I spent the next two days in absolute solitude, and got through a tremendous quantity of toil. In fact, I added two whole chapters to my treatise on the Nile monuments and I arranged the details of a third. By the end of that time, however, I was ravenously hungry. I had been too engrossed in labour to think of eating anything but biscuits. And appetite at last turned me out of the tent. I looked around for my Arabs and saw sand and sky--no living thing--oh, yes, there was my donkey. The little beast had eaten his way through a truss of straw, and was asleep. Strolling over to the ruined pylon, I glanced down into the hole my Arabs had excavated. It was empty. "Gad!" I exclaimed. "They must still be working for Ottley." I had to build a fire and turn cook, willy nilly. Later, fortified with the pleasant conviction of a good dinner, I turned my telescope on the Hill of Rakh. An Arab stood on the treeless summit leaning on a rifle whose barrel glittered in the sunlight. I was puzzled. He was manifestly posted there as sentinel, but why? I watched him till dark, but he did not move. That night I shot a jackal--omen of disaster. It was long before I slept. Yet I seemed only to have slumbered a moment or two when I awoke. A voice called my name aloud. "Dr. Pinsent! Dr. Pinsent!" I started upright and listened, nerves on edge. "Dr. Pinsent!" "Who calls?" I shouted. "I--May Ottley." "Miss Ottley!" I hopped out of my bag bed like a cricket. "Just a moment." I struck a light and, grabbing at my clothes, proceeded to dress like mad. Thus for thirty seconds; then I remembered how I had been treated, and went slower. Then I thought--"Pinsent, you're a cad--she's a woman, and perhaps in trouble." So I got up steam again and called out, "Nothing wrong, I hope?" "Yes," said Miss Ottley. Well, here was a woman of business, at any rate. She seemed to know the use of words, and valued them accordingly. Waste not, want not. I drew on my jacket and lifted the flap. An Arab rustled past me. "Hello!" said I. "Not so fast, my man."