"Not if it were on fire?" asked the Colonel.

Headingly laughed, and rose from his camp-stool.

"Well, it doesn't come within the provisions of the Monroe Doctrine,
Colonel," said he. "I'm beginning to realise that modern Egypt is every
bit as interesting as ancient, and that Rameses the Second wasn't the
last live man in the country."

The two Englishmen rose and yawned.

"Yes, it's a whimsical freak of fortune which has sent men from a little
island in the Atlantic to administer the land of the Pharaohs," remarked
Cecil Brown. "We shall pass away again, and never leave a trace among
these successive races who have held the country, for it is not an
Anglo-Saxon custom to write their deeds upon rocks. I dare say that the
remains of a Cairo drainage system will be our most permanent record,
unless they prove a thousand years hence that it was the work of the
Hyksos kings. But here is the shore party come back."

Down below they could hear the mellow Irish accents of Mrs. Belmont and
the deep voice of her husband, the iron-grey rifle-shot. Mr. Stuart,
the fat Birmingham clergyman, was thrashing out a question of piastres
with a noisy donkey-boy, and the others were joining in with chaff and
advice. Then the hubbub died away, the party from above came down the
ladder, there were "good-nights," the shutting of doors, and the little
steamer lay silent, dark, and motionless in the shadow of the high Halfa
bank. And beyond this one point of civilisation and of comfort there
lay the limitless, savage, unchangeable desert, straw-coloured and
dream-like in the moonlight, mottled over with the black shadows of the