.

Smoothing again the rifled hiding place among the roses, she made
her careful way into the house.

CHAPTER VI

A SECRET OF THE SANDS

The siesta was past. The sun was tilting towards the west and
shadows were beginning to jut out across the blazing sands.

Over the mounds of rubbish the bearers had resumed their slow
procession, a picturesque frieze of tattered, indigo-robed, ebony
figures, baskets on heads, against a cloudless cobalt sky, and again
the hot air was invaded with the monotonous rise and fall of their
labor chant.

A man with a short, pointed red beard and an academic face beneath a
pith helmet was stooping over the siftings from those baskets,
intent upon the stream of sand through the wire screens. Patiently
he discarded the unending pebbles, discovering at rare intervals
some lost bead, some splinter of old sycamore wood, some fragment of
pottery in which a Ptolemy had sipped his wine--or a kitchen wench
had soaked her lentils.

Beyond the man were traces of the native camp, a burnt-out fire, a
roll of rags, a tattered shelter cloth stuck on two tottering
sticks, and distributed indiscriminatingly were a tethered goat, a
white donkey with motionless, drooping ears, and a few supercilious
camels.

The camp was in the center of a broken line of foothills on the
desert's edge. North and south and west the wide sands swept out to
meet the sky, and to the east, shutting out the Nile valley, the
hills reared their red rock from the yellow drift.

Among the jutting rock in the foreground yawned dark mouths that
were the entrances of the discovered tombs, and within one of these
tombs was another white man. He was conducting his own siftings in
high solitude, a lean, bronzed young man, with dark hair and eyes
and, at the present moment, an unexhilarated expression.

It had been two weeks since Jack Ryder had returned to camp. Two
interminable weeks. They were the longest, the dullest, the
dreariest, the most irritatingly undelighting weeks that he had ever
lived through.

But bitterly he resented any aspersion from the long-suffering
Thatcher upon his disposition. He wanted it distinctly understood
that he was _not_ low-spirited. Not in the least. A man wasn't in
the dumps just because he wasn't--well, garrulous. Just because he
didn't go about whistling like a steam siren or exult like a cheer
leader when some one dug up the effigy of a Hathor-cow.... Just
because he objected when t