eguiled Constantine, or bewitched him, I know not
which. At least, by his own proclamation once more she rules the Empire
jointly with himself, and that I think will be his death warrant, and
perhaps yours also."

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," I said. "Now if I live I
shall learn whether any oaths are sacred to Irene, as will Constantine."

Then we parted.

Leaving Alexandria, we wandered first to the town of Misra, which stood
near to the mighty pyramids, beneath whose shadow we slept one night in
an empty tomb. Thence by slow marches we made our way up the banks of
the Nile, earning our daily bread by the exercise of our art. Once
or twice we were stopped as spies, but always released again when I
produced the writing that the officer Yusuf had given me upon the ship.
For the rest, none molested us in a land where wandering beggars were
so common. Of money it is true we earned little, but as we had gold
in plenty sewn into our garments this did not matter. Food was all we
needed, and that, as I have said, was never lacking.

So we went on our strange journey, day by day learning more of the
tongues spoken in Egypt, and especially of Arabic, which the Moslems
used. Whither did we journey? We know not for certain. What I sought to
find were those two huge statues of which I had dreamed at Aar on the
night of the robbing of the Wanderer's tomb. We heard that there were
such figures of stone, which were said to sing at daybreak, and that
they sat upon a plain on the western bank of the Nile, near to the ruins
of the great city of Thebes, now but a village, called by the Arabs
El-Uksor, or "the Palaces." So far as we could discover, it was in the
neighbourhood of this city that Heliodore had escaped from Musa, and
there, if anywhere, I hoped to gain tidings of her fate. Also something
within my heart drew me to those images of forgotten gods or men.

At length, two months or more after we left Alexandria, from the deck of
the boat in which we had hired a passage for the last hundred miles of
our journey, Martina saw to the east the ruins of Thebes. To the west
she saw other ruins, and seated in front of them _two mighty figures of
stone_.

"This is the place," she said, and my heart leapt at her words. "Now let
us land and follow our fortune."

So when the boat was tied up at sunset, to the west bank of the river,
as it happened, we bade farewell to the owner and went ashore.

"Whither now?" a