was laid in it."

Margaret remained silent. She was thinking and thinking, new and
bewildering thoughts were rushing through her mind Before she could in
the least appreciate this new life what a lot she had to learn!

"An excavator's life isn't a bed of roses--it doesn't consist picking
up jewels and mummy-beads and beautiful amulets and rare scarabs and
valuable parchments in every tomb which is opened. It's hard, hard
work, with any amount of boring, minute detail and scientific work
attached to it."

Margaret thought for a moment. To speak at all upon a subject of which
she knew absolutely nothing was not in her nature.

"Shall we pass any tombs? Where are they?" She had expected to see
some ruins of fallen buildings, or monuments which resembled the tombs
in "The Street of Tombs" at Athens--these were familiar to her from
photographs. Here there was absolutely nothing, nothing to suggest
that great tombs had ever been there.

"They are below us," Michael said, "and all around us, under these pink
rocks, buried like coal-mines. Where your brother is digging just now
the site is rather different--it is flatter and less beautiful; it is
in a small side valley. They were terribly anxious to hide themselves,
poor things, to get away from robbers."

"Oh, I'm so glad I came!" Margaret said, irrelevantly, and the deep
sigh she gave terminated their conversation.

Michael knew quite well the nature of her thoughts and the turbulent
fight for expression which they must be causing her. No creature as
sensitively attuned as he judged her to be could journey for the first
time unmoved through the valley which to him summed up the word Egypt.
He allowed her to ride a few paces ahead, just behind the Sheikh. The
camel's arrogant head, with its supercilious gaze, towered above them.
To Margaret, Michael Amory and herself were still an offence in the
valley. The camel, with the high-seated, turbaned Sheikh, seemed a
part of the whole. The animal, with its prehistoric loneliness of
expression, the Sheikh, with his splendid deportment and benign
loftiness of manner, suited the dignity of their surroundings. The
camel's gaze, as its head reached up higher and higher to view some
object which interested its supercilious mind, made Margaret feel very
small and vulgarly modern. She was glad that she was riding a humble
ass. The way the Sheikh rode his haughty animal provoked her
admiration; it was to her after the