ve you a pencil? Thank you. Here is the
town of Sa-el-Hagar, here are the ruins, here is the wall, and somewhere
hereabouts should be the buried temple of Neith, which nobody has
found." He shifted his pencil. "Here is the lake of Sais; here, standing
all alone on the plain, are those great monolithic pillars stretching
away into perspective--four hundred of them in all--a hundred and nine
still upright. There were one hundred and ten when I arrived at El Teb
Wells."

He looked across at the Tracer, repeating: "One hundred and ten--when I
arrived. One fell the first night--a distant pillar far away on the
horizon. Four thousand years had it stood there. And it fell--the first
night of my arrival. I heard it; the nights are cold at El Teb Wells,
and I was lying awake, all a-shiver, counting the stars to make me
sleep. And very, very far away in the desert I heard and felt the shock
of its fall--the fall of forty centuries under the Egyptian stars."

His eyes grew dreamy; a slight glow had stained his face.

"Did you ever halt suddenly in the Northern forests, listening, as
though a distant voice had hailed you? Then you understand why that far,
dull sound from the dark horizon brought me to my feet, bewildered,
listening, as though my own name had been spoken.

"I heard the wind in the tents and the stir of camels; I heard the reeds
whispering on Sais Lake and the yap-yap of a shivering jackal; and
always, always, the hushed echo in my ears of my own name called across
the star-lit waste.

"At dawn I had forgotten. An Arab told me that a pillar had fallen; it
was all the same to me, to him, to the others, too. The sun came out
hot. I like heat. My men sprawled in the tents; some watered, some went
up to the town to gossip in the bazaar. I mounted and cast bridle on
neck--you see how much I cared where I went! In two hours we had
completed a circle--like a ruddy hawk above El Teb. And my horse halted
beside the fallen pillar."

As he spoke his language had become very simple, very direct, almost
without accent, and he spoke slowly, picking his way with that lack of
inflection, of emotion characteristic of a child reading a new reader.

"The column had fallen from its base, eastward, and with its base it had
upheaved another buried base, laying bare a sort of cellar and a flight
of stone steps descending into darkness.

"Into this excavation the sand was still running in tiny rivulets.
Listening, I could hear it p