rumbling remains of ancient buildings, so old
that no date could be assigned to them, but designed in some far-off
civilisation to give the travellers shade from the sun or protection
from the ever-lawless children of the desert. The mud bricks with which
these refuges were constructed showed that the material had been carried
over from the distant Nile. Once, upon the top of a little knoll, they
saw the shattered plinth of a pillar of red Assouan granite, with the
wide-winged symbol of the Egyptian god across it, and the cartouche of
the second Rameses beneath. After three thousand years one cannot get
away from the ineffaceable footprints of the warrior-king. It is surely
the most wonderful survival of history that one should still be able to
gaze upon him, high-nosed and masterful, as he lies with his powerful
arms crossed upon his chest, majestic even in decay, in the Gizeh
Museum. To the captives, the cartouche was a message of hope, as a sign
that they were not outside the sphere of Egypt. "They've left their
card here once, and they may again," said Belmont, and they all tried to
smile.

And now they came upon one of the most satisfying sights on which the
human eye can ever rest. Here and there, in the depressions at either
side of the road, there had been a thin scurf of green, which meant that
water was not very far from the surface. And then, quite suddenly, the
track dipped down into a bowl-shaped hollow, with a most dainty group
of palm-trees, and a lovely greensward at the bottom of it. The sun
gleaming upon that brilliant patch of clear, restful colour, with the
dark glow of the bare desert around it, made it shine like the purest
emerald in a setting of burnished copper. And then it was not its beauty
only, but its promise for the future: water, shade, all that weary
travellers could ask for. Even Sadie was revived by the cheery sight,
and the spent camels snorted and stepped out more briskly, stretching
their long necks and sniffing the air as they went. After the unhomely
harshness of the desert, it seemed to all of them that they had never
seen anything more beautiful than this. They looked below at the
greensward with the dark, starlike shadows of the palm-crowns, and then
they looked up at those deep green leaves against the rich blue of the
sky, and they forgot their impending death in the beauty of that Nature
to whose bosom they were about to return.

The wells in the centre of the grove consist