"She must be frightfully up on the guide books," muttered Falconer.
"She's a miner in them," Arlee laughed, as they made their way over the rubbishy ground where great beams of stone and fallen statues lay half-buried in the sands.
"They must be very glad to have you back again with them," Falconer told her, trying hard to keep their progress ahead of the others.
"Oh, I don't know!" Honest dubiety spoke in Arlee's tone. "They have mentioned twice how convenient it was to use my stateroom!"
"They felt very badly when you ran away from them in Cairo."
"I was shockingly sudden about that," owned the girl lightly, "but the chance came—Are we going to climb the great pylon now?"
"It will be a jolly high place to see the moon rise."
It was a jolly high place to see the moon rise, and to see all Karnak, and all Luxor, with its high Moslem minaret towering over its crumbling columns, and to see the dark and distant country with its tiny hamlets crouching under humbler mosques and lonely palms, and on the other side the wide and winding Nile with the shadowy cliffs of Thebes beyond. It gave Arlee the dizzying sensation of being suspended between heaven and earth, so high was she above those far-reaching plains, so high above the giant columns beneath her, the vast beamed roofs, the pointing obelisks. It made her breath quicken and her pulses beat.
"Watch the moon," said Falconer in a low tone.