Depositing his burden, he set forth to reconnoiter.  He descended again into the Nile valley by the way he had come and wandered toward the mouth of the gorge.  From a little distance he looked upon a scene of great activity.  In the shadow of one of the dilapidated hovels, four humped oxen stood, their heavy harness still hanging upon them, though the sledges they drew, covered with stone dust and broken pieces, were some distance away from them.  A company of half a score of children were ascending in single file, along a slanting plane of planks, into the hollow in the cliff upon which work had been renewed.  Along the rock-wall ahead of them a scaffold had been erected and here were men drilling holes in the stone, or driving wooden wedges into the holes already made, or pouring water on the wedges as the skins the children bore were passed up to them.

Kenkenes picked his way through the debris of sticks, stones, dust and cast-off water-skins, and serenely disregarding the stare of the laborers, went up to the edge of the stone-pit and watched the work with interest.  A constant stream of broken stone rattled down under the scaffold and long runlets of water fed an ever increasing pool in the depression before the cliff.  A single slab of irregular dimensions lay on the sand at the base of a wooden chute, down which it had descended from the hollow in the cliff the evening before.  The cavity it left bade fair to enlarge by nightfall, for the swelling wedges were rending another slab from its bedding with loud reports and the sudden etching of fissures.

The young sculptor noted with some wonder that the laborers were Israelites.

After a time Kenkenes turned away and addressed one of the bearded men at that moment, ascending the wooden plane.

“What do ye here?” he asked.

The man answered in unready Egyptian, but, for an inferior, in a manner curiously collected.

“The Pharaoh addeth to the burden of the chosen people.  We dig stone for a temple to the war-god.”

“The chosen people!” Kenkenes repeated inquiringly.

“The children of Israel,” the Hebrew explained.  Kenkenes lifted one eyebrow quizzically and went his way.  As he leaped up into the gorge he vaguely realized that he had seen no trace of an encampment near the hamlet, which he knew to be uninhabitable.

“Of a truth, the chosen people seem to follow me of late,” he said to himself as he rambled up the valley.  “Meneptah must have scattered them out of Goshen into all the corners of Egypt.”

As he turned the last winding of the gorge he came upon a cluster of some threescore tents, spread over the level pocket at the valley’s end.  Almost against the northern wall the house of the commander had been built to receive the earliest shadow of the afternoon.  The military standard was raised upon its roof and a scribe, making entries on a roll of linen, sat cross-legged on a mat before the door.