I nodded, caught up my revolver and surgical pack and rushed out of the tent. In two minutes I had saddled the donkey. Miss Ottley was standing by the door of the tent. I lifted her on the beast and we started off in silence. An hour later she spoke.
"There is one thing I like about you," she announced. "You haven't much to say for yourself, but you are a worker."
"Tu quoque," I replied. "You must have done that twelve miles in record time. It is not yet two o'clock."
"I am no bread-and-butter miss, at any rate. This donkey has a bad pace, don't you think?"
I kicked the brute into a trot and ran beside it. The Hill of Rakh soon began to loom large among the stars on the horizon. "I suppose you were pretty wild at our cavalier treatment of you the other evening," said Miss Ottley.
"Be generous," said Miss Ottley. "We have been sufficiently punished. Not only have we lost the treasure, but there was no mummy in the sarcophagus."
"No," said she, with a most spirited inflection. "It is not a woman's place."
"Then be silent or change the topic," I growled.
She was silent. We arrived an hour later at the mountain. I was bathed in perspiration and as tired as a dog. But Miss Ottley had no time to notice my condition. She slipped off the donkey and hurried away through the smaller of the three pylons that fronted a small temple hollowed out of the rock face of the hill. There was no sign of tent, so I concluded that Sir Robert had made his camp within the temple. I hitched the ass to a stake and cooled off, thanking Providence for a cool breeze that swept up from the placid surface of the Nile. Day was already showing signs of breaking, and a broad flight of long-legged flamingoes hurried its coming with a flash of scarlet just above the eastern horizon. The distant howling of a hyena was borne to me in fitful snatches on the wind. The earth was wrapped in mystery and melancholy. Oh, Egypt! Egypt, land of sun-lit spaces and illimitable shadows; of grandeur and of squalor without peer; of happy dreams and sad awakenings; of centuries ingloriously oblivious of glory; of sleep and sphinx-browed, age-bound silences; of darkly smiling and impotent despair. What a mistress for a man of curiosity and of imagination! Little wonder that since I had been caught in her magic and most jealous spell the face of no human being had possessed the power to threaten her supremacy or cancel my allegiance to the mystic desert queen.