The lady looked at him in mock fear.

“Come, Nechutes,” the sculptor implored laughingly, “be gracious.  Being in highest favor, it behooves thee to be generous.”

But the prospective cup-bearer refused to be placated.  He rumbled an order to the slaves and they shouldered the litter.

Ta-meri made a pretty mouth at him, and turned again to Kenkenes.

“Nay, Kenkenes,” she said.  “It was mine to say that the way shall be clear—­but I promise it.”

She nodded a bright farewell to him, and they moved away.  The sculptor, still smiling, continued down to the river.

At the landing he engaged one of the numerous small boats awaiting a passenger, and directed the clout-wearing boatman to drop down the stream.

Directly opposite his point of embarkation there were farm lands, fertile and moist, extending inland for a mile.  But presently the frontier of the desert laid down a gray and yellow dead-line over which no domestic plant might strike its root and live.

But the arable tracts were velvet green with young grain, the verdant level broken here and there by a rustic’s hut, under two or three close-standing palms.  Even from the surface of the Nile the checkered appearance of the country, caused by the various kinds of products, was noticeable.  Egypt was the most fertile land in the world.

However, as the light bari climbed and dipped on the little waves toward the north the Arabian hills began to approach the river.  Their fronts became abrupt and showed the edges of stratum on stratum of white stone.  About their bases were quantities of rubble and gray dust slanting against their sides in slides and drifts.  Across the narrowing strip of fertility square cavities in rows showed themselves in the white face of the cliffs.  The ruins of a number of squat hovels were barely discernible over the wheat.

“Set me down near Masaarah,” Kenkenes said, “and wait for me.”  The boatman ducked his head respectfully and made toward the eastern shore.  He effected a landing at a bedding of masonry on which a wharf had once been built.  The rock was now over-run with riotous marsh growth.

The quarries had not been worked for half a century.  The thrifty husbandman had cultivated his narrow field within a few feet of the Nile, and the roadway that had once led from the ruined wharf toward the hills was obliterated by the grain.

Kenkenes alighted and struck through the wheat toward the pitted front of the cliffs.  Before him was a narrow gorge that debouched into the great valley over a ledge of stone three feet in height.  After much winding the ravine terminated in a wide pocket, a quarter of a mile inland.  Exit from this cul-de-sac was possible toward the east by a steep slope leading to the top of one of the interior ridges of the desert.  Kenkenes did not pause at the cluster of houses.  The roofs had fallen in and the place was quite uninhabitable.