“No, lad,” the professor replied. “I’m sorry to say that I’ve got to get back to Cairo to-night. Two or three things have come up that I want to look after, in order to have everything clear before starting off in the morning. I’ve been over the Pyramids before, Perry, you know, and it’s an old story. What I want to see is fossil elephants! Compared with those, my boy, the Pyramids are very young.”
“Oh, we’re going to find heaps of fossils that no one ever saw before,” asserted Perry, with a buoyancy so infectious that the two men laughed. “But just now, I’m after Pyramids. Fossil elephants, later.”
“Put your heavy coat on, then, Perry,” the Survey expert advised him, as they rose from the table. “If you’re going to sit on the sand with Mad Quinward, you’ll find that it gets jolly cold here at night.”
A lurid glow as of a volcano’s reflection was all that the sky still held of the sunset when Perry reached the boulder where he had left the artist. Mad Quinward, as the boy had come to know him, was still sitting on the rock, but he, also, had been having dinner, for he was putting into one of his capacious pockets a flat tin food-box, and into another a flask. Seeing the boy, however, he unhooked the lid of the box, sprinkled some salt over a crust that remained, and gravely handed it to Perry.
“Bread and salt,” he said.
The boy took it gravely, remembering the old custom that whosoever has accepted bread and salt at your hands has thereby cemented friendship, and munched the crust in silence, feeling something very fitting in this ancient oriental rite in the presence of the Sphinx as the day died down.
The crimson faded out of the sky with the last crumb of the little ritual meal, and then Perry saw, for the first time in his life, the up-coming of a night in Egypt. The darkness hurled itself after the sunset like a battle-charge, and within a few seconds, the palm-trees that had been dark green in the glowing sunset, loomed like black sentinels against the sky. The stars, as though in panic at the darkness, leaped into full brilliancy, and a bright star-shine gleamed where the sunset had been but a moment before. The transformation was so sudden as to seem almost theatrical.
The artist unfolded the tattered blanket on which he had been seated and threw one-half of its length upon the sand, motioning to Perry to sit down. The boy did so, feeling the heat of the sun-warmed sand beneath him and, taking his cue from the artist, lapsed into silence. It was some time before Mad Quinward spoke.
“Nearly five thousand years ago,” he said, in a low, thoughtful voice, “there came a wise man to the old city beside the Nile.”
He stopped, and in the pause Perry felt himself slide into a reverie of life as it was in the days of the Pyramid-builders.