life!' I cried, still louder; for it is not
often that one has a chance of impressing a Pharaoh.' We must face them
with open eyes and an open mind! Did _you_?'

'I had no opportunity of avoiding them,' he replied. 'I broke every
convention in my land.'

'Oh, noble! And what happened?'

'What happens when you strip the cover off a hornet's nest? The raw
fact of life is that mankind is just a little lower than the angels, and
the conventions are based on that fact in order that men may become
angels. But if you begin, as I did, by the convention that men are
angels they will assuredly become bigger beasts than ever.'

'That,' I said firmly, 'is altogether out-of-date. You should have
brought a larger mentality, a more vital uplift, and--er--all that sort
of thing, to bear on--all that sort of thing, you know.'

'I did,' said Ahkenaton gloomily. 'It broke me!' And he, too, went dumb
among the ruins.

There is a valley of rocks and stones in every shade of red and brown,
called the Valley of the Kings, where a little oil-engine coughs behind
its hand all day long, grinding electricity to light the faces of dead
Pharaohs a hundred feet underground. All down the valley, during the
tourist season, stand char-a-bancs and donkeys and sand-carts, with here
and there exhausted couples who have dropped out of the processions and
glisten and fan themselves in some scrap of shade. Along the sides of
the valley are the tombs of the kings neatly numbered, as it might be
mining adits with concrete steps leading up to them, and iron grilles
that lock of nights, and doorkeepers of the Department of Antiquities
demanding the proper tickets. One enters, and from deeps below deeps
hears the voices of dragomans booming through the names and titles of
the illustrious and thrice-puissant dead. Rock-cut steps go down into
hot, still darkness, passages-twist and are led over blind pits which,
men say, the wise builders childishly hoped would be taken for the real
tombs by thieves to come. Up and down these alley-ways clatter all the
races of Europe with a solid backing of the United States. Their
footsteps are suddenly blunted on the floor of a hall paved with
immemorial dust that will never dance in any wind. They peer up at the
blazoned ceilings, stoop down to the minutely decorated walls, crane and
follow the sombre splendours of a cornice, draw in their breaths and
climb up again to the fierce sunshine to re-dive into the next adit on