It occurred to him that he might cross to the Memphian shore and procure a larger boat; but what would protect his helpless charges during the hours of absence, or in case he were taken? He realized that he dare not run a risk; his every movement must be safe and sure. He could not ask the wounded Israelite to return to the camp now, seeing that she had suffered mistreatment at the hands of Har-hat's servants and deserted not.
"If there were but a grotto in the rocks—a cave or a tomb—" he stopped and smote his hands together.
"By Apis! I have it—the Tomb of the Discontented Soul!"
He turned to the two women, who had talked softly together in Hebrew, and spoke lightly in his relief.
"We have shelter for this night—safer than any other place in all Egypt. Trouble no more concerning that. Let me hide my sacrilege and rob them of indisputable evidence against me, and then we shall get to our refuge."
He lifted Deborah in his arms, and bearing her out into the open, left her with Rachel.
Then he reentered the shadowy niche. The night was not too dark to show the interior. Athor, a torso, broken in twain, headless, armless, was prostrate. It had been pushed over against the great cube that sheltered it and the fall against the hard limestone had ruined it. Kenkenes clenched his hands and choked back the angry tears. To the artist the destruction partook of the heinousness of murder, of the pathos of death. He set about concealing the wreck with all speed, for he wished to be merciful to his eyes.
He collected the fragmentary members, and carrying them down the slope a little way, dug a grave for them in the sand. To the trench he rolled the trunk on the tamarisk cylinders, and buried all that was left of Athor the Golden. Over the grave he laid a flat stratum of rock that the wind might not uncover the ruin.
Returning to the niche, he took up the matting with its weight of chipped stone, and went down through the dark to the line of rocks opposite the quarries. There he permitted the rubble to slide with a mixture of earth, like a natural displacement, into the talus, of a similar nature, at the base of the cliff. The matting he shook and laid aside. It would serve for a bed in the tomb that night.
Then he destroyed the north wall. In the four months of its existence the sand had banked against it more than half its height. Each stone removed in the dismantling was carried away to a new place, until the whole fortification was, as once it had been, scattered up and down the slope. The light, dry sand he pitched with his wooden shovel against the great cube until it all lay where the wind would have piled it had no second wall stood in its way. By dawn the strong breeze from the north would cover every footprint and shovel-mark to a level once more. He went again to the line of rocks and threw the shovel with a sure aim and a strong arm into the quarries across the valley. To-morrow it would seem that an Israelite had forgotten one of his tools.