centuries, and now lay almost swallowed up in the sea of yellow sands below. I put out my foot carefully, trying to reach the broad top of the nearest column of granite, but it was beyond me. Stepping back a couple of paces and quietly removing my boots, I gathered up my strength and made a leap, landing almost in the center of the column's top. A half step backward, another leap—who could resist the challenge of that lone and kingly column that remained? I landed securely as before, then turned about. Her face had not lifted an instant from the awful majesty of the Orient.

Slowly, wearily, the immense moon came shouldering up through the seas of yellow sand. These billows of sand seemed to breathe and move. The expiring heat of the departed sun made them scintillate and shimmer in a soft and undulating light. And yet it was not light; only the lone and solemn ghost of a departed day. Yellow and huge and startling stood the moon at last, full grown and fearful in its nearness and immensity on the topmost lift of yellow sands in the yellow seas before us. Distance seemed to be annihilated. The moon seemed to have forgotten her place and all proportion. Looking down into the sullen Nile, it seemed a black and bottomless chasm. And it seemed so far away! And the moon so very near.

Black as blackest Egypt rolled the somber Nile down and on and on through this world of yellow light; this light that was not light. Silence, desolation, death lay on all things below, about, above. The west was molten yellow gold, faint and fading, it is true: but where the yellow sands left off and the yellow skies began no man could say or guess, save by the yellow stars that studded the west with an intense yellow.

Yellow to the right and yellow to the left, yellow overhead and yellow underfoot; with only this endless chasm of Erebus cleaving the yellow earth in halves with its bottomless pit of endless and indissoluble blackness.

After a time—and all the world still one sea of softened yellow, torn in two by Charon's chasm of black waters—I silently leaped back, replaced my boots on my feet and then held my breath. For I had seen, or perhaps felt, an object move on the lifted levels of sand between us and the moon.

Cautiously I sank down on my breast and peered low and long up the horizon. I saw, heard nothing. Glancing around to where my companion lay, I saw that she still had not stirred from the half reclining position she had first taken, with half lifted face in her upturned palm.

Then she had seen nothing, heard 

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