Nor did he want to.  They waned upon him.  Mrs. Pendleton’s conversation was a perpetual, “Do look at—!” or dissertations from the guide books—­already she had imparted a great deal of Flinders Petrie to him about his tombs.  Mr. Pendleton was neither enthusiastic nor voluble, but he was attacking the objects of their travels in the same thorough-going spirit that he had attacked and surmounted the industrial obstacles of his career, and he went to a great deal of persistent trouble to ascertain the exact dates of passing mosques and the conformations of their arches.

The travelers had already “done” the Citadel.  They had climbed its rocky hill, they had viewed the Mahomet Ali mosque and its columns and its carpets and had taken their guide’s and their guidebook’s word that it was an inferior structure although so amazingly effective from below; they had looked studiously down upon the city and tried to distinguish its minarets and towers and ancient gates, they had viewed with proper quizzicalness the imprint in the stone parapet of the hoof of that blindfolded horse which the last of the Mamelukes, cornered and betrayed, had spurred from the heights.

So now, no duty upon them, Ryder led them past the Citadel, up the Mokattam hills behind it, to that hilltop on which stood the little ancient mosque of the Sheykh-el-Gauchy, where the sunset spaces flowed round them like a sea of light and the world dropped into miniature at their feet.

Below them, in a golden haze, Cairo’s domes and minarets were shining like a city of dreams.  To the north, toy fields, vivid green, of rice and cotton lands, and the silver thread of the winding Nile, and all beyond, west and southwest, the vast, illimitable stretch of desert, shimmering in the opalescent air, sweeping on to the farthest edge of blue horizon.

“A nice resting place,” said Jack Ryder appreciatively of the tomb of the Sheykh-el-Gauchy.

“I presume the date is given,” Mr. Pendleton was murmuring, as he began to ferret with his Baedecker.

Mrs. Pendleton sighed sentimentally.  “He must have been very fond of nature.”

“He was very distrustful of his wives,” said Ryder, grinning.  “He had three of them, all young and beautiful.”

“I thought you said he was a saint?” murmured Jinny, to which interpolation he responded, “Wouldn’t three wives make any man a saint?” and resumed his narrative.

“And so he had his tomb made where he could overlook the whole city and observe the conduct of his widows.”

“They could move,” objected Miss Jeffries.

“The female of the Mohammedan species is not the free agent that you imagine,” Ryder retorted, beginning with a smile and ending with a queer, reminiscent pang.  He had a moment’s rather complicated twinge of amusement at her reactions if she should know that to an encounter with a female of the Mohammedan species was to be attributed his departure from her party last night.