Now there was a family of Arab blood among those who served and were sworn to the Brotherhood of the Dawn, who from generation to generation had been climbers of the pyramids. These men alone, by following certain cracks in their marble casings and clinging to knobs or hollows that had been worn in them by the blowing of sand during hundreds or thousands of years, had the art and courage to come to the crest of every one of them; nor until they had done so were they accounted fit to take a wife. With the Sheik of these men Nefra often talked, and for her pleasure at different times he and his sons scaled every one of the pyramids before her eyes, returning safely from their dizzy journey to her side.
“Why cannot I do as you do?” she asked of this sheik at length. “I am light and surefooted, and my head does not swim upon a height; also I have limbs as long as yours.”
The Captain of the Pyramids, for so he was commonly called, looked at her, astonished, and shook his head.
“It is impossible,” he said. “No woman has ever climbed those stone mountains; that is, except the Spirit of the Pyramids herself.”
“Who is the Spirit of the Pyramids?” she asked.
“Lady, we know not,” he answered. “We never ask her, and when we see her in the full moon upon her journeyings, we veil our faces.”
“Why do you veil your faces, Captain?”
“Because if we did not we should go mad, as men have done who looked into her eyes.”
“Why do they go mad?”
“Because too much beauty breeds madness, as perchance you may find one day, Lady,” he answered; words that brought the colour to Nefra’s brow.