A Desert Drama. Arthur Conan Doyle

money in the country, England has neither directly nor indirectly made a shilling out of it, and I don't believe you will find in history a more successful and more disinterested bit of work.”

      Headingly puffed thoughtfully at his cigarette.

      “There is a house near ours, down on the Back Bay at Boston, which just ruins the whole prospect,” said he. “It has old chairs littered about the stoop, and the shingles are loose, and the garden runs wild; but I don't know that the neighbours are exactly justified in rushing in, and stamping around, and running the thing on their own lines.”

      “Not if it were on fire?” asked the Colonel.

      Headingly laughed, and rose from his camp-stool.

      “Well, it doesn't come within the provisions of the Monroe Doctrine, Colonel,” said he. “I'm beginning to think, that modern Egypt is every bit as interesting as ancient, and that Rameses the Second wasn't the last live man in the country.”

      The two Englishmen rose and yawned.

      “Yes, it's a whimsical freak of fortune which has sent men from a little island in the Atlantic to administer the land of the Pharaohs. We shall pass away and never leave a trace among the successive races who have held the country, for it is an Anglo-Saxon custom to write their deeds upon rocks. I dare say that the remains of a Cairo drainage system will be our most permanent record, unless they prove a thousand years hence that it was the work of the Hyksos kings,” remarked Cecil Brown. “But here is the shore party come back.”

      Down below they could hear the mellow Irish accents of Mrs. Belmont and the deep voice of her husband, the iron-grey rifleshot. Mr. Stuart, the fat Birmingham clergyman, was thrashing out a question of piastres with a noisy donkey-boy, and the others were joining in with chaff and advice. Then the hubbub died away, the party from above came down the ladder, there were “good-nights,” the shutting of doors, and the little steamer lay silent, dark, and motionless in the shadow of the high Haifa bank. And beyond this one point of civilisation and of comfort there lay the limitless, savage, unchangeable desert, straw-coloured and dream-like in the moonlight, mottled over with the black shadows of the hills.