ill hanging upon them, though
the sledges they drew, covered with stone dust and broken pieces, were
some distance away from them. A company of half a score of children
were ascending in single file, along a slanting plane of planks, into
the hollow in the cliff upon which work had been renewed. Along the
rock-wall ahead of them a scaffold had been erected and here were men
drilling holes in the stone, or driving wooden wedges into the holes
already made, or pouring water on the wedges as the skins the children
bore were passed up to them.

Kenkenes picked his way through the debris of sticks, stones, dust and
cast-off water-skins, and serenely disregarding the stare of the
laborers, went up to the edge of the stone-pit and watched the work
with interest. A constant stream of broken stone rattled down under
the scaffold and long runlets of water fed an ever increasing pool in
the depression before the cliff. A single slab of irregular dimensions
lay on the sand at the base of a wooden chute, down which it had
descended from the hollow in the cliff the evening before. The cavity
it left bade fair to enlarge by nightfall, for the swelling wedges were
rending another slab from its bedding with loud reports and the sudden
etching of fissures.

The young sculptor noted with some wonder that the laborers were
Israelites.

After a time Kenkenes turned away and addressed one of the bearded men
at that moment, ascending the wooden plane.

"What do ye here?" he asked.

The man answered in unready Egyptian, but, for an inferior, in a manner
curiously collected.

"The Pharaoh addeth to the burden of the chosen people. We dig stone
for a temple to the war-god."

"The chosen people!" Kenkenes repeated inquiringly.

"The children of Israel," the Hebrew explained. Kenkenes lifted one
eyebrow quizzically and went his way. As he leaped up into the gorge
he vaguely realized that he had seen no trace of an encampment near the
hamlet, which he knew to be uninhabitable.

"Of a truth, the chosen people seem to follow me of late," he said to
himself as he rambled up the valley. "Meneptah must have scattered
them out of Goshen into all the corners of Egypt."

As he turned the last winding of the gorge he came upon a cluster of
some threescore tents, spread over the level pocket at the valley's
end. Almost against the northern wall the house of the commander had
been built to receive the earliest shadow of the afternoon.