I had been sitting with him for an hour, perhaps—­at any rate I know that it was getting so dark that I could only just make out his head lying like a gleam of gold upon the pillow we had extemporised out of a bag covered with a blanket—­when suddenly Billali arrived with an air of great importance, and informed me that She herself had deigned to express a wish to see me—­an honour, he added, accorded to but very few.  I think that he was a little horrified at my cool way of taking the honour, but the fact was that I did not feel overwhelmed with gratitude at the prospect of seeing some savage, dusky queen, however absolute and mysterious she might be, more especially as my mind was full of dear Leo, for whose life I began to have great fears.  However, I rose to follow him, and as I did so I caught sight of something bright lying on the floor, which I picked up.  Perhaps the reader will remember that with the potsherd in the casket was a composition scarabaeus marked with a round O, a goose, and another curious hieroglyphic, the meaning of which is “Suten se Ra,” or “Royal Son of the Sun.”  The scarab, which is a very small one, Leo had insisted upon having set in a massive gold ring, such as is generally used for signets, and it was this very ring that I now picked up.  He had pulled it off in the paroxysm of his fever, at least I suppose so, and flung it down upon the rock-floor.  Thinking that if I left it about it might get lost, I slipped it on my own little finger, and then followed Billali, leaving Job and Ustane with Leo.

We passed down the passage, crossed the great aisle-like cave, and came to the corresponding passage on the other side, at the mouth of which the guards stood like two statues.  As we came they bowed their heads in salutation, and then lifting their long spears placed them transversely across their foreheads, as the leaders of the troop that had met us had done with their ivory wands.  We stepped between them, and found ourselves in an exactly similar gallery to that which led to our own apartments, only this passage was, comparatively speaking, brilliantly lighted.  A few paces down it we were met by four mutes—­two men and two women—­who bowed low and then arranged themselves, the women in front and the men behind of us, and in this order we continued our procession past several doorways hung with curtains resembling those leading to our own quarters, and which I afterwards found opened out into chambers occupied by the mutes who attended on She.  A few paces more and we came to another doorway facing us, and not to our left like the others, which seemed to mark the termination of the passage.  Here two more white-, or rather yellow-robed guards were standing, and they too bowed, saluted, and let us pass through heavy curtains into a great antechamber, quite forty feet long by as many wide, in which some eight or ten women, most of them young and handsome, with yellowish hair, sat on cushions