most to vague resentment.  There were many things to interest them in this old trade route, had they been in a condition to take notice of them.  Here and there along its course were the crumbling remains of ancient buildings, so old that no date could be assigned to them, but designed in some far-off civilisation to give the travellers shade from the sun or protection from the ever-lawless children of the desert.  The mud bricks with which these refuges were constructed showed that the material had been carried over from the distant Nile.  Once, upon the top of a little knoll, they saw the shattered plinth of a pillar of red Assouan granite, with the wide-winged symbol of the Egyptian god across it, and the cartouche of the second Rameses beneath.  After three thousand years one cannot get away from the ineffaceable footprints of the warrior-king.  It is surely the most wonderful survival of history that one should still be able to gaze upon him, high-nosed and masterful, as he lies with his powerful arms crossed upon his chest, majestic even in decay, in the Gizeh Museum.  To the captives, the cartouche was a message of hope, as a sign that they were not outside the sphere of Egypt.  “They’ve left their card here once, and they may again,” said Belmont, and they all tried to smile.

And now they came upon one of the most satisfying sights on which the human eye can ever rest.  Here and there, in the depressions at either side of the road, there had been a thin scurf of green, which meant that water was not very far from the surface.  And then, quite suddenly, the track dipped down into a bowl-shaped hollow, with a most dainty group of palm-trees, and a lovely green sward at the bottom of it.  The sun gleaming upon that brilliant patch of clear, restful colour, with the dark glow of the bare desert around it, made it shine like the purest emerald in a setting of burnished copper.  And then it was not its beauty only, but its promise for the future:  water, shade, all that weary travellers could ask for.  Even Sadie was revived by the cheery sight, and the spent camels snorted and stepped out more briskly, stretching their long necks and sniffing the air as they went.  After the unhomely harshness of the desert, it seemed to all of them that they had never seen anything more beautiful than this.  They looked below at the green sward with the dark, star-like shadows of the palm-crowns; then they looked up at those deep green leaves against the rich blue of the sky, and they forgot their impending death in the beauty of that Nature to whose bosom they were about to return.