CHAPTER XI.

LUXOR

The Nile was high. Much of the Memnonia was impassable. The Colossi sat lonely in the midst of a great lake, when Barry came to Luxor. In this way he saw the City of the Sun under advantageous conditions.

The Winter Palace Hotel, whose impudent modernity aspires to dwarf the majesty of the great temple, was in a comatose state. Its palatial suites which later in the season would echo Wall Street quotations, its public rooms where, anon, much talk would be heard about the situation in the English coalfields and the cheery optimism of Mr. Baldwin, these were empty. Empty was the dragomans’ bench before the entrance. No guttural German voices were raised in argument against the soft music of Arabic impostors, relative to the cost of donkeys from Kûrna to Dêr-el-Bâhari. The tourist steamers were missing; yet Barry did not miss them.

Sighing wearily at the end of her summer sleep, the City of the Sun looked wistfully down the Nile from which at any time now invasion might be expected.

Barry had conceived something very like friendship for Hassan es-Sugra. The man fascinated him. Delicate in form and features, soft-spoken and mild-eyed, slow of movement and speech, invariably unruffled, Barry had detected beneath the velvet surface an indomitable will, and something else.

On the evening of their arrival, leaving Danbazzar and John Cumberland at the hotel poring over rough plans, Barry had set out with Hassan to view the celebrated spectacle of Karnak by moonlight. The evening was oppressively hot. The sky looked like a dome of lapis lazuli. The moon was such a moon as gave birth to Isis; fronds of palms seemed to be carved out of ebony; and the whiteness of the buildings was dazzling. Plaintive notes of a reed pipe crept up from the river, with more distant throbbing of a _darabukkeh_.

A great zest of life, an eagerness to inhale, as it were, the unfamiliar perfume of this strange land, possessed Barry. He hurried as though bound for his father’s New York office. But:

“Sir,” said Hassan, in his soft, caressing voice, “there is no need for haste, and the evening is hot.”

Barry pulled up and glanced aside at his companion. The gaze of the gazelle-like eyes met his own. Hassan smiled.

“Always,” the speaker went on hesitantly yet with perfect expression, “always the gentlemen who come from America and from Europe are in so great a hurry; particularly the gentlemen from America. Yet there is so much time, and life in Egypt is very beautiful for those who will rest and enjoy it.”

Barry laughed.

“No wonder you always look so cool,” he commented. “Now I come to think of it, I have never seen you hurry.”

Hassan extended his slender brown hands, his ebony stick held lightly between the first and second fingers of the left.

“What is there to hurry for?” he asked softly. “We are all going the same way. Why should we try to pass one another? Everything that life has to give us is ours to-night. Let us enjoy it, for to-night will never come again.”

Barry stared curiously at this survival of the Arabian philosophers, but checked his eager steps and walked on sedately beside the dignified Egyptian.

Spots of interest were pointed out by Hassan, and, as they moved through the streets, it became apparent to Barry that his companion possessed many acquaintances in Upper Egypt by whom he was held in high esteem.

A most notable demonstration of this came when they passed a café in the native town. A number of men sat smoking outside. Five of them, on sight of the approaching figure, sprang up and performed a graceful Arab salute with the right hand. All were fine types, tall muscular fellows, and different from the townsmen surrounding them. Hassan es-Sugra gravely returned their salutation, but they remained standing until the café was passed.

“Who were those men, Hassan?” Barry asked.

“They are some of our excavators, sir,” Hassan replied. “Most of them are already at the camp: these are late arrivals who go to-morrow.”

Barry glanced curiously at the delicate, almost effeminate face of the speaker, and he wondered, as he had wondered many times before, how Hassan es-Sugra had inspired, and how he retained, the profound respect of these men.

And so, pursuing their leisurely way, they presently found themselves on the ancient road to Karnak, formerly bordered by Sphinxes throughout the mile of its length. The silence now was broken only by the distant note of a pipe, the faint throbbing of a drum. Barry grew silent, too, awed by the sleeping past upon which he intruded. At that point where the road turned left into the Avenue of the Rams he sighted the great shadowy ruins and hastened his steps.

“It is fortunate, sir,” Hassan said, laying one slender hand upon Barry’s arm to check this impetuous increase of pace, “that we have been able to begin while the Nile was in flood.”

“Why is that?” Barry asked.

“Because,” Hassan replied, “the tomb, which is on high land, can only be approached from above at this season and is cut off from those routes along which people generally come. We are less likely to be disturbed.”

At the entrance to the Temple, the _Ghafîr_ appeared, mysterious, out of a bank of shadow. Barry, a law-abiding citizen, had been given to understand that he must show his ticket here, but Hassan es-Sugra waved him aside, saluted the guardian, was saluted deeply in return, and they entered the great, silent building.

Again Barry found himself glancing curiously at the face of his companion, delicately beautiful in the moonlight. He was learning a lesson that anyone susceptible to truth learns in Egypt. He was learning to look with less satisfaction upon the hurriedly grasped successes of modern life, and to experience an unpleasant sense of inferiority in the company of this dignified, placid, yet majestic Arab.

Those who are sent to govern in these lands must be of a type immune from such impressions. Barry had too much poetry in his nature to be blind to some strange spiritual calm possessed by Hassan es-Sugra (whom Aunt Micky would have briefly classified as a heathen), the secret of which has been lost during generations of feverish endeavour.

He found himself amid a forest of vast columns; statues looked down upon him scornfully; and all about him upon painted walls were those Pharaohs and gods whom the imagination of Pierre Loti has depicted as eternally signalling to one another. Bats haunted high, shadowy places, and the note of some night bird sounded eerily.

Hassan es-Sugra walked through the mysterious darkness as confidently as Barry would have walked along Fifth Avenue, until they came to the Great Hall, most awe-inspiring of all the Egyptian monuments. He seemed to know every inch of the place. The hieroglyphics held no mystery for him. Raising his stick he pointed to an inscription, translating slowly:

“I did the best I could for the Temple of Amen, as architect of my Lord. I placed obelisks, their height reached to the world of heaven. A propylon is before the same in sight of the city of Thebes; and ponds and gardens of flourishing trees.…”

“Who made this inscription, Hassan?” Barry asked.

“He was the First Prophet of Amen,” was the reply, “in the reign of Rameses the Second, who was the son of Seti the First.”

Barry did not reply. A new idea had possessed him; a new magic had invested the building. Here, in this vast, wonderful temple-place, she must have walked--the Princess Zalithea!--the beautiful, mysterious girl of the past who was so like that other, who lived, who surely lived, in the present! His blood tingled, impatience claimed him, and, suddenly turning to Hassan:

“When do we begin to excavate?” he asked abruptly.

“I hope, sir, the day after to-morrow.”

“Good!” said Barry.

The magic of Egypt had got into his veins. He knew that whatever else life might hold for him, wherever Fate should guide his steps, always until the end he would hear it calling him--calling him back to the Nile.

Later that night in the almost deserted lounge of the hotel he got into conversation with a very bored young man whose job was connected with the Irrigation Department. In a less virulent case this young man could not have failed to prove a perfect antidote.

“Dead-alive hole, this,” he declared, “out of the season. Did you stay long in London?”

“A week,” Barry replied.

“Lucky man!” sighed the other. “I would cheerfully sell all Egypt, if it belonged to me, for a week in London. See any new shows?”

“One or two.”

“Gad! I’d see one every evenin’! And after the show I’d go on to the Kit Cat, first night; the Embassy, next night; Ciro’s, third night. And so forth.”

“Really?” said Barry. “That’s odd! The life in London or New York or Paris seems to be much the same. I’ve been fed up with the usual round for years!”

“I’ve never had a chance to get fed up,” the other declared plaintively. “I went straight from Oxford to the war, straight from the war to hospital, and straight from hospital to this blasted hole.”

“Don’t you get a vacation sometimes?”

“_Sometimes_ is right,” said the other.

Barry laughed at his acquaintance’s pessimism and ordered another drink. As the waiter brought it:

“You are not here for fun, are you?” the irrigation man inquired wearily; “because there’s nothing funny about Luxor.”

“No,” said Barry guardedly. “My father and I are here on a job of work.”

“You are not goin’ to try to Americanize Egypt, are you?” the other suggested.

“Not exactly,” Barry replied. “Dad has a scheme for exploiting the old caravan road to the Dakhla Oasis.”

“What for?” drawled his acquaintance. “Nobody wants to go there!”

“They might,” Barry returned, “if the journey were easier.”

“Goin’ to build a hotel there?”

“I don’t quite know, but we are starting out to-morrow to prospect.”

“Good luck!” murmured the irrigation gentleman, raising his glass. “If I’m still alive when you come back you might bring me a few dates. They are the best dates in Egypt. I don’t think they grow anything else.”

Their chat was interrupted at this point by the sudden appearance of Professor Blackwell, expected that evening from Assouan and evidently newly arrived.

“Ah! Professor!” cried Barry, jumping up. “Glad to see you! Does Dad know you are here?”

“No,” the Professor replied, dropping into an armchair. “I have only this very moment come in.”

Barry introduced the Professor to the irrigation expert, who presently, however, having offered to buy more drinks, withdrew to what he termed his “fly trap,” nodding gloomily to Barry as he went.

“Don’t forget the dates,” were his parting words.

Going back to their rooms, Barry ushered in Professor Blackwell. John Cumberland, who was seated at a table studying some maps, stood up gladly to greet him. Danbazzar, his broad back to the room, was staring out of the open window across the Nile to where, sharp in the moonlight, the Libyan Hills were outlined against the sky. He turned, fixing his penetrating regard upon the new arrivals; and:

“Hassan tells me,” Barry began eagerly, “that we start operations on Thursday. Is that correct?”

“It’s surely correct,” came Danbazzar’s deep voice. “I don’t know who’s been giving public recitations, but it looks like some of our plans have leaked out. Yes, sir, we start on Thursday.”