were hung behind them, and through a break of cloud fringing the horizon
a yellow glow poured, to touch the tips of the pyramids with poignant
splendour. But farther over to the right, where Cairo lay, there hung a
bluish mist, palpable and delicate, out of which emerged the vast
pyramids of Cheops; and beside it the smiling inscrutable Sphinx faced
the changeless centuries. Beyond the pyramids the mist deepened into a
vast deep cloud of blue and purple, which seemed the end to some mystic
highway untravelled by the sons of men.

Suddenly there swept over David a wave of feeling such as had passed over
Kaid, though of a different nature. Those who had built the pyramids
were gone, Cheops and Thotmes and Amenhotep and Chefron and the rest.
There had been reformers in those lost races; one age had sought to
better the last, one man had toiled to save--yet there only remained
offensive bundles of mummied flesh and bone and a handful of relics in
tombs fifty centuries old. Was it all, then, futile? Did it matter,
then, whether one man laboured or a race aspired?

Only for a moment these thoughts passed through his mind; and then, as
the glow through the broken cloud on the opposite horizon suddenly faded,
and veils of melancholy fell over the desert and the river and the palms,
there rose a call, sweetly shrill, undoubtingly insistent. Sunset had
come, and, with it, the Muezzin's call to prayer from the minaret of a
mosque hard by.

David was conscious of a movement behind him--that Kaid was praying with
hands uplifted; and out on the sands between the window and the river he
saw kneeling figures here and there, saw the camel-drivers halt their
trains, and face the East with hands uplifted. The call went on--"La
ilaha illa-llah !"