Beyond the pyramids the mist deepened into a vast deep cloud of blue and purple, which seemed the end to some mystic highway untravelled by the sons of men.
Suddenly there swept over David a wave of feeling such as had passed over Kaid, though of a different nature.

Those who had built the pyramids were gone, Cheops and Thotmes and Amenhotep and Chefron and the rest.

There had been reformers in those lost races; one age had sought to better the last, one man had toiled to save--yet there only remained offensive bundles of mummied flesh and bone and a handful of relics in tombs fifty centuries old.

Was it all, then, futile?
Did it matter, then, whether one man laboured or a race aspired?
Only for a moment these thoughts passed through his mind; and then, as the glow through the broken cloud on the opposite horizon suddenly faded, and veils of melancholy fell over the desert and the river and the palms, there rose a call, sweetly shrill, undoubtingly insistent.
Sunset had come, and, with it, the Muezzin's call to prayer from the minaret of a mosque hard by.
David was conscious of a movement behind him--that Kaid was praying with hands uplifted; and out on the sands between the window and the river he saw kneeling figures here and there, saw the camel-drivers halt their trains, and face the East with hands uplifted.

The call went on--"La ilaha illa-llah!" It called David, too.