“I was never less alone than when by myself.”

GIBBON.

Next morning, with her chaperon’s energetic daughters, Damaris found herself one of the herd foregathered on the Nile bank preparatory to the excursion to the Valley of the Kings, and later in the afternoon by mountain path over the ridge to that marvel of antiquity the Terrace-Temple of Deir el-Baharí.

“I don’t want to go, Janie dear,” she said, the preceding night, whilst the devoted maid wielded strong-bristled brushes on the burnished short-cropped hair.

“Better go, dearie. One must be polite, even if the heart breaks.”

Jane Coop’s literary plane swung between a three-penny weekly entitled “Real Stories from High Life” and Ouida’s novels, which latter she had bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road and kept sandwiched between her Bible and “Grandmother’s Herb Recipes.”

“But I don’t want to go. I hate crowds, and I can’t take Wellington. Every native flies from him since he got behind the Musical Colossus and growled. You remember? They thought it was the statue speaking, and the dear old darling was only trying to catch a lizard.”

The bulldog loathed Egypt.

He was always either in disgrace or being talked to in baby language. He had seen next to nothing of his beloved mistress, and his digestion had been almost ruined by the amount of chocolates he had eaten out of pure boredom.

“Take me,” he said, every time his beloved went out, as plainly as could be by means of his beautiful face and down-cast tail. But excursions had grown rarer and rarer and his slender middle more and more defined through grief.

“My heart isn’t breaking, Janie!” Damaris declared, sitting up in bed.

“I know it isn’t, dearie. There’s nothing to break it over, I’m sure. I was just repeating from ‘Her Scarlet Sin’, where the beautiful heroine is torn between two stools as it were.”

Jane Coop had no use for knights who left the field of combat; and as for the tales which were duly carried to her of an Arabian chief who followed her young mistress in the desert and sent her bunches of flowers and such-like trash, well! it was all you could expect if you left your own country for heathen parts!

To Jane Coop, rides in the desert in Egypt were just as much a part of the day’s programme as rides on donkeys at holiday-time had been in Margate, before interfering people began to make a fuss about the rider’s weight.

“You mind your own hedges, Maria Hobson, and see that your own cattle don’t go a-straying, with their monkey tricks,” she had said tartly and not over-lucidly, to her grace’s maid, who had heard from someone who had heard from someone else that Miss Hethencourt was out at all hours of the night, here, there and everywhere. “I know what time she comes in and where she has been, and who with, and that’s quite enough for me. Thank you, I can shepherd my own flock!”

She was not exactly within the confines of truth in her statement, but having learned in her youth to diagnose the hurt of dumb animals, she felt she was fully qualified to treat her beloved child’s unrest without any verbal aid from outsiders.

Yet something, a warning from the future, maybe, had prompted her to speak this night as she stood beside the bed, looking down upon the beauty of the child to whom she seemed, more than anyone else, to stand in the position of sponsor.

“Will you promise me one thing, dearie?”

She stroked the red head lovingly as it leant against the motherly bosom upon which had so often rested errant lambs and stricken pullets.

“Yes, Janie darling. I would promise you anything!”

“I know things are going crosswise a bit with you, dearie, as they always do in an unknown country; but I don’t worry about that, because at the crossways there is always a signpost. But now that we are in this heathen land, I want your promise that you will always tell me where you are going to when you go out-always. If it’s out for a ride in the desert or over amongst them mummy-tombs, or out to a tennis-party or dance. Will you, dearie? Always?”

The insistence in the demand made the girl look up into the homely face and she did not smile as she made a little cross above her heart in the manner of children.

“I promise, Janie-cross heart. And I’m starting out early-early to-morrow morning on an excursion to the Tombs of the Kings. We are taking lunch with us-paper-bags and remnants of sandwiches amongst Egypt’s dead--tea at the Rest House and--”

She stopped for a minute, then continued slowly:

A moment’s silence; then said practical Jane:

Damaris laughed.

“They’ve left, Janie! They’re all at Assouan, waiting to be shot by Mr. Kelham and Miss Sidmouth.”

Jane Coop sniffed as she tucked in the bed-clothes and kissed her child good-night.

She had got to the door when Damaris spoke.

“Janie, you know all about birds, don’t you?”

“Hens, dearie.”

“Hawks aren’t hens, dearie.”

“White Leghorns,” said Jane Coop, who was beginning to get interested in this subject so near her heart.

“Yes. Well, supposing you found that one, when it had all its feathers, had some speckled ones under its wings-

“But it couldn’t, dearie, if it was pure-bred!”

“Yes, but just supposing it had, what would be the meaning of it?”

Jane Coop hesitated, and re-tied her apron-strings. Descriptive analysis was not her strong forte.

“Well, dearie, I should say that the male bird was a-a-oh! a Plymouth Rock, or something like that. The speckled bird would be a good one, but if it was mixed it would have to be turned out of the run if you had a fancy for showing and prizes. I remember a black- But there now! what made you start your old Nannie talking about hens? Just you turn over and go to sleep, dearie. You have to be up and away early to-morrow, you know!”

She closed the door gently and left the girl alone.

“I don’t understand,” she said softly, and slipped out of bed to stand at the open window, with all the glory of an Egyptian night before her.

“I don’t understand the meaning of the story,” she repeated, as she watched the figure of a fellah wrapped in a big cloak which shone snow-white under the moon, trudging patiently across the grounds to the servants’ quarters. Then, as the huge dog flung himself against her, she struck her hands together. The sudden impact sent her mind flying back to the first time she had seen Hugh Carden Ali, in English riding-kit and Mohammedan tarbusch in the bazaar; then in her memory she saw him dining as an Englishman; saw him riding with falcon upon fist-a very Eastern, saw him as an Arab of Arabia in the desert; again as an Englishman, save for the Mohammedan tarbusch, holding in the bay mare as she thundered past him on the stallion Sooltan.

In a flash she understood the tragic story of the Hawk of Egypt.

“The pity of it!” she whispered. “Oh! the cruel pity of it!” and crept back to bed.

Wide-eyed and quiet, she stood very early next morning with the jostling, laughing crowd, waiting to be ferried across the Nile on the excursion to the Tombs of the Kings, which to most of the crowd ranked on a level with Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, with the difference that in the valley of desolation you could leave the remnants of your lunch anywhere, which is a habit strictly forbidden in the Marylebone Road.

Mounting the diminutive donkeys caused peals of laughter; the hamlets of Naza’er-Rizkeh and Naza’el Ba’irait rang with the cries of the cavalcade, and Damaris blindly followed Lady Thistleton’s energetic offspring, as with note-book and pencil they followed the guide in and out of the regulation tombs of Biban el-Muluk, the history of which he repeated with parrot-like monotony.

Lucy Jones, lighthearted tourist, thought the lunch awfully jolly in the shade of the tomb, in fact, she made it a riotous feast, with the help of others as young and non-temperamental as herself.

After all, what did it matter?

As Lucy said, “The dead had been such a jolly long time dead,” and the desolation of the valley made such a splendid contrast to the golden sunshine and violent blue of the sky.

The zig-zag path down to Deir el-Baharí occasioned more laughter and little screams and offers of help from the sterner male, who, under an extreme insouciance, tried to hide the insecurity of his perch on the back of the humble, scrambling quadruped.

When the laughing, jostling and somewhat dishevelled crowd streamed back down the second incline and across the Central Terrace, en route for the donkeys, it left Damaris standing with dancing eyes, and laughing mouth under the blue and star-strewn ceiling of the Shrine.

And when the last sound of laughter, and clattering stone under nimble hoof had melted away; when the sky had turned the marble temple mauve and pink and deepest red, and back to pink, to mauve, to softest white; when the first star had fastened the robe of day to the cloak of night, and silence had fallen like balm upon the wound caused by raucous voices, Damaris tip-toed down the steps and out into the Colonnade of Punt.

She was quite alone.