“Her?”

“Hathor.  That temple of Denderah seemed haunted to-day.”

He pulled off his hat to let the breeze get at his hair, too.

“When we were standing in the sanctuary I seemed to be smelling death and corruption.  Ugh!”

His face changed at the memory.

“And the cries of those bats!  They sounded like menacing spirits.  I was a fool to go to such a place to ask a blessing on our voyage.  My attempt at paganism was punished, and no wonder, Ruby.  For I don’t think I’m really a bit of a pagan; I don’t think I see much joy in the pagan life, that is so much cracked up by some people.  I don’t see how the short life and the merry one can ever be really merry at all.  How can a man be merry with a darkness always in front of him?”

“What darkness?”

“Death—­without immortality.”

She said nothing for a moment.  Then she asked him: 

“Do you look upon death merely as a door into another life?”

“I believe it is.  Don’t you?”

“Yes.  Then you don’t dread death?”

“Don’t I—­now?  It would be leaving so much now.  And besides, I love this life; I revel in it.  Who wouldn’t, with health like mine?  Feel that arm!”

She did not move.  He took her hand and pressed her fingers against his muscles.

“It’s like iron,” she said, taking away her hand.  “But muscle and health are not exactly the same thing, are they?”

“No; of course not.  But did you ever see a man look more perfectly well than I do?”

As he stood beside her, radiant now, upright, with the breeze ruffling his short, fair hair, his enthusiastic blue eyes shining with happiness, he did look like a young god of health and years younger than his age.

“Oh, you look all right,” she said; “just like lots of other men who go in for sport and keep themselves fit.”

He laughed.

“You won’t pay me the compliment I want.  Look at those barges loaded with pottery!  All those thousands of little vases—­koulal, as the natives call them—­are made in Keneh.  I’ve seen the men doing it—­boys too—­the wet clay spinning round the brown finger that makes the orifice.  How good it is to see the life of the river!  There’s always something new, always something interesting, humanity at work in the sunshine and the open air.  Who wouldn’t be a fellah rather than a toiler in any English town?  Here are the shadufs!  All the way up the Nile we shall see them, and we shall hear the old shaduf songs, that sound as if they came down from the days when they cut the Sphinx out of the living rock, and we shall hear the drowsy song of the water-wheels, as the sleepy oxen go round and round in the sunshine; and we shall see the women coming in lines from the inland villages with the water-jars poised on their heads.  If only we were back in the days when there were no steamers and the Nile must have been like a perpetual dream!  But never mind.  At least we refused Baroudi’s steam-tug.  So we shall just go up with the wind, or be poled up when there is none, if we aren’t tied up under the bank.  That’s the only way to travel on the Nile, but of course Baroudi uses it, as one uses the railway, to go to business.”