"I am sure I shall like it, Nigel. There's no Casino, I suppose!"

"Good heavens, no! What should one do with a Casino here!"

"Oh, they sometimes have one, even in places like this. A friend of mine
who went to Biskra told me there was one there."

"Look at that, Ruby! That's better than any Casino--don't you think?"

They had turned to the left and come to the river bank.

All the Nile was flooded with gold, in which there were eddies of pale
mauve and distant flushes of a red that resembled the red on the wing of
a flamingo. The clear and radiant sky was drowned in a quivering
radiance of gold, that was like a thing alive and sensitively
palpitating. The far-off palms, the lofty river banks that framed the
Nile's upper reaches, the birds that flew south, following the direction
of the breeze, the bats that wheeled about the great columns of the
temple, the boats that with wide-spread lateen sails went southward with
the birds, were like motionless and moving jewels of black against the
vibrant gold. And the crenellated mountains of Libya, beyond Thebes and
the tombs of the Kings, stood like spectral sentinels at their posts
till the pageant should be over.

"Isn't it wonderful, Ruby?"

"Yes," she said. "Quite wonderful."

She honestly thought it superb, but the dust in her hair and in her