“When I left the Point I was assigned to the colored cavalry.  They are good men; we went up Kettle Hill together.  Then came the Philippine troubles, then that Chinese affair.  Then I did staff duty, and could not stand the inactivity and resigned.  They had no use for me in Manchuria; I tired of waiting, and went to Venezuela.  The prospects for service there were absurd; I heard of the Moorish troubles and went to Morocco.  Others of my sort swarmed there; matters dragged and dragged, and the Kaiser never meant business, anyway.

“Being independent, and my means permitting me, I got some shooting in the back country.  This all degenerated into the merest nomadic wandering—­nothing but sand, camels, ruins, tents, white walls, and blue skies.  And at last I came to the town of Sa-el-Hagar.”

His voice died out; his restless, haunted eyes became fixed.

“Sa-el-Hagar, once ancient Sais,” repeated the Tracer quietly; and the young man looked at him.

“You know that?”

“Yes,” said the Tracer.

For a while Burke remained silent, preoccupied, then, resting his chin on his hand and speaking in a curiously monotonous voice, as though repeating to himself by rote, he went on: 

“The town is on the heights—­have you a pencil?  Thank you.  Here is the town of Sa-el-Hagar, here are the ruins, here is the wall, and somewhere hereabouts should be the buried temple of Neith, which nobody has found.”  He shifted his pencil.  “Here is the lake of Sais; here, standing all alone on the plain, are those great monolithic pillars stretching away into perspective—­four hundred of them in all—­a hundred and nine still upright.  There were one hundred and ten when I arrived at El Teb Wells.”

He looked across at the Tracer, repeating:  “One hundred and ten—­when I arrived.  One fell the first night—­a distant pillar far away on the horizon.  Four thousand years had it stood there.  And it fell—­the first night of my arrival.  I heard it; the nights are cold at El Teb Wells, and I was lying awake, all a-shiver, counting the stars to make me sleep.  And very, very far away in the desert I heard and felt the shock of its fall—­the fall of forty centuries under the Egyptian stars.”

His eyes grew dreamy; a slight glow had stained his face.

“Did you ever halt suddenly in the Northern forests, listening, as though a distant voice had hailed you?  Then you understand why that far, dull sound from the dark horizon brought me to my feet, bewildered, listening, as though my own name had been spoken.

“I heard the wind in the tents and the stir of camels; I heard the reeds whispering on Sais Lake and the yap-yap of a shivering jackal; and always, always, the hushed echo in my ears of my own name called across the star-lit waste.

“At dawn I had forgotten.  An Arab told me that a pillar had fallen; it was all the same to me, to him, to the others, too.  The sun came out hot.  I like heat.  My men sprawled in the tents; some watered, some went up to the town to gossip in the bazaar.  I mounted and cast bridle on neck—­you see how much I cared where I went!  In two hours we had completed a circle—­like a ruddy hawk above El Teb.  And my horse halted beside the fallen pillar.”