Then, without more words, he saluted the sacred ring, and we all went back to Zeu.

CHAPTER V

PHARAOH MAKES TROUBLE

Another six weeks or so had gone by, and at length the character of the country began to change.  At last we were passing out of the endless desert over which we had travelled for so many hundreds of miles; at least a thousand, according to our observations and reckonings, which I checked by those that I had taken upon my eastward journey.  Our march, after the great adventure at the oasis, was singularly devoid of startling events.  Indeed, it had been awful in its monotony, and yet, oddly enough, not without a certain charm—­at any rate for Higgs and Orme, to whom the experience was new.

Day by day to travel on across an endless sea of sand so remote, so unvisited that for whole weeks no man, not even a wandering Bedouin of the desert, crossed our path.  Day by day to see the great red sun rise out of the eastern sands, and, its journey finished, sink into the western sands.  Night by night to watch the moon, the same moon on which were fixed the million eyes of cities, turning those sands to a silver sea, or, in that pure air, to observe the constellations by which we steered our path making their majestic march through space.  And yet to know that this vast region, now so utterly lonesome and desolate, had once been familiar to the feet of long-forgotten men who had trod the sands we walked, and dug the wells at which we drank.

Armies had marched across these deserts, also, and perished there.  For once we came to a place where a recent fearful gale had almost denuded the underlying rock, and there found the skeletons of thousands upon thousands of soldiers, with those of their beasts of burden, and among them heads of arrows, sword-blades, fragments of armour and of painted wooden shields.

Here a whole host had died; perhaps Alexander sent it forth, or perhaps some far earlier monarch whose name has ceased to echo on the earth.  At least they had died, for there we saw the memorial of that buried enterprise.  There lay the kings, the captains, the soldiers, and the concubines, for I found the female bones heaped apart, some with the long hair still upon the skulls, showing where the poor, affrighted women had hived together in the last catastrophe of slaughter or of famine, thirst, and driven sand.  Oh, if only those bones could speak, what a tale was theirs to tell!

There had been cities in this desert, too, where once were oases, now overwhelmed, except perhaps for a sand-choked spring.  Twice we came upon the foundations of such places, old walls of clay or stone, stark skeletons of ancient homes that the shifting sands had disinterred, which once had been the theatre of human hopes and fears, where once men had been born, loved, and died, where once maidens had been fair, and good and evil wrestled, and little children played.  Some Job may have dwelt here and written his immortal plaint, or some king of Sodom, and suffered the uttermost calamity.  The world is very old; all we Westerns learned from the contemplation of these wrecks of men and of their works was just that the world is very old.