Weary and happy, he rowed himself back to Memphis and slept soundly on the eve of a great offense against the laws of Egypt.

But the next day, when the young sculptor faced the moment of actual creation, he realized that his goddess must take form from an unembodied idea.  The ritual had been his guide before, and his genius, set free to soar as it would, fluttered wildly without direction.  His visions were troubled with glamours of the old conventional forms; his idea tantalized him with glimpses of its perfect self too fleeting for him to grasp.  The sensation was not new to him.  During his maturer years he had tried to remember his mother’s face with the same yearning and heart-hurting disappointment.  But this time he groped after attributes which should shape the features—­he had spirit, not form, in mind; and the odds against which his unguided genius must battle were too heroic for it to succeed without aid.  The young sculptor realized that he was in need of a model.  Stoically, he admitted that such a thing was as impossible as it was indispensable.  It seemed that he had met complete bafflement.

He took up his tools and returned to Memphis.  But each succeeding morning found him in the desert again, desperately hopeful—­each succeeding evening, in the city disheartened and silent.

So it followed for several days.

On the sixth of January the festival in honor of the return of Isis from Phenicia was celebrated in Memphis.  Kenkenes left the revel in mid-afternoon and crossed the Nile to the hills.  He found no content away from his block of stone—­no happiness before it.  But he wandered back to the seclusion of the niche that he might be moody and sad of eye in all security.

The stone-pits were deserted.  The festivities in Memphis had extended their holiday to the dreary camp at Masaarah.  Kenkenes climbed up to his retreat and remained there only a little time.  The unhewn rock mocked him.

He descended through the gorge and found that the Hebrews were but nominally idle.  A rope-walk had been constructed and the men were twisting cables of tough fiber.  The Egyptians lounged in the long shadows of the late afternoon and directed the work with no effort and little concern.  The young sculptor overlooked the scene as long as it interested him and continued down the valley toward the Nile.

Presently a little company of Hebrew children approached, their bare feet making velvety sounds in the silence of the ravine.  Each balanced a skin of water on his head.  The little line obsequiously curved outward to let the nobleman pass, and one by one the sturdy children turned their luminous eyes up to him, some with a flash of white teeth, some with a downward dip of a bashful head.  One of them disengaged a hand from his burden and swept a tangle of moist black curls away from his eyes.  The sun of the desert had not penetrated that pretty thatch and the forehead was as fair as a lotus flower.