"Why does this valley, with its pink sunlight, make talking out of the question?" Margaret at last said. "Please forgive me if I am a very poor companion."

Michael, who had been glad that she had not spoken--he would not have liked her so well if she had--said, "Please don't feel compelled to talk. I came to help you if you needed help, not to bother you or spoil your enjoyment."

"Thank you," she said. "I simply couldn't talk. Does one enjoy Egypt?" she asked the question pertinently.

They rode on in silence again and Michael was pleased that temperamentally she seemed to "feel" Egypt. There had been no suggestion of psychic influence in her very evident acceptance of the power of Egypt--just a simple awe, which was to Michael absolutely natural.

Presently she said, "Does my brother live all alone in this valley?"

"Practically alone, for some months in each year. I am with him just now, and in the daytime there are the workmen. At night he is alone with his two Sudanese house-servants; but he is well protected--his watch-dogs sit round his hut and nothing human would dare venture near them after dark."

Margaret tried to laugh. "Dogs!" she said. "Dogs couldn't keep off this"--she indicated the valley.

Michael knew what she meant. Not a green blade of gra.s.s, not the smallest patch of herb was visible. To Margaret they seemed to be floating rather than riding through the pink light of another world.

"No, not this," Michael said. "But your brother's a marvel. I couldn't do it. Yet even he has to leave it now and then; sometimes he spends a night in frivolling in Luxor or a.s.suan."

As the vision of Luxor hotels, with their company of fashionably-clothed and overfed tourists, rose up before the girl, she laughed more naturally. But in the valley her laughter sounded wrong; she quickly hushed it.

"Fancy Luxor hotels after this! It certainly is going to extremes--personally, their society would bore me, but I should think that it was good for Freddy."

"Quite necessary," Michael said. "And he's awfully popular at the dances. I often wonder what some of his partners would say if they could see him as I do, pick in hand, down in the bowels of the earth or under the blazing sun of the desert, for days and days on end! Your brother's quite wonderful."

"I'm longing to see him at work," Margaret said. "I think his life sounds most exciting and interesting."

"Don't expect too much--it is amazingly interesting, but we don't open a tomb of Queen Thi every day."

"What tomb was that? Something very special?"

"Yes, very." Michael said the words very simply, but it struck him as odd that Freddy's sister should never have even heard of the tomb of Queen Thi. "At the present time he has just unearthed a small staircase in the sand and a bit of a brick wall, which may lead to the tomb he is looking for, or they may end in nothing, for sometimes the ancient tomb-builders began to dig and work upon a tomb and eventually abandoned the site as hopeless--the sand was too soft, which meant the constant falling of sand before they struck a foundation of rock, or for some other reason--so after days and days of excavating we find that the whole thing is a fraud, just the mere beginning of a tomb which was never finished. Then other times he finds a tomb and after endless work at it--you can't imagine how much work it entails--he discovers that it was robbed of every single thing of value, probably by the s.e.xton who was in charge of it when it was first built--all the jewels and scarabs and things had been looted; probably they were stolen only a few weeks after the mummy was laid in it."

Margaret remained silent. She was thinking and thinking, new and bewildering thoughts were rushing through her mind Before she could in the least appreciate this new life what a lot she had to learn!

"An excavator's life isn't a bed of roses--it doesn't consist picking up jewels and mummy-beads and beautiful amulets and rare scarabs and valuable parchments in every tomb which is opened. It's hard, hard work, with any amount of boring, minute detail and scientific work attached to it."

Margaret thought for a moment. To speak at all upon a subject of which she knew absolutely nothing was not in her nature.

"Shall we pa.s.s any tombs? Where are they?" She had expected to see some ruins of fallen buildings, or monuments which resembled the tombs in "The Street of Tombs" at Athens--these were familiar to her from photographs. Here there was absolutely nothing, nothing to suggest that great tombs had ever been there.

"They are below us," Michael said, "and all around us, under these pink rocks, buried like coal-mines. Where your brother is digging just now the site is rather different--it is flatter and less beautiful; it is in a small side valley. They were terribly anxious to hide themselves, poor things, to get away from robbers."

"Oh, I'm so glad I came!" Margaret said, irrelevantly, and the deep sigh she gave terminated their conversation.

Michael knew quite well the nature of her thoughts and the turbulent fight for expression which they must be causing her. No creature as sensitively attuned as he judged her to be could journey for the first time unmoved through the valley which to him summed up the word Egypt.

He allowed her to ride a few paces ahead, just behind the Sheikh. The camel's arrogant head, with its supercilious gaze, towered above them.

To Margaret, Michael Amory and herself were still an offence in the valley. The camel, with the high-seated, turbaned Sheikh, seemed a part of the whole. The animal, with its prehistoric loneliness of expression, the Sheikh, with his splendid deportment and benign loftiness of manner, suited the dignity of their surroundings. The camel's gaze, as its head reached up higher and higher to view some object which interested its supercilious mind, made Margaret feel very small and vulgarly modern. She was glad that she was riding a humble a.s.s. The way the Sheikh rode his haughty animal provoked her admiration; it was to her after the manner in which the British aristocracy treat their powdered and silk-stockinged menservants.

Margaret felt more at ease on her white donkey, just as she felt more at ease with pleasant English maidservants than with pompous powdered footmen. It was a ridiculous simile, but it is the ridiculous which invades the mind in sublime moments.

While Margaret was finding pleasure in watching the camel and the Sheikh, or rather, while they were taking their place in her mind with the air and the sky and the hills and the valley, Michael was certainly enjoying himself in a more definite criticism of Freddy's sister. He remembered his friend's remark, "Oh, Meg's all right," and he knew what he meant.

Her long limbs and boyish figure delighted his artistic eye, while the white topee hat, with the long blue veil, failed to hide the attractive carriage of her head. He felt impatient to see her unhatted and unveiled. Certainly she was not dowdy, nor had she any aggressive cleverness about her. Indeed, there was something which suggested a man's directness of mind and a simplicity which was quite unusual and fascinating. He could almost have laughed aloud when he thought of the picture which he had conjured up to himself of the Meg who could "tackle pretty stiff stuff and suck the guts out of a book like a weasel sucking the blood out of a rabbit."

The dowdy "blue stocking" had vanished, and in her place was a girl as attractive in her darkness as Freddy was in his fairness.

And so they rode on and on through the Theban hills, bathed in pink sunlight. The donkey-boys had fallen behind. Their first enthusiastic effort to show off before the honourable Sitt had quite subsided. They were discussing her now, in none too delicate a fashion. The elder of the two boys, who was the son of a dragoman, and hoped one day to develop into as resplendent a being as his father, was in his way a great reader. He had just finished an Arabic translation of a French novel and he was picturing to his friends Margaret as the heroine of the obscene romance. Poor Margaret!

In Egypt the Arabic translations of low-cla.s.s French romances, rendered even more unclean by their translation, have a poisonous effect upon the minds of the youths who devour them. Margaret, who had admired the boy's brilliant smiles and beautiful features and teeth, which were even whiter and more attractive than her brother's, little dreamed, as they tell behind and talked together, of the nature of their conversation.

Their blue shirts looked like turquoise in the sunlight, and their little white crochet skull-caps showed to advantage the fine outline of their dark heads. They were certainly handsome young rascals, with an inherited grace of manner.

How her clean, healthy mind would have abhorred and hated them if she had understood their ceaseless chatter! It was like the noise of starlings on a spring morning. In Egypt, where ignorance is bliss, it is certainly folly to be wise. In the East, the inquiring mind, especially in domestic matters, is often its own enemy.

To Margaret, Egypt held for the time being nothing which was unclean or unlovely, nothing which was bettered by ignorance. She was lost in its light and mystery. In the Theban valley it seemed as if she would live on light, that it would supply food for both soul and body. In Egypt G.o.d is made manifest in the sun.

CHAPTER III

Margaret had been shown over the "estate"; her modest luggage had been deposited in her bedroom, in which she was now standing, with her arm linked in her brother's.

When she had approved of everything and had told him about her journey, she gave his arm a little hug.

"Oh, Freddy, it's good to be with you again! You were a brick to let me come."

Freddy slid his arm round her shoulders and pressed her closer to him.

"It's topping having you, old girl, but you mustn't mind if I leave you an awful lot alone--I can't help it."

"I know you can't, and if I stew up a bit, you may find work which I can do. I'd love to help."

"Oh, don't fear--I'll find lots for you to do."

She looked at him eagerly, with a touching humility. "What sort of work?"

"Cleaning and sorting out the small finds which the workmen bring in each night, and you could help Mike to do some copying--it's not difficult, and sometimes the colours vanish when they are exposed to the light. He can't get the things done all at one time."

"I see," Margaret said, but in her mind there was a horrible jumble.

"Sometimes I want Mike to help me--we're awfully short of hands just now--I mean, for hands that you can absolutely trust, so if you get into the thing you could do some of Mike's work and let him off."

"I'd love to, and you know my capability as well as anyone, so if you think I could I'll do my best."

"You'll soon know as much as Mike did when he came here, and your painting's all right."

"How nice Mike is!" she said simply.

"He's one of the best."