A red sky burned over Egypt,--red with deep intensity of spreading fire.

The slow-creeping waters of the Nile washed patches of dull crimson against the oozy mud-banks, tipping palms and swaying reeds with colour as though touched with vermilion, and here and there long stretches of wet sand gleamed with a tawny gold.

All Cairo was out, inhabitants and strangers alike, strangers especially, conceiving it part of their "money's worth" never to miss a sunset,--and beyond Cairo, where the Pyramids lifted their summits aloft,--stern points of warning or menace from the past to the present and the future,--a crowd of tourists with their Arab guides were assembled, staring upward in, amazement at a white wonder in the red sky, a great air-ship, which, unlike other air-ships, was noiseless, and that moved vast wings up and down with the steady, swift rhythm of a bird's flight, as though of its own volition.

It soared at an immense height so that it was quite impossible to see any pilot or passenger.

It hung over the Pyramids almost motionless for three or four minutes as if about to descend, and the watching groups below made the usual alarmist prognostications of evil, taking care to look about for the safest place of shelter for themselves should the huge piece of mechanism above them suddenly escape control and take a downward dive.