--who
could resist the challenge of that lone and kingly column that remained?
I landed securely as before, then turned about. Her face had not lifted
an instant from the awful majesty of the Orient.

Slowly, wearily, the immense moon came shouldering up through the seas
of yellow sand. These billows of sand seemed to breathe and move. The
expiring heat of the departed sun made them scintillate and shimmer in a
soft and undulating light. And yet it was not light; only the lone and
solemn ghost of a departed day. Yellow and huge and startling stood the
moon at last, full grown and fearful in its nearness and immensity on
the topmost lift of yellow sands in the yellow seas before us. Distance
seemed to be annihilated. The moon seemed to have forgotten her place
and all proportion. Looking down into the sullen Nile, it seemed a black
and bottomless chasm. And it seemed so far away! And the moon so very
near.

Black as blackest Egypt rolled the somber Nile down and on and on
through this world of yellow light; this light that was not light.
Silence, desolation, death lay on all things below, about, above. The
west was molten yellow gold, faint and fading, it is true: but where the
yellow sands left off and the yellow skies began no man could say or
guess, save by the yellow stars that studded the west with an intense
yellow.

Yellow to the right and yellow to the left, yellow overhead and yellow
underfoot; with only this endless chasm of Erebus cleaving the yellow
earth in halves with its bottomless pit of endless and indissoluble
blackness.

After a time--and all the world still one sea of softened yellow, torn
in two by Charon's chasm of black waters--I silently leaped back,
replaced my boots on my feet and then held my breath. For I had seen, or
perhaps felt, an object move on the lifted levels of sand between us and
the moon.

Cautiously I sank down on my breast and peered low and long up the
horizon. I saw, heard nothing. Glancing around to where my companion
lay, I saw that she still had not stirred from the half reclining
position she had first taken, with half lifted face in her upturned
palm.

Then she had seen nothing, heard nothing. This, however, did not argue
much. Her life had not been of the desert. She had spent her years in
the study of men and women. I had spent mine with wild beasts. I could
trust her to detect motives in men, give the warning note of danger from
dangerous men; but the wild beast