t keep off
this"--she indicated the valley.

Michael knew what she meant. Not a green blade of grass, 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 Assuan."

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 sexton 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