’We live on the River—­a line without breadth or thickness.  Behind us is the Desert, which nothing can affect; wither no man goes till he is dead, (One does not use good agricultural ground for cemeteries.) Practically, then, we only move in two dimensions—­up stream or down.  Take away the Desert, which we don’t consider any more than a healthy man considers death, and you will see that we have no background whatever.  Our world is all one straight bar of brown or green earth, and, for some months, mere sky-reflecting water that wipes out everything You have only to look at the Colossi to realise how enormously and extravagantly man and his works must scale in such a country.  Remember too, that our crops are sure, and our life is very, very easy.  Above all, we have no neighbours That is to say, we must give out, for we cannot take in.  Now, I put it to you, what is left for a priest with imagination, except to develop ritual and multiply gods on friezes?  Unlimited leisure, limited space of two dimensions, divided by the hypnotising line of the River, and bounded by visible, unalterable death—­must, ipso facto——­’

‘Even so,’ I interrupted.  ’I do not comprehend your Gods—­your direct worship of beasts, for instance?’

’You prefer the indirect?  The worship of Humanity with a capital H?  My Gods, or what I saw in them, contented me.’

‘What did you see in your Gods as affecting belief and conduct?’

‘You know the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx?’

‘No,’ I murmured.  ‘What is it?’

’"All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells,"’ he replied.  With that I had to be content, for the passage ended in solid rock.

There were other tombs in the valley, but the owners were dumb, except one Pharaoh, who from the highest motives had broken with the creeds and instincts of his country, and so had all but wrecked it.  One of his discoveries was an artist, who saw men not on one plane but modelled full or three-quarter face, with limbs suited to their loads and postures.  His vividly realised stuff leaped to the eye out of the acreage of low-relief in the old convention, and I applauded as a properly brought-up tourist should.

‘Mine was a fatal mistake,’ Pharaoh Ahkenaton sighed in my ear,’ I mistook the conventions of life for the realities.’

‘Ah, those soul-crippling conventions!’ I cried.

‘You mistake me,’ he answered more stiffly.  ’I was so sure of their reality that I thought that they were really lies, whereas they were only invented to cover the raw facts of life.’

‘Ah, those raw facts of life!’ I cried, still louder; for it is not often that one has a chance of impressing a Pharaoh.’  We must face them with open eyes and an open mind!  Did you?’

‘I had no opportunity of avoiding them,’ he replied.  ’I broke every convention in my land.’

‘Oh, noble!  And what happened?’