his statue.

The place was strewn with tolerably regular fragments, and the building
of a segment of wall to the north at the edge of the matting required
more time than strength or skill. He built solidly against the
penetrative sand, and as high as his head. The early afternoon blazed
upon him and passed into the mellower hours of the later day before he
had finished. He hid his shovel and two cylindrical billets of wood,
such as were used to roll great weights, under the edge of his reed
carpet, and his preparations were complete. He wiped his brow,
congratulating himself on the snugness of his retreat and the
auspicious beginning of his transgression.

Weary and happy, he rowed himself back to Memphis and slept soundly on
the eve of a great offense against the laws of Egypt.

But the next day, when the young sculptor faced the moment of actual
creation, he realized that his goddess must take form from an
unembodied idea. The ritual had been his guide before, and his genius,
set free to soar as it would, fluttered wildly without direction. His
visions were troubled with glamours of the old conventional forms; his
idea tantalized him with glimpses of its perfect self too fleeting for
him to grasp. The sensation was not new to him. During his maturer
years he had tried to remember his mother's face with the same yearning
and heart-hurting disappointment. But this time he groped after
attributes which should shape the features--he had spirit, not form, in
mind; and the odds against which his unguided genius must battle were
too heroic for it to succeed without aid. The young sculptor realized
that he was in need of a model. Stoically, he admitted that such a
thing was as impossible as it was indispensable. It seemed that he had
met complete bafflement.

He took up his tools and returned to Memphis. But each succeeding
morning found him in the desert again, desperately hopeful--each
succeeding evening, in the city disheartened and silent.

So it followed for several days.

On the sixth of January the festival in honor of the return of Isis
from Phenicia was celebrated in Memphis. Kenkenes left the revel in
mid-afternoon and crossed the Nile to the hills. He found no content
away from his block of stone--no happiness before it. But he wandered
back to the seclusion of the niche that he might be moody and sad of
eye in all security.

The stone-pits were deserted. The festivities in Memphis had ext