I saw before me the stately mass of the great Temple of Osiris.
The mighty wall, wherein I had spent the first night and morning, was revealed as part of a great quadrangle enclosing an enceinte of about 100 yards square.
The wall and the gateway, which I seemed to know as a blind man knows things by his sense of touch, were the only parts of the building which retained any semblance of its original design. The rest was a vast tumbled ruin, wrecked by man and his unruliness, by Nature and by Time.
I climbed again to the summit of the great wall where I had been the day before.
There was a cool refreshing breeze, and I could see around me the great ruin, and on the slope below it what I took to be the outlines of a Ptolemaic pleasure city that had once been busy and important under the shadow of the Temple’s walls.
Now the desert lay utterly barren all round, and far in the distance I could just see the sea with that bewildering blue of the butterfly’s wing.
Looking inland I could still make out on the horizon a dozen horsemen, and through my field-glasses could see the white uniforms, the red tarbooshes and slung carbines which I presumed were worn by mounted police or troopers of the Egyptian army. Jakoub’s enemies had certainly gone. His cunning and foresight and the labours of those old worshippers of Mithras had saved him for the time being.
Below me the Arabs were busy reloading the camels, and I was eager to be on the road again, willing enough to leave behind me all these relics of ancient mystery and magnificence which for me were associated with that night of vigil and horror.
A few hours later the Temple had faded like a dream into the sand that surrounded us, as our party toiled across the last few miles to the railway.
We came to it at last, a wavy track following the contours of the desert, an iron link with civilisation.