Down below them,
under the golden sand, in the dark bowels of the earth, Freddy was
still picking up precious jewels and packing them into the
cigarette-boxes, the effigy of the royal bride still lay in all her
Pharaonic splendour. She was there, underneath them, waiting and
waiting as she had waited for three thousand years for her heavenly
bridegroom. And still by her side lay that shrivelled, withered
corpse, the real queen, for whose pride and honour the vast underground
temple had been built. The brown mummy was the thing which mattered,
the real owner of the costly home.

Freddy, in his white flannels, with his modern mind, was alone with
these two forms, alone and shut off from the embracing, loving light of
the desert. It was not a quarter of an hour since Meg and he had been
there; now they were as far away from the withered mummy and the
resplendent bride as though they had travelled across the breadth of
the world.

His mind went back to the time before the excavating of the tomb was
begun, when it had seemed absurd to suppose that all this splendour lay
under their feet. It seemed to him now as though the whole of Egypt
might be honeycombed in this subterranean manner.

Meg still lay embracing the sun-warmed sand, rejoicing in the dazzling
sunshine.

"It makes one feel very humble," she said at last. "So utterly,
utterly unimportant. It doesn't seem as if it much matters what
happens, not even to our love, Mike."

Mike raised his face from his hands. "I know," he said. "It is
absolute devastation, nothing more or less. I'm shattered, Meg."

"It seems hardly worth while trying to do anything. Tomorrow we'll be
like that. It's so difficult to explain, except that it's just wiped
out my eagerness, it's made our own precious happiness seem absurd and
hollow, human beings ridiculous."

"Dearest, I understand, I feel the same," Mike said. "All that down
there"--he stuck his stick into the sand--"illustrates a bit too
plainly the things we want to forget."

"It shows us the absurdity of what we think are the things that matter.
It's really destructive to anything like worldly fame and ambition.
Those poor shrunken cheeks, those poor leathery lips, those poor, poor
diadems and jewels!"

Mike let her ramble on. It was good for her to give utterance to her
incoherent thoughts.

"They are so different when you see them in a museum," she said.
"They're impersonal there. They don't hurt one'