It was almost a different lad, however, who jumped up briskly when the call to wake the camp was made at sunrise. He was out and busy with his camera half an hour before breakfast was ready, and when he sat down, his appetite whetted by the open air, he tucked away a meal that made a serious inroad on the provisions.
“You’ll have to go easier on the grub than that when we get out on the desert,” his uncle warned him jokingly, “or we’ll have to build a railroad as we go to keep you in supplies.”
Perry grinned appreciatively.
“I wish I could eat enough at one sitting to make me so fat that I wouldn’t feel the camel,” he said, “but as I can’t, I suppose I’d better quit now.” He winced as he got up from his cross-legged position on the floor. “I just feel like one big bruise.”
“Cheer up,” said Antoine, “you’ll feel worse to-night.”
The caravan started past Sakkara, following the same general character of road as the day before. To the left, lay the Nile, flowing between the cultivated fields, and beyond, the high, bare, rocky escarpment of the eastern plain; to the right, frowned the sandstone bluffs, from the top of which to the westward stretched the interminable leagues of desert.
“That’s really the plan of all Egypt, isn’t it, Antoine?” asked Perry, at the evening halt, pointing across the cultivated stretch. “Desert on either side, and that two-mile strip between. I hadn’t ever thought of Egypt merely as a single narrow strip of land, at least, not as narrow as that.”
“That is just what it is,” Antoine replied. “Except for the delta and Lower Egypt, for the Fayum, where we are going, and for the oases in the desert, that narrow valley is all. Yet Egypt has played a great part in the world.”
“I don’t see that it does now,” declared Perry, with American opportunism. “It’s all tombs. We’ve seen the tombs of Ptah-hotep, Ti, Mera, and a whole lot of others to-day and yesterday. Those chaps seem to have done big things. They sent out armies all over the map. They built huge temples and pyramids. I don’t see that modern Egypt is doing anything at all. What’s the matter?”
“Nations die out, like people,” said Antoine. “There is no longer any Egypt. It is England, and England only, that lives in the present, here. Yet, Perry, you must not forget that the great dam at Assouan, which was built less than ten years ago, is a much bigger work than the Pyramids and a million times more useful. Egypt now grows two crops instead of one, doubling the wealth of the entire country.”