ory over the desert, it illuminated the
few remaining but sufficiently large features of the Sphinx with a
burning saffron radiance! The Sphinx had indeed blushed!

II

It was the full season at Cairo. The wealth and fashion of Bayswater,
South Kensington, and even the bosky Wood of the Evangelist had sent
their latest luxury and style to flout the tombs of the past with the
ghastly flippancy of to-day. The cheap tripper was there--the latest
example of the Darwinian theory--apelike, flea and curio hunting!
Shamelessly inquisitive and always hungry, what did he know of the
Sphinx or the pyramids or the voice--and, for the matter of that, what
did they know of him? And yet he was not half bad in comparison with
the "swagger people,"--these people who pretend to have lungs and what
not, and instead of galloping on merry hunters through the frost and
snow of Piccadilly and Park, instead of enjoying the roaring fires of
piled logs in the evening, at the first approach of winter steal away
to the Land of the Sun, and decline to die, like honest Britons, on
British soil. And then they know nothing of the Egyptians and are
horrified at "bakshish," which they really ought to pay for the
privilege of shocking the straight-limbed, naked-footed Arab in his
single rough garment with their baggy elephant-legged trousers! And
they know nothing of the mystic land of the old gods, filled with
profound enigmas of the supernatural, dark secrets yet unexplored
except in this book. Well might the great Memnon murmur after this
lapse of these thousand years, "They're making me tired!"

Such was the blissful, self-satisfied ignorance of Sir Midas Pyle, or
as Lord Fitz-Fulke, with his delightful imitation of the East London
accent, called him, Sir "Myde His Pyle," as he leaned back on his divan
in the Grand Cairo Hotel. He was the vulgar editor and proprietor of a
vulgar London newspaper, and had brought his wife with him, who was
vainly trying to marry off his faded daughters. There was to be a
fancy-dress ball at the hotel that night, and Lady Pyle hoped that her
girls, if properly disguised, might have a better chance. Here, too,
was Lady Fitz-Fulke, whose mother was immortalized by Byron--sixty if a
day, yet still dressing youthfully--who had sought the land of the
Sphinx in the faint hope that in the contiguity of that lady she might
pass for being young. Alaster McFeckless, a splendid young
Scotchman,--already dressed as a