In after years Kenkenes remembered only vaguely the long hours of that black and lonely vigil.  This climax to a calamitous space eight months in length might have crushed a less sturdy spirit, but he was mystically sustained.

With the exception of a few intervals of short duration most of the time was spent in sleep, so profound and dreamless as to border on coma.  The reeds had received him on a bed of crushed herbage and the upstanding ranks about him sheltered him from the blowing sand.  The whilom assailants of the young man were not so kindly served by the gods to whom they appealed loudly and frequently.  The city in the distance moaned and complained and the hills were full of fear.

In one of his profound lapses of slumber a hairy paw felt of Kenkenes’ face.  Later a drifting boat nosed about among the reeds at the water’s edge.  Presently one of the crew cried out, and a second voice said: 

“Nay, fear not; it is an ape, by the feel of him.  Toth is with us.  It is a good omen; let him not go forth.”

Silence fell again, for the boat drifted on.

At last dawn-lights reddened about the horizon; stars faded out of the uppermost as naturally as if they had been there during the three days of unlifting night.  All Egypt showed up darkly in the coming day.

Kenkenes, in his couch of reeds, slept on peacefully.  The mid-morning sun shone in his face before he awakened.

He leaped to his feet, cramped and stiffened by his long inactivity, and looked about him.  Near by was a disturbed spot of wide circumference.  Here had the struggle taken place.  Here, also, some of the sand was stained with the blood of the Nubian, who had been wounded by Rachel.  Fresh footprints led toward the water.  He followed them with a wildly beating heart.  There were no marks of a little sandal.  At the Nile edge the deep line cut by a keel was still visible in the wet sand.  His own boat and the other were gone.  All other signs had been obliterated, for the wind had been busy during the darkness.

Across the cultivated land, or rather the land which would have been wheat-covered but for the locusts, he saw the huts of rustics, and to each of these he went, asking of the pallid and terror-stricken tenants if Rachel had come to them.  Gaining no information, he went next to Masaarah, appeasing his hunger with succulent roots plucked from the loam beside the river.  The quarries were deserted, the pocket in the valley, where the Israelites had pitched their tents, was as solitary as it had ever been.  There was no place here to shelter the lost girl.

There were the huts to the north of the Marsh and the deserted village of Toora to search.  He retraced his steps.

As he came again before the tomb he went to it.  Half-way up the steps he stopped.

On a blank face of the rock, sheltered by a jutting ledge above it, was an inscription, a little faint, but he ascribed that to the poor quality of the pencil and roughness of the tablet.  This is what he read: