“A luckier day for me,” returned Phalos, with a smile. “Is it understood then?” he asked, turning to Don’s uncles, “that we join hands and prosecute our search together?”
“Most gladly on our part,” replied the captain and the professor in one breath.
“Then we’ll consider it settled,” said the old Egyptian. “I have a steam dahabiyeh moored in the river, and if you are agreeable, we will sail on that up the river to Luxor. I think you will find it the most pleasant mode of traveling, and there will be plenty of room for the baggage and supplies we shall need to take along.”
“That will be fine,” replied the captain. “And who knows but that the wishes of all our hearts may be fulfilled in the finding of my brother and also of the Tombs of Gold.”
“All things are in the hands of Allah,” replied Phalos, who, although a cosmopolite, clung to the formula of his Mohammedan faith.
The next two days were busy ones for the adults of the party, as much had to be purchased in the way of implements and supplies for what might prove a long sojourn in the desert.
Don and Teddy had a good deal of time on their hands, and the professor suggested that they go out to Gizeh to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx. They needed no urging, for these mighty wonders of the world had long made a strong appeal to their imaginations. The boys had seen them pictured many times, but that was nothing compared to seeing the marvelous constructions that were old when Rome was young, and under whose shadows Cæsar and Napoleon had paced and been reminded of their own littleness.
Their elders were too busy to go with them, and besides had seen them before. So Don and Teddy secured a native guide and rode on donkeys toward the massive creations, the greatest built by human hands, that loomed up in the brightness of the Egyptian sunshine.
They were prepared to be impressed, but that word was too weak to express their feeling of awe when they stood before the largest pyramid of the three and gazed aloft at its towering top. Overpowered would have come nearer to their actual state of mind.
There the greatest of the three pyramids, that of King Cheops, reared itself toward the skies, originally nearly five hundred feet in height and with a base so broad that the boys had to trudge through the sands for half a mile before they had compassed it. It stood there, apparently as immutable as time itself, a tremendous monument of the great civilization that had once flourished on the banks of the Nile.