Sometimes there were days off, when one of the three was left in charge, and the two others went far through the fertile land, or ferrying across the Nile, spent the day with M. Naville at Deir-el-Bahari to see what fresh sculptured wall had been reclaimed from the blown sand of the desert, showing the pictured ivory and gold which the expedition of Queen Hatasoo had brought back from the mysterious land of Punt; or we crawled dustily into some newly discovered malodorous tomb in the valley where the kings of Egypt were buried, or visited Professor Petrie at the Ramesseum and exchanged the news of fresh finds. Sometimes I took a holiday from the remote and swarming past, and with a horse in place of the demurer donkey, went far out into the desert on the other side of the Nile. Pebbles and soft sand, hard sand and rocks succeeded each other in slope and level, and the horse whinnied as he sniffed the utter emptiness of the unbreathed air. One kite hung, a remote speck in the brazen sky, and the silence and the solitude wove the unutterable spell of the desert. There, out of sight of all that makes the planet habitable, your horse alone made the link with the ephemeral living world; all else was as it had been through uncounted centuries, and as it would remain for centuries to come, until the spinning earth grew still. In the desert the past and the future are one, and the present, dwindled to a microscopical point, is but a shadow of time in the timeless circle of eternity. Old wicked Egypt was no more than that; the dynasties were whisked away like an unquiet fly, that persists for a little, but not for long.
Luxor would be full of southerly-going dahabeahs and English tourists during this month of January, and I can see Maggie waving her long fine-fingered hands in impotent despair, as I brought her an invitation from some friend that she and I would dine on one of these dahabeahs to-night or next night or the night after. “How am I to get on with my work,” exclaimed this outraged invalid, “with all these interruptions? Won’t it do, if we ask them to tea at the temple?” That certainly usually “did” quite well, for while Maggie was making tea, the cry of “Antica!” would arise from the diggers, and she popped the lid on the teapot, and we turned to see what had been unearthed. Once it was the statue of the Rameses of the Exodus, which would tremendously excite the visitor, but left us cold, for he was already plentifully represented. Or it might be a scribe of the eighteenth dynasty whom to-day you may see in the museum at Gizeh, and better even than that was a superb Saite head, such as I may behold at this moment if I raise my eyes from the page, or best of all it was the image of Sen-mut himself, to see which, again, you must go to Gizeh. That was the crown and culmination of the digging and worthy of an archæological digression.