grew in width from a faint thread to a wider band, he
would see them, dignified, stately figures, like white-robed priests,
walking desertwards from the horizon to his tent.

Although he had seen the same figures every morning for some months, he
was not tired of watching them. It always gave him pleasure to recall
how vividly they had at first reminded him of the pictures, familiar to
him as a boy, of the Wise Men following the star in the east. But
these were not wise men coming to pay homage or bring presents to the
Galilean Babe who came to be called the Prince of Peace; they were the
Mohammedan workmen who were employed by the Exploration School to which
Michael Amory had attached himself; their labour was confined to the
rougher preliminary digging and the clearing away of the accumulation
of sand and debris on sites which had been selected for excavation.

As the dawn slipped back and counted itself with the years that are
spent and the first yellow gleam appeared in the sky, Michael saw the
tall figures go down on their knees and press their foreheads to the
sand. It was their third prayer of the day: devout Mohammedans begin
their new day at sunset; their second pra