"All right," he said. "I was only waiting for you to come in." Freddy was not the sort to see anything which he was not meant to see. If the two lovers had anything to tell him, they would tell him. Until then, he would mind his own business.
"You go and have a smoke outside," Meg said. "I'll put away all this."
"All this" meant the boxes of "finds" and the papers of plans and figures which they had all been working at earlier in the evening.
CHAPTER XII
It was the dawn of the morning on which the tomb was to be opened. Meg could not sleep; the overseer's shrill whistle for the roll-call of the workmen had banished her last hopes that a little sleep would come to her before the exciting day began.
The clear whistle called the straggling figures together. They were still indefinite objects, moving white columns in the darkness which heralds the dawn. They were to begin work earlier than usual; Meg could see no signs of the coming day in the sky.
She sprang out of bed, glad to begin some practical work to banish the confusion of thoughts which had made her brain too active for sleep. Before she had her bath or dressed, she felt that she must breathe the cool, pure air outside the hut for a moment or two.
During the night her thoughts had been mastered by a consciousness of the fact that after the great day, after the tomb was satisfactorily opened and Michael had accomplished the necessary work in connection with it which Freddy might demand of him, he would start out on his desert journey. She could not and would not hold him back. Things too delicate and indefinite to be described had gathered and accumulated, strengthening his determination to leave the valley and start out on his apparently objectless journey. As the accumulation of atoms has formed continents, so the accumulation of thoughts becomes a thing which controls our destinies.
The treasure-trove of gold which had been hidden by Akhnaton the Dreamer was now as real to Michael as the gold-mines in California were real to the miners of the '49 rush. He had visualized it over and over again. He was undaunted by the fact that many visionaries had seen their King Solomon's mines equally clearly; but how many have reached them? He was satisfied that, though his journey might prove a complete failure from Freddy's point of view, until he made it any work he tried to do would be a more complete one. There are treasures laid up in heaven far beyond the value of rubies and precious jewels, and the Kingdom of Heaven which is within us Mike was determined to find.
Meg had given her abundant sympathy, but advice she had none to offer. The thing was beyond her, taken out of her hands; it belonged to the part of Michael which she loved and admired but did not fully comprehend—the superman. Her practical common sense was her stumbling-block; it held her with the chains of caution and the doubts of a scientific trend of mind, which demands practical proofs before it accepts any theory or idea. Although she was influenced more deeply by Egypt than she had ever imagined it possible to be influenced by the unseen, or by atmosphere and surroundings, she still walked firmly on her two feet. Her momentary standings on her head were passing and spasmodic. She neither felt convinced nor unconvinced upon the subject of Akhnaton's vision or upon the truth and reliability of the old man's words at el-Azhar. Suggestion is so often at the root of what appears to be the supernatural. Michael might have talked to the old man, as he had often talked to herself, about the possibility of such a treasure having been hidden by the King when he, Akhnaton, knew that he was dying and when he realized that his new capital of Tel-el-Amarna would not long survive his decease, that the priests of the old religion would do all in their power to obliterate his memory and teachings. She knew that Michael was not the only person who held this view. He was not the originator of the theory.