Over the mounds of rubbish the bearers had resumed their slow
procession, a picturesque frieze of tattered, indigo-robed, ebony
figures, baskets on heads, against a cloudless cobalt sky, and again
the hot air was invaded with the monotonous rise and fall of their
labor chant.

A man with a short, pointed red beard and an academic face beneath a
pith helmet was stooping over the siftings from those baskets,
intent upon the stream of sand through the wire screens. Patiently
he discarded the unending pebbles, discovering at rare intervals
some lost bead, some splinter of old sycamore wood, some fragment of
pottery in which a Ptolemy had sipped his wine--or a kitchen wench
had soaked her lentils.

Beyond the man were traces of the native camp, a burnt-out fire, a
roll of rags, a tattered shelter cloth stuck on two tottering
sticks, and distributed indiscriminatingly were a tethered goat, a
white donkey with motionless, drooping ears, and a few supercilious
camels.

The camp was in the center of a broken line of foothills on the
desert's edge. North and south and west the wide sands swept out to
meet the sky, and to the east, shutting out the Nile valley, the
hills reared their red rock from the yellow drift.

Among the jutting rock in the foreground yawned dark mouths that
were the entrances of the discovered tombs, and within one of these
tombs was another white man. He was conducting his own siftings in
high solitude, a lean, bronzed young man, with dark hair and eyes
and, at the present moment, an unexhilarated expression.