In response to a quick gesture on the part of my guide, I pulled back the wooden bolt and opened the door. A tall and strikingly handsome Egyptian arose from an ivory-inlaid stool as I entered. Carefully rolling up a manuscript which he had been reading by the light of an oil lamp, and without otherwise appearing to notice me, he took from the table nearby a blue glazed goblet, handed it to my rescuer, and re-seated himself. Once again he picked up the discarded manuscript and continued his reading as though nothing had happened to interrupt his train of thought. Perhaps, after all, I had been expected! I heard my charming guide utter the one softly sibilant Egyptian word: _Drink!_ I lifted the bright blue goblet to my lips and drank deeply, thirstily.... CHAPTER III ENANA, THE MAGICIAN, WOULD PROVE THAT A RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN A QUEEN AND A PRIESTESS MAY BE TURNED TO HIS ADVANTAGE. The sloping walls of the Temple of Amenra loomed black and forbidding against the pallid light of early morning. The tall cedar flag-poles fronting the entrance pylons and the gold-capped shafts of the four granite obelisks seemed carved in ebony, so sharply were their dark lines defined. No sound came from within; no life was apparent in the wide domain of cultivated fields which surrounded the temple on three sides. There was no sign of life upon the temple barges moored to the sandstone landing at the temple front. A long line of cranes flew slowly, noiselessly, across the moon, now rapidly sinking into the blue haze which floated above the Western Hills. Within the temple precinct, in a small chamber lit by the fitful light of a six-wicked lamp which swung out from the wall at the end of a pole, a restless figure bent from time to time above a form stretched at length upon a high couch. The figure was that of a woman, a woman dead and to a certain extent disfigured by the scalpel and fat-extracting implements of the embalmer who now bent over her. On a low bench beside him were spread out the many bronze and flint utensils of his craft. Kathi, the Embalmer, made the last great incision. With a long, flat and minutely serrated flint knife, he laid open a good six inches of the flesh immediately above the heart. Having extracted that organ he carefully placed it in an alabaster jar filled almost to the brim with aromatic spirits. On top of the jar he set the cover, a cover crowned with a tinted portrait-head of the deceased. Three similar jars containing the viscera, brains and other organs liable to rapid decay, had already been hermetically sealed. So quickly comes the dawn in Egypt that, by this time, one could readily distinguish the inscription in letters of dark blue which symmetrically filled a square at the shoulder of each vase: