Old wicked Egypt was no more than that; the dynasties were whisked away like an unquiet fly, that persists for a little, but not for long. Luxor would be full of southerly-going dahabeahs and English tourists during this month of January, and I can see Maggie waving her long fine-fingered hands in impotent despair, as I brought her an invitation from some friend that she and I would dine on one of these dahabeahs to-night or next night or the night after. “How am I to get on with my work,” exclaimed this outraged invalid, “with all these interruptions? Won’t it do, if we ask them to tea at the temple?” That certainly usually “did” quite well, for while Maggie was making tea, the cry of “Antica!” would arise from the diggers, and she popped the lid on the teapot, and we turned to see what had been unearthed. Once it was the statue of the Rameses of the Exodus, which would tremendously excite the visitor, but left us cold, for he was already plentifully represented. Or it might be a scribe of the eighteenth dynasty whom to-day you may see in the museum at Gizeh, and better even than that was a superb Saite head, such as I may behold at this moment if I raise my eyes from the page, or best of all it was the image of Sen-mut himself, to see which, again, you must go to Gizeh. That was the crown and culmination of the digging and worthy of an archæological digression. Sen-mut, we knew, was the architect of our temple, and of the temple of Deir-el-Bahari across the river, and the mysterious thing in connection with him was that wherever his name and his deeds appeared in hieroglyphic inscriptions they had always been defaced, and an inscription about King Thothmes III, nephew and successor of Queen Hatasoo, to whose reign the activities of Sen-mut belonged had been superimposed. Sometimes the deletion was not quite thorough and you could read Sen-mut’s name below some dull chronicle of King Thothmes. What the reason for these erasures had been was hitherto only conjecture: now, on the close of this bright January afternoon the riddle was solved, and we found ourselves the accidental recoverers of a scandal nearly four thousand years old. For Sen-mut was but a common man, “not mentioned in writing” (i.e. with no ancestral records), and he speaking from the inscription on the back of this statue of himself which he had dedicated told us that, “I filled the heart of the Queen (Hatasoo) in very truth gaining the heart of my mistress daily ... and the mistress of the two lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) was pleased with that which came forth from my mouth, the Priest of Truth, Sen-mut. I knew her comings in the Royal house, _and was beloved of the ruler_.”