“The plunder of Khafra and Sigur, by my mummy!” Kenkenes ejaculated.

“Will they return?” Rachel asked, in a voice full of fear.

“They are gathered to Amenti for their misdeeds many months agone,” he explained.  “See how thickly the dust lies here without a print upon it.  They were tomb-robbers.  None of the authorities could discover their hiding-place, and lo! here it is.”

He walked round the sarcophagus and found at the head, on the floor, several bronze cases sealed with pitch.  He opened one of them with some difficulty.  Flat packages wrapped with linen lay within.

“Dried gazelle-meat,—­and I venture there is wine in those amphorae.  They lived here, I am convinced, and fed upon the food offerings they filched from the tombs.  Was there ever such intrepid lawlessness?”

“Here is a snare and net,” Rachel reported.

“Did they not profit by superstition?  As long as they were here they were safe.  They did not fear the spirit.”

“The spirit?” Deborah, still in the outer chamber, repeated with interest.

“The spirit of this tomb,” Kenkenes explained, returning to her.  In a few words he told her the story as Hotep had told it to him.

“Canst thou discover the name?” she asked when he had finished.

“The sarcophagus is plain.  There is no inscription within yonder crypt, for I have this moment looked.  But let me examine this writing here by the door.”

After a while he spoke again.  “The name is not given.  It says only this: 

’The Spouse to Potiphar,
Captain of the Royal Guard to
Apepa, Child of the Sun,
In the Twelfth Year of Whose Luminous Reign
She Died. 
Rejected by the Forty-two at On, because of
Unchastity,
She Lies Here,
Until Admitted to the Divine Pardon of Osiris.’”

“Aye, I know,” Deborah responded.  “It is history to the glory of a son of Abraham.  Him, who brought our people here, she would have tempted, but he would have none of her.  Therefore she bore false witness against him and he was thrust into prison.

“But the God of Israel does not suffer for ever His chosen to be unjustly served, and he was finally exalted over Upper and Lower Mizraim.  And honor and long life and a perfumed memory are his, and she—­lo! she hath done one good thing.  Her house hath become a shelter for the oppressed and for that may she find peace at last.”

Kenkenes looked at the old woman with admiring eyes.  The quaint speech of the Hebrews had always fascinated him, but now it had become melody in his ears.  In this, the first moment of mental idleness since midday, he had time to think on Deborah.  He knew that he had seen her before, and now he remembered that it was she who had transfixed him with a look on an occasion when Israel had first come to Masaarah.

But he did not remind her of the incident.  Instead, he set about counteracting any effect that might follow should her memory, unaided, recall the occurrence.  He had put her down on the matting, and the running spiders and slower insects worried her.