If you have not the vision you need not worry, for you will not want to wander from the hotel lounge after your coffee to traverse these ancient wastes.

Damaris had spent the last fortnight in helping her godmother prepare for her tedious journey.

With the knowledge that she would have a fortnight, perhaps more, in which there would be little else to do than to visit the ruins, she had rushed through the principal objects of interest in the wake of a verbose dragoman, and then given every moment of her time to her beloved godmother, to whom she had said good-bye that very morning.

Restless and irritated by the trivial conversation of girls of her own age and the amorous tendencies of the stronger sex of the same age and also a good bit older, she had spent the afternoon in the hotel grounds, waiting for the evening, when she could slip away by herself; having realised that the best time of all in Thebes of the Hundred Gates is at fall of night, when the shadows cast a seemly cloak over the vulgarity of the modern buildings, and give an air of romance even to the glittering lights of the appalling esplanade, which flaunts its tawdry modernity cheek by jowl with the quay, built by one of the Ptolemies, and in use even to the present day.

When the call of the Muezzin from the Mosque of Abou’l-Haggag came to her an hour before sunset she went in, bathed and dressed, and dined in her own room.  Later, she stole out, ordered her car and drove herself along the broad tree-lined road and up the avenue of ram-headed Sphinxes to the first pylon of the great Temple.

There she switched off the lights, hid the starting-handle under the cushions and, tip-toeing, passed through the first pylon and up to the broken kiosk of the Ethiopian Tahraka.

She walked quietly, though assuredly her footsteps would have been deadened by Egypt’s sands even if she had walked upon her heels, and stole through the vestibule to the second pylon, occasionally switching on her electric torch for fear of being tripped by fallen stone.

She had not heard of the great catastrophe which had brought the columns hurtling to the ground, due perhaps to the merciless greed of Ptolemy Lathyrus, or earthquake, or the well-known fact that temples, houses or plans built upon sand are bound to crumble; nor did she wot of the precariousness of the walls around her or the shifting propensities of the foundations.

She walked quietly because the spirit of the place was upon her, the spirit which puts a hand upon your mouth so that words shall not disturb the ghosts of the past, and which blinds your eyes so that you look back upon that hour as on a dream.

Yet, as she passed through pylon, vestibule and the Great Court, she stopped and turned, went on, and stopped again to listen.

There was no sound.

Flashing her light upon part of a fallen column, she sat down upon it, with the purple sky studded with stars as roof above her head and the sands of ages as carpet to her feet.