The Nile wound its way through the green plains, stretching as far to the north as eye could see between the opal and mauve and gold of the Libyan Hills.

Far over in the western vista a long line of trees, twining through an oasis flanking the city, led out to a point where the desert abruptly raised its hills of yellow sand.
Here, enormous, lonely, and cynical, the pyramids which Cheops had built, the stone sphinx of Ghizeh, kept faith with the desert in the glow of rainless land-reminders ever that the East, the mother of knowledge, will by knowledge prevail; that: "The thousand years of thy insolence The thousand years of thy faith, Will be paid in fiery recompense, And a thousand years of bitter death." "The sword--for ever the sword," David said to himself, as he looked: "Rameses and David and Mahomet and Constantine, and how many conquests have been made in the name of God! But after other conquests there have been peace and order and law.

Here in Egypt it is ever the sword, the survival of the strongest." As he made his way down the hillside again he fell to thinking upon all Faith had written.

The return of the drunken chair-maker made a deep impression on him--almost as deep as the waking dreams he had had of his uncle calling him.
"Soolsby and me--what is there between Soolsby and me ?" he asked himself now as he made his way past the tombs of the Mamelukes.

"He and I are as far apart as the poles, and yet it comes to me now, with a strange conviction, that somehow my life will be linked with that of the drunken Romish chair-maker.