before you reach the goal; that is to say, ransom the honor of your
future mother and wife, for how could you take an outcast into your
house?"

Paaker looked thoughtfully at the ground.

"May I inform my mistress that thou wilt save her?" asked Nemu.
"I may?--Then all will be well, for he who will devote a fortune to love
will not hesitate to devote a reed lance with a brass point to it to his
love and his hatred together."




CHAPTER XVI.

The sun had set, and darkness covered the City of the Dead, but the moon
shone above the valley of the kings' tombs, and the projecting masses of
the rocky walls of the chasm threw sharply-defined shadows. A weird
silence lay upon the desert, where yet far more life was stirring than in
the noonday hour, for now bats darted like black silken threads through
the night air, owls hovered aloft on wide-spread wings, small troops of
jackals slipped by, one following the other up the mountain slopes. From
time to time their hideous yell, or the whining laugh of the hyena, broke
the stillness of the night.

Nor was human life yet at rest in the valley of tombs. A faint light
glimmered in the cave of the sorceress Hekt, and in front of the
paraschites' but a fire was burning, which the grandmother of the sick
Uarda now and then fed with pieces of dry manure. Two men were seated in