“Well! It is there. Maghmood!” he coughed.
A native appeared at the door of the shanty.
“My son is the superintendent,” said the old man, showing a maze of wrinkles meant for a smile. “Follow Maghmood.”
The son, a polite young Frenchman clothed in the thinnest of white trousers and an open shirt, was bowed over a small stone covered with ancient Egyptian figures. I told him why I had come.
“Work?” he replied. “No. Unfortunately, the society allows us to hire only natives. I wish I might have a few Europeans to look after the digging. But I am pleased to find a workman interested in the ruins. You are as free to go inside as if you had a ticket. But it is midday now. How do you escape a sunstroke, with only that cap? You had better sit here in the shade until the heat dies down a bit.”
I assured him that the Egyptian sun did not trouble me, and he stepped to the door to shout an order to the well fed gate-keeper just out of sight over the hill. That official grinned knowingly as I appeared, unlocked the gate, and, pushing back with one hand several small black boys who were racing about, let me in to the noonday quiet of the forest of pillars.
As the shadows began to grow long, a flock of sheep rushed into the sacred place, and, stumbling through the ruins, awoke the sleeping echoes with their bleating. They were trying to get to their shepherds, who were calling to them in voices that sounded like phonographs. After they had left, there came more peaceful beings weighed down with cameras and note-books. Everybody was interested in one lively corner of the place. There, in the latest hollow dug, an army of men and boys toiled at the machines that raised the sand and the water which had been poured into the pit to loosen the soil. Other natives, naked, groped in the mud at the bottom, eager to win the small reward offered to the discoverer of each ancient treasure buried in the earth.
One such prize was captured in the afternoon. A small boy, half buried in mud and water, suddenly stopped wallowing about, and uttered a shrill shriek of joy. He came dangerously near being trampled out of sight by his fellow workmen. In a twinkling half the band, amid a mighty roar of shouting and splashing, was tugging at some heavy object hidden from view in the mud.
They raised it at last—a woman’s figure in blue stone, about four feet in length. The news of the discovery was quickly carried to the shanty on the hill. In a great white helmet that made him look like a walking toad-stool, the superintendent hurried down to the edge of the pit, and gave orders that the statue be carried to a level space, where a crowd of excited tourists lay in wait with open note-books. There it was carefully washed with sponges, while the tourists stood gazing eagerly at it. Then it was placed on a car of the tiny railway laid among the ruins. Crowds of natives grasped the long rope attached to the car, and, moving in time to a wild Arabic song of rejoicing, dragged the new find through the temple and placed it at the feet of the aged Frenchman.
As evening fell I turned back to my lodging-place. Several lodgers had gathered, but neither they nor Pietro could tell me anything about the land across the Nile, which I meant to visit next day.