k figures gliding towards the river, or a
little train of camels making for the bare grey hills from the ghiassas
which had given them their desert loads. The course of the Nile was
marked by a wide fringe of palms showing blue and purple, friendly and
ancient and solitary. Beyond the river and the palms lay the grey-brown
desert, faintly touched with red. So clear was the sweet evening air
that the irregular surface of the desert showed for a score of miles as
plainly as though it were but a step away. Hummocks of sand--tombs and
fallen monuments gave a feeling as of forgotten and buried peoples; and
the two vast pyramids of Sakkarah stood up in the plaintive glow of
the evening skies, majestic and solemn, faithful to the dissolved and
absorbed races who had built them. Curtains of mauve and saffron-red
were hung behind them, and through a break of cloud fringing the horizon
a yellow glow poured, to touch the tips of the pyramids with poignant
splendour. But farther over to the right, where Cairo lay, there hung
a bluish mist, palpable and delicate, out of which emerged the vast
pyramids of Cheops; and beside it the smiling inscrutable Sphinx faced
the changeless centuries. Beyond the pyramids the mist deepened into a
vast deep cloud of blue and purple, which seemed the end to some mystic
highway untravelled by the sons of men.

Suddenly there swept over David a wave of feeling such as had passed
over Kaid, though of a different nature. Those who had built the
pyramids were gone, Cheops and Thotmes and Amenhotep and Chefron and the
rest. There had been reformers in those lost races; one age had sought
to better the last, one man had toiled to save--yet there only remained
offensive bundles of mummied flesh and bone and a handful of relics
in tombs fifty centuries old. Was it all, then, futile? Did it matter,
then, whether one man laboured or a race aspired?

Only for a moment these thoughts passed through his mind; and then,
as the glow through the broken cloud on the opposite horizon suddenly
faded, and veils of melancholy fell over the desert and the river and
the palms, there rose a call, sweetly shrill, undoubtingly insistent.
Sunset had come, and, with it, the Muezzin's call to prayer from the
minaret of a mosque hard by.

David was conscious of a movement behind him--that Kaid was praying with
hands uplifted; and out on the sands between the window and the river
he saw kneeling figures here and there, saw the c