d
knitted blackly. The scowl was unpropitious.

"Thou mayest come freely now," he growled, "The way shall be clear."

The lady looked at him in mock fear.

"Come, Nechutes," the sculptor implored laughingly, "be gracious.
Being in highest favor, it behooves thee to be generous."

But the prospective cup-bearer refused to be placated. He rumbled an
order to the slaves and they shouldered the litter.

Ta-meri made a pretty mouth at him, and turned again to Kenkenes.

"Nay, Kenkenes," she said. "It was mine to say that the way shall be
clear--but I promise it."

She nodded a bright farewell to him, and they moved away. The
sculptor, still smiling, continued down to the river.

At the landing he engaged one of the numerous small boats awaiting a
passenger, and directed the clout-wearing boatman to drop down the
stream.

Directly opposite his point of embarkation there were farm lands,
fertile and moist, extending inland for a mile. But presently the
frontier of the desert laid down a gray and yellow dead-line over which
no domestic plant might strike its root and live.

But the arable tracts were velvet green with young grain, the verdant
level broken here and there by a rustic's hut, under two or three
close-standing palms. Even from the surface of the Nile the checkered
appearance of the country, caused by the various kinds of products, was
noticeable. Egypt was the most fertile land in the world.

However, as the light bari climbed and dipped on the little waves
toward the north the Arabian hills began to approach the river. Their
fronts became abrupt and showed the edges of stratum on stratum of
white stone. About their bases were quantities of rubble and gray dust
slanting against their sides in slides and drifts. Across the
narrowing strip of fertility square cavities in rows showed themselves
in the white face of the cliffs. The ruins of a number of squat hovels
were barely discernible over the wheat.

"Set me down near Masaarah," Kenkenes said, "and wait for me." The
boatman ducked his head respectfully and made toward the eastern shore.
He effected a landing at a bedding of masonry on which a wharf had once
been built. The rock was now over-run with riotous marsh growth.

The quarries had not been worked for half a century. The thrifty
husbandman had cultivated his narrow field within a few feet of the
Nile, and the roadway that had once led from the ruined wharf toward
the hills was o