with gold. I remarked the fact in a sort of self-defensive panic, for the truth is I am a shy idiot with pretty women. Thank goodness she was thirsty and did not notice my confusion. Two minutes afterwards I was mounted on my donkey, and we were off on the long tramp to the Hill of Rakh, the Arabs trailing behind us in a thin ill-humoured line. We maintained the silence of bad temper and excessive heat until the sun sank into the sand. Then, however, we wiped our foreheads, said a cheerful goodbye to the flies that had been tormenting us, and woke up."I am immensely obliged to you, Dr. Pinsent," said Sir Robert.
"So am I," said Miss Ottley.
"The boot is on the other foot," I replied. "It's kind of you to permit me to be present at your triumph. Is it a king?"
"No," said Miss Ottley, "a priest of Amen of the eighteenth dynasty."
"Oh, a priest."
Miss Ottley bridled at my tone. "No king was ever half as interesting as _our_ priest," she declared. "He was a wonderful man in every way, a prophet, a magician, and enormously powerful. Besides, he is believed to have committed suicide for the sake of principle, and he predicted his own resurrection after a sleep of two thousand years."
"He has been dead 3285 years," sighed Sir Robert.
"Is that his fault?" cried the girl.
"It falsifies his prophecy."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Ptahmes was his name," said Sir Robert, turning to me. "He was the right-hand man of Amen-hotep IV; but when that king changed his religion and his name and became Akhenaten and a devotee of the old worship of Heliopolis, Ptahmes apparently killed himself as a protest against the deposition of Amen, his particular divinity."
Read that," said Miss Ottley.
She handed me a page of type-written manuscript. It ran as follows:
"Hearken to the orders which are put upon you by Ptahmes, named Tahutimes, son of Mery, son of Hap. All my ways were regulated even as the pace of an ibis. The Hawk-headed Horus was my protector like amulets upon my body. I trained the troops of my lord. I made his pylon 60 cubits long in the noble rock of quartzite, most great in height and firm as heaven. I did not imitate what had been done before. I was the royal scribe of the recruits. Mustering was done under me. I was appointed Judge of the Palace; overseer of all the prophets of the south and of the north. I was appointed High Priest of Amen in the Capital--King of all the Gods. I was made the eyes and ears of the king: keeper of my lord's heart and fan-bearer at the King's right hand. Great men have come from afar to bow themselves before me, bringing presents of ivory and gold, copper, silver and emery, lazuli, malachite, green felspar and vases of mern wood inlaid with white precious stones sometimes bearing gold at one time 1000 deben (200 pounds weight). 

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