Sunrise on the uncompleted city tipped the raw lines of her half-built walls with broken fire and gilded the gear of gigantic hoisting cranes.  Scaffolding, clinging to bald facades, seemed frail and cobwebby at great height, and slabs of stone, drawn and held by cables near the summit of chutes, looked like dice on the giddy slide.

Below in the still shadowy passages and interiors, speckled with fallen mortar, lay chains, rubble of brick and chipped stone; splinters, flinders and odd ends of timber; scraps of metal, broken implements and the what-not that litters the path of construction.  Without, in the avenues, vaguely outlined by the slowly rising structures on either side, were low-riding, long, heavy, dwarf-wheeled vehicles and sledges to which men, not beasts, had been harnessed.  Here, also, were great cords of new brick and avalanches of glazed tile where disaster had overtaken orderly stacks of this multi-tinted material.  In the open spaces were covered heaps of sand, and tons of lime, in sacks; layers of paint and hogsheads of tar; ingots of copper and pigs of bronze.  Roadways, beaten in the dust by a multitude of bare feet, led in a hundred directions, all merging in one great track toward the camp of the laboring Israelites.

This was pitched in a vast open in the city’s center, wherein Rameses II had planned to build a second Karnak to Imhotep.  Under the gracious favor of this, the physician god, the great Pharaoh had regained his sight.  But death stayed his grateful hand and Meneptah forgot his father’s debt.  Here, then, year in and year out, an angular sea of low tents sheltered Israel.

Let it not be supposed that all the sons of Abraham were here.  Thousands labored yet in the perfection of Pithom, on the highways of the Lower country, and on the Rameside canal, and the greater number made the brick for all Egypt in the clay-fields of the Delta.  Therefore, within the walls of Pa-Ramesu there were somewhat more than three thousand Hebrews, men, women and children.

On a slight eminence, overlooking the camp, were numerous small structures of sun-dried brick, grouped about one of larger dimensions.  Above this was raised a military standard, a hawk upon a cross-bar, from which hung party-colored tassels of linen floss.  By this sign, the order of government was denoted.  The Hebrews were under martial law.

The camp was astir.  Thin columns of blue smoke drifted up here and there between the close-set tents, and the sibilant wearing of stone-mills, as they ground the wheat, was heard in many households.  The nutty aroma of parching lentils, and the savor of roasting papyrus root and garlic told the stage of the morning meal.  The strong-armed women, rich brown in tint from the ardent sun, crowned with coil upon coil of heavy hair, bent over the pungent fires.  Sturdy children, innocent of raiment, went hither and thither, bearing well filled skins of water.  Apart from