emed to be smelling death
and corruption. Ugh!"

His face changed at the memory.

"And the cries of those bats! They sounded like menacing spirits. I was
a fool to go to such a place to ask a blessing on our voyage. My attempt
at paganism was punished, and no wonder, Ruby. For I don't think I'm
really a bit of a pagan; I don't think I see much joy in the pagan life,
that is so much cracked up by some people. I don't see how the short
life and the merry one can ever be really merry at all. How can a man be
merry with a darkness always in front of him?"

"What darkness?"

"Death--without immortality."

She said nothing for a moment. Then she asked him:

"Do you look upon death merely as a door into another life?"

"I believe it is. Don't you?"

"Yes. Then you don't dread death?"

"Don't I--now? It would be leaving so much now. And besides, I love this
life; I revel in it. Who wouldn't, with health like mine? Feel that
arm!"

She did not move. He took her hand and pressed her fingers against his
muscles.

"It's like iron," she said, taking away her hand. "But muscle and health
are not exactly the same thing, are they?"

"No; of course not. But did you ever see a man look more perfectly well
than I do?"

As he stood beside her, radiant now, upright, with the breeze ruffling
his short, fair hair, his enthusiastic blue eyes shining with happiness,
he did look like a young god of health and years younger than his age.

"Oh, you look all right," she said; "just like lots of other men who go
in for sport and keep themselves fit."

He laughed.

"You won't pay me the compliment I want. Look at those barges loaded
with pottery! All those thousands of little vases--_koulal_, as the
natives call them--are made in Keneh. I've seen the men doing it--boys
too--the wet clay spinning round the brown finger that makes the
orifice. How good it is to see the life of the river! There's always
something new, always something interesting, humanity at work in the
sunshine and the open air. Who wouldn't be a fellah rather than a toiler
in any English town? Here are the shadufs! All the way up the Nile we
shall see them, and we shall hear the old shaduf songs, that sound as if
they came down from the days when they cut the Sphinx out of the living
rock, and we shall hear the drowsy song of the water-wheels, as the
sleepy oxen go round and round in the sunshine; and we shall see the
women coming in lines from the inland villag