makes one, so that at
the end of every week they both rise together, but on opposite sides of
the horizon, which is the signal for that night to be disregarded in the
count. The next week begins on the following morning, the first rising
of the larger moon being disregarded, and her second rising being the
one reckoned from."

We were discussing this during our noon-day meal, and, when we had
finished, I walked with the doctor out to the plateau, where I was
supervising some important work on the Gnomons; for I had not been ten
days in Kem until I attempted to buy, with my gold coins, a large amount
of wheat from the Pharaoh. Through the interference and objection of
Zaphnath, however, I failed utterly in getting any. But the gold had its
effect just the same, and later the Pharaoh showed an evident
willingness to part with anything in his possession in order to get a
liberal number of the smaller coins. But I put a very high value upon
the gold, comparing closely with the worth of diamonds upon Earth, and
refused to part with any, until one day the wisdom of buying the Gnomons
occurred to me. I considered the project carefully, and finally made him
an offer of a hundred half-eagles for them. Many of the small ones had
been built to watch the course of the birth-stars of his various
ancestors, and these were now in a sense monuments to his dynasty. He
reserved these and a small one, built to observe his own star of
nativity, and finally sold me all the large important ones, upon the
doctor's representation that they were no longer needed for astronomical
purposes. He specified only that they must not be torn down, but that I
might use them as I should see fit.

As I have said before, the Gnomons contained numerous large, long
chambers, and it only became necessary to put a permanent bottom in
these to convert them into enormous warehouses. All the storage places
inside the city were rapidly filling with grain, which poured in at
every gate on tens of thousands of mules. The plenteous crop, already
ripening, would have to be housed somewhere, and even if I did not
succeed in buying a large store of grain for myself, I knew how to make
a storehouse eat up a large portion of the value of the grain it housed.
I had seen wheat, stored year after year, finally become the property of
the elevator owner, by virtue of his charges.

I was not only putting a bottom to the storage chambers, but converting
the inclined slopes of