"And thou wilt permit no eye to see thee enter or come forth from the valley?"
"Most cautious will I be—most secret and discreet."
"Canst thou open the gates?"
"I have not forgotten from the daily practice that was mine for many weeks."
"Then go, and let no man know of this. Amen give thee success."
Kenkenes thanked him gratefully and went at once.
The moon was in its third quarter, but it was near midnight and the valley of the Nile between the distant highlands to the east and west was in soft light. On the eastern side of the river there was only a feeble glimmer from a window where some chanting leech stood by a bedside, or where a feast was still on. But under the luster of the waning moon Thebes lost its outlines and became a city of marbles and shadows and undefined limits.
On the western side the vision was interrupted by a lofty, sharp-toothed range, tipped with a few scattered stars of the first magnitude. In the plain at its base were the palaces of Amenophis III, of Rameses II, and their temples, the temples of the Tothmes, and far to the south the majestic colossi of Amenophis III towered up through the silver light, the faces, in their own shadow, turned in eternal contemplation of the sunrise. Grouped about the great edifices were the booths of funeral stuffs and the stalls of caterers to the populace of the Libyan suburb of Thebes. But these were hidden in the dark shadows which the great structures threw. The moon blotted out the profane things of the holy city and discovered only its splendors to the sky.
At the northwest limits of the suburb, the hills approached the Nile, leaving only a narrow strip a few hundred yards wide between their fronts and the water. Here the steep ramparts were divided by a tortuous cleft, which wound back with many cross-fissures deep into the desert. The ravine was simply a chasm, with perpendicular sides of naked rock.
At its upper end, it was blocked by a wall of unscalable heights. Nowhere in its length was it wider than a hundred yards, and across the mouth a gateway wide enough for three chariots abreast had been built of red granite.