to your mind which may last a lifetime.

If you have not the vision you need not worry, for you will not want to
wander from the hotel lounge after your coffee to traverse these
ancient wastes.

Damaris had spent the last fortnight in helping her godmother prepare
for her tedious journey.

With the knowledge that she would have a fortnight, perhaps more, in
which there would be little else to do than to visit the ruins, she had
rushed through the principal objects of interest in the wake of a
verbose dragoman, and then given every moment of her time to her
beloved godmother, to whom she had said good-bye that very morning.

Restless and irritated by the trivial conversation of girls of her own
age and the amorous tendencies of the stronger sex of the same age and
also a good bit older, she had spent the afternoon in the hotel
grounds, waiting for the evening, when she could slip away by herself;
having realised that the best time of all in Thebes of the Hundred
Gates is at fall of night, when the shadows cast a seemly cloak over
the vulgarity of the modern buildings, and give an air of romance even
to the glittering lights of the appalling esplanade, which flaunts its
tawdry modernity cheek by jowl with the quay, built by one of the
Ptolemies, and in use even to the present day.

When the call of the _Muezzin_ from the Mosque of Abou'l-Haggag came to
her an hour before sunset she went in, bathed and dressed, and dined in
her own room. Later, she stole out, ordered her car and drove herself
along the broad tree-lined road and up the avenue of ram-headed
Sphinxes to the first pylon of the great Temple.

There she switched off the lights, hid the starting-handle under the
cushions and, tip-toeing, passed through the first pylon and up to the
broken kiosk of the Ethiopian Tahraka.

She walked quietly, though assuredly her footsteps would have been
deadened by Egypt's sands even if she had walked upon her heels, and
stole through the vestibule to the second pylon, occasionally switching
on her electric torch for fear of being tripped by fallen stone.

She had not heard of the great catastrophe which had brought the
columns hurtling to the ground, due perhaps to the merciless greed of
Ptolemy Lathyrus, or earthquake, or the well-known fact that temples,
houses or plans built upon sand are bound to crumble; nor did she wot
of the precariousness of the walls around her or the shifting
propensities of the foundations.