safety
and whatever boon thou wouldst have and for myself. What thinkest
thou? Shall I go on?"

Rachel smiled and looked up at him gratefully.

"I will go with thee, Kenkenes," she said.

Her ready confidence and the easiness of his name on her lips filled
him with joy. "Ah! ye ungentle Hathors!" he mourned to himself, "why
may I not tell her how much I love her?"

But the white hand which he pressed against his breast asked its
release with gentle reluctance, and he set it free.

Once again the silence fell and was not frequently broken thereafter.

There was no invitation in her manner, and he could not speak what he
would.

The sun dropped behind the Libyan hills and the heights filled with
shadow. At length he said:

"It is time."

Lifting her to her feet, the ape attending them, he went toward the
Nile, hand in hand with Rachel, his love all untold.

CHAPTER XX

THE TREASURE CAVE

The sudden night had just fallen, and there was an incomplete moon in
the west. But already the desert was full of feeble shadows and silver
interspaces, and all that tense silence of evening upon unpeopled
localities.

Kenkenes stood upon the top of a huge monolith, listening. Below, with
only her face in the faint moonlight, was Rachel, looking up to him.
Anubis, oppressed by the voiceless expectancy of the two young people,
crouched at his master's feet. For a while there was only the ringing
turmoil of his own quickened blood in the young man's ears. But
presently, up from the southern slope, rose the sound he had heard some
minutes before--a long, quavering note, ending in a high eery wail.

Kenkenes was familiar with the screams of wild beasts, and he knew the
irreconcilable differences between them and the human voice. Instantly
he sent back across the hollow a strong reply that the startled echoes
repeated again and again. Almost immediately the first cry was
repeated, but a desperate power had entered into it. Kenkenes dropped
from his point of vantage.

"Some one calleth, of a surety," he said, "and by the voice, it is a
woman."

"It is Deborah come up from the camp to seek for me!" Rachel exclaimed.

"I doubt not. But the gods are surely with her, to fend the beasts
from her in this savage place. It is well we came this way."

With all the haste possible on the rough slope, they descended. The
ground was familiar to Kenkenes, for the niche was near the foot of the
declivity.

Half-