Hassan es-Sugra spread wide his palms.
“Gone!” he replied. “Those Coptic dogs, those eaters of carrion, have fled in the night.”
“And this”—I pointed to the little mound of broken granite and sand—“is their work?”
“So it would seem,” was the reply; and Hassan sniffed his sublime contempt.
I stood looking bitterly at this destruction of my toils. The strangeness of the thing at the moment did not strike me, in my anger; I was only concerned with the outrageous impudence of the missing workmen, and if I could have laid hands upon one of them it had surely gone hard with him.
As for Hassan es-Sugra, I believe he would cheerfully have broken the necks of the entire gang. But he was a man of resource.
“It is so newly filled in,” he said, “that you and I, in three days, or in four, can restore it to the state it had reached when those nameless dogs, who regularly prayed with their shoes on, those devourers of pork, began their dirty work.”
His example was stimulating. I was not going to be beaten, either.
After a hasty breakfast, the pair of us set to work with pick and shovel and basket. We worked as those slaves must have worked whose toil was directed by the lash of the Pharaoh’s overseer. My back acquired an almost permanent crook, and every muscle in my body seemed to be on fire. Not even in the midday heat did we slacken or stay our toils; and when dusk fell that night a great mound had arisen beside Condor’s shaft, and we had excavated to a depth it had taken our gang double the time to reach.
When at last we threw down our tools in utter exhaustion, I held out my hand to Hassan, and wrung his brown fist enthusiastically. His eyes sparkled as he met my glance.