to trouble about it.”  She remembered the shrug of his mighty shoulders that had accompanied the words.  Almost she could see them and their disdainful movement before her.  Yes, the Sphinx was fading away in the night, and Baroudi was there in front of her.  His strong outline blotted out from her the outline of the Sphinx.  The evening star came out, and the breeze arose again from its distant place in the sands, and whispered round the Sphinx.

She shivered, and got up.

“Let us go; I want to go,” she said.

“Isn’t it wonderful, Ruby?”

“Yes.  Where are the Arabs?”

She could no longer quite conceal her secret agitation, but Nigel attributed it to a wrong cause, and respected it.  The Sphinx always stirred powerfully the spiritual part of him, made him feel in every fibre of his being that man is created not for time, but for Eternity.  He believed that it had produced a similar effect in Ruby.  That this effect should distress her did not surprise him, but roused in his heart a great tenderness towards her, not unlike the tenderness of a parent who sees the tears of a child flow after a punishment the justice of which is realized.  The Sphinx had made her understand intensely the hatefulness of certain things.

When he had helped her on to her donkey he kept his arm about her.

“Do you realize what it has been to me to see the Sphinx with you?” he whispered.

The night had fallen.  In the darkness they went away across the desert.

And the Sphinx lay looking towards the East, where the lights of Cairo shone across the flats under the ridges of the Mokattam.

XXII

The Fayyum is a great and superb oasis situated upon a plateau of the desert of Libya, wonderfully fertile, rich, and bland, with a splendid climate, and springs of sweet waters which, carefully directed into a network of channels, spreading like wrinkles over the face of the land, carry life and a smiling of joy through the crowding palms, the olive and fruit trees, the corn and the brakes of the sugar-cane.  The Egyptians often call it “the country of the roses,” and they say that everything grows there.  The fellah thinks of it as of a Paradise where man can only be happy.  Every Egyptian who has ever set the butt end of a gun against his shoulder sighs to be among its multitudinous game.  The fisherman longs to let down his net into the depths of its sacred lake.  The land-owner would rather have a few acres between Sennoures and Beni Suwef than many in the other parts of Egypt.  The man who is amorous yearns after the legendary beauty of its unveiled women, with their delicately tattooed chins, their huge eyes, and their slim and sinuous bodies.  And scarcely is there upon the Nile a brown boy whose face will not gleam and grow expressive with desire at the sound of the words “El-Fayyum.”

It is a land of Goshen, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of the heart’s desire, this green tract of sweet and gracious fertility to which the Bahr-Yusuf is kind.