Safe in the protecting shadows he watched Hahmed and Jill descend.

Little ripples of laughter fell on the night air as Hahmed, letting himself down easily from one gigantic block to another, held out his arms and lifted Jill down, bending his head to kiss her each time he put her on her feet.

They were at the last step but one when, with a little scream, she swayed, and nearly fell to the step beneath.

“Hold me, Hahmed,” she cried, “I’m dizzy, everything is going round!”

And Hahmed caught her and lifted her gently down the last steps to the sand, bending to kiss her on the mouth, and shifting her suddenly to his left arm so as to catch Jack Wetherbourne by the throat as he dashed shouting from the shadows upon them.

“Jill!   Jill!   It’s I--Jack! don’t let-----”

Until the grip tightening choked back his words, when with a surprising swiftness the Arab let go his hold, and getting one in on the point, sent the Englishman reeling backwards to fall in a heap against the base of the pyramid, and then to scramble to his feet, too dizzy to stop his adversary, who, flinging the veil over the woman’s face, passed swiftly to the place where awaited the camels.

And too slow was Jack Wetherbourne to gain the spot in time to stop the flight of the camel which with its double burden was already racing straight ahead into the desert; and too bemused by the blow to recognise the fact when he did get there that the hired brute he was staggering too was built for speed in the image of the tortoise compared to the hare-like-for-swiftness contour of the abandoned beauty who had strolled to the spot from the other side of the pyramid, and quite undisturbed was watching her sister’s hurried departure into the unknown.

CHAPTER XXXIX

All our lives we all chase wraiths in the moonshine!  Be the wraiths the outcome of proximity in the garden under the silvery moon rays, which so often snap the trap about our unwary feet by rounding off the physical angles of our momentary heart’s desires, or lending point to the stub ends of their undeveloped mentality; or the wraiths of the midnight soul, otherwise disarranged nervous or digested system, which float invitingly, distractingly, tantalisingly in front of our clogged-by-sleep vision at night; turning out, however, in the early light heralding the early cup of tea, to be nothing more soul distracting than the good old brass knob adorning the end of the bedstead.

But Jack Wetherbourne’s wraiths, which he was chasing in the moonlight, were good honest humans with the requisite number of legs and arms wrapped in good, white raiment; one of which humans with the other in his arms sat astride a camel, who made up by her muscular development whatever she might lack in goodness of heart and honesty of purpose; she too being wrapped in the silvery drapery which the moon throws pell-mell around pyramid and mud hut, humble fellah, descendant maybe of some long dead Pharaoh, and the jocular, jubilant millionaire, who with luck can trace a grandfather.