Then, crying, “Safîyeh! Safîyeh!” she gathered up a great armful of assorted garments and ran into her bedroom. She had apparently forgotten Barry’s existence. But he walked out onto the balcony to await her reappearance. Knowing his father’s thoroughness, he didn’t doubt that John Cumberland would have found some way to obtain things to fit. Zalithea had been early introduced to shoes; so that this part of her equipment was comparatively simple. As for the other items, perhaps he had enlisted Safîyeh’s aid. Barry looked out across the Nile to where the Libyan Desert baked under the merciless sun. He could hear Zalithea’s delicious, childish laughter and the harsher tones of Safîyeh. The miracle of it all crashed down suddenly upon his mind like a palpable weight. This gay, light-hearted girl, whose laughter rang out clear as a bell, happily as a child’s, had lain for three thousand years over yonder in the Valley of the Dead! He picked up a magazine at random from the little table set upon the balcony. There were things he couldn’t face--yet. He wondered if he ever would be capable of facing them. He dropped into a cane chair and began to scan the pictured pages. In a section devoted to the doings of New York Society, he came across photographs of two or three people he knew. He stared at them as at the pictures of strangers. He felt that a great gulf had opened between himself and the empty life he had known. Upon one side of it were the old set, Aunt Micky, Jim and the rest; upon the other he stood, alone--with Zalithea. Beneath, beside the river, moved men and women to whom Thebes meant sightseeing and sunshine--no more. He watched them as through a haze or as in a glass, darkly. Then, from a minaret at the back of the town, distantly, sweetly, came the voice of the _muezzin_ raised in the _adan_, or noonday call to prayer: “_Alla-hu akbar.… La illa-ha illa Allah!_…” “God is most great.… There is no God but God!” He listened to those words, which he knew, with a fresh wonder. For some reason they soothed his troubled mind. The passive attitude of Islam toward life was very wise, after all. He found himself thinking of Hassan es-Sugra, that grave, graceful philosopher, when: “Bahree!” came a cry from the room behind him. He turned. His eyes, dazzled by the blazing sunlight, at first could see little in the darkened room. Then, standing just within the doorway communicating with her bedroom, he saw Zalithea. She wore a very up-to-date dance frock which displayed more of her creamy skin than Barry had seen since that unforgettable hour in the tomb when Danbazzar’s scissors had stripped off the wrappings. With unfailing instinct she had selected shoes to harmonize with the frock, which was very short.