he natives twanged their fool strings all
night and wailed at the moon.

The moon was full now. Round and white it went sailing blandly over
the eternal monotony of desert.... Round and white, it lighted up
the eternal sameness of life.... He had never noticed it before, but
a moon was a poignantly depressing phenomenon.

He couldn't help it. A man couldn't make himself be a comedian. It
wasn't as if he wanted to be a grump. He would have been glad to be
glad. He wanted Thatcher to make him glad. He defied him to.

He didn't enjoy this flat, insipid taste of things, this dull grind,
this feeling of sameness and dullness that made nothing seem worth
while.... A feeling that he had been marooned on a desert island,
far from all stir and throb of life.

Suppose he did dig up a Hathor-cow? Suppose he dug up Hathor
herself, or Cleopatra, or ten little Ptolemies? What was the good of
it?

Not Jinny Jeffries herself could have cast more aspersions upon the
personal value of excavations.

When he was tired of denying to himself that there was anything
unusual the matter with him, he shifted the inner argument and took
up the denial that anything which had happened in Cairo those two
weeks before had anything to do with it. As if that rash encounter
_mattered_! As if he were the silly, senseless sentimental sort of
idiot to go mooning about his work because of a girl--and a girl
from a harem with a taste for secret masquerades and Turkish
marriages!

As if he cared--!

Of course--he admitted this logically and coldly now to himself, as
he sat there in the ray of his excavator's lantern, on the sanded
floor at the end of the Hall of Offerings--of course, he was sorry
for the girl. It was no life for any young girl--especially a
spirited one, with her veins bubbling with French blood.

The system was wrong. If they were going to shut up those girls,
they had no business to bring them up on modern ideas. If they kept
the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they
ought to keep the kohl on their eyes and the henna on their fingers
and education out of their hidden heads.

It was too bad.... But, of course, they were brought up to it. Look
how quickly that girl had given in. She was Turkish, through and
through. Submissive. Docile.... And a darned good thing she was,
too! Suppose she had taken him at his fool word. Suppose she had
really wanted to get away!

Lucky, that's what he'd been. And it wou