"But that's what you are, dearest—a practical mystic. You are a woman with two sides to your nature—the intensely practical and the subconsciously mystic. Egypt has developed the mystic half—your Lampton forbears are responsible for the other."
"The Lampton half of me keeps my two feet firmly planted on the earth,
Mike."
"The mystic half loves this silly drifter." He pressed her to him.
"The practical half says, come back to the hut and help Freddy."
And so they went.
PART II
CHAPTER I
Michael's travels in the Eastern desert had barely extended over a three days' journey by camel and some hours spent on the Egyptian State Railway, which runs by the banks of the Nile.
The town of Luxor lies on the right or east bank of the Nile, four hundred and fifty miles to the south of Cairo. Tel-el-Amarna, or "The City of the Horizon," Akhnaton's capital, lies about a hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo. Michael could very easily have gone almost all the way to the modern station of Tel-el-Amarna, or Haggi Kandil, by boat or by train from Luxor, which faces the Theban Hills, in whose bowels lies the great Theban necropolis, the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, which had been his home for some months. But that was not his idea; he wished to spend all his days in the solitude of the desert, so he started his journey at a point half-way between Luxor and Tel-el-Amarna.
This was not his first pilgrimage to the eastern desert.