"And Nahoum also--and Nahoum," he said presently. "Read this," he added,
and put a letter from Nahoum into Ebn Ezra's hand.

Lacey reverently covered Achmet's face. "Say, he got what he wanted," he
said again.




CHAPTER XLII

THE LOOM OF DESTINY

It was many a day since the Duchess of Snowdon had seen a sunrise, and
the one on which she now gazed from the deck of the dahabieh Nefert,
filled her with a strange new sense of discovery and revelation. Her
perceptions were arrested and a little confused, and yet the undercurrent
of feeling was one of delight and rejuvenation. Why did this sunrise
bring back, all at once, the day when her one lost child was born, and
she looked out of the windows of Snowdon Hall, as she lay still and
nerveless, and thought how wonderful and sweet and green was the world
she saw and the sky that walled it round? Sunrise over the Greek Temple
of Philae and the splendid ruins of a farther time towering beside it!
In her sight were the wide, islanded Nile, where Cleopatra loitered with
Antony, the foaming, crashing cataracts above, the great quarries from
which ancient temples had been hewed, unfinished obelisks and vast blocks
of stone left where bygone workmen had forsaken them, when the invader
came and another dynasty disappeared into that partial oblivion from
which the Egyptian still emerges triumphant over all his conquerors,
unchanged in form and feature. Something of its meaning got into her