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This was exactly what he wanted life to be. The game; the drink; the utter seclusion. And a warm, voluptuous woman who'd strip off her clothes when he snapped his fingers.

He made her dress in her costumes about the house. He liked to see her shining flat belly and her mounded breasts over the gaudy purple satin. He liked the big cheap earrings she wore, and her fine hair, oh, very fine, he liked to see that down her back so that he could grab a handful of it, and tug her gently towards him.

Ah, she was the perfect woman for him. She had his shirts done, and his clothes pressed, and saw to it his tobacco never ran out. She brought him magazines and papers when he asked for them.

But he didn't care much for that anymore. The outside world didn't exist. Except for dreams of San Francisco.

That's why he was so annoyed when they brought a telegram to the door. He never should have left this address at Shepheard's. But then he had no choice. How else could he have gotten the money his father telegraphed? Or the other telegrams his father had sent? Important not to make his father angry until some sort of deal had been struck.

With a cold, nasty expression the Frenchman waited as he tore open the yellow envelope and saw that this message wasn't from his father. Rather, it had come from Elliott.

"Damn," he whispered. "They're on their way here." He handed it to Malenka. "Get my suit pressed. I have to go back to the hotel."

"You can't quit now," said the Frenchman.

The German took a long drag on his smelly cigar. He was even more stupid than the Frenchman.

"Who said I was going to quit?" Henry said. He upped the ante; then bluffed them out one by one.

He'd go to Shepheard's later and see to their rooms. But he wasn't sleeping there. They shouldn't expect that of him.

"That's quite enough for me," said the German, flashing his yellowed teeth.

The Frenchman would stay there until ten or eleven easily.

Cairo. This had been desert in Ramses' time, though somewhere to the south lay Saqqara, where he had come on a pilgrimage once to worship at the pyramid of Egypt's first King. And of course he had gone on to visit the great pyramids of the great ancestors.

And so now it was a metropolis, bigger even than Alexandria. And this the British sector looked for all the world like a part of London, except that it was too warm. Paved streets; neatly clipped trees. Motor cars in profusion, their engines and horns scaring the camels, the donkeys, the natives. Shepheard's Hotel--another "tropical" palace with broad porches, replete with wicker, slatted blinds, and vague Egyptian artifacts thrown in among the English furnishings, the whole crowded with the same rich tourists he'd seen everywhere.

A great advertisement for the opera stood in front of the two ironwork lifts. Aida. And such a lurid, vulgar picture of ancient Egyptians entwined in each other's arms amid palms and pyramids. And in the foreground in an oval yet another sketch of a modern man and woman dancing.

OPERA BALL--OPENING NIGHT--

SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL

Well, if this was what Julie wanted. He had to confess he wanted to see a large theater, and hear an orchestra of great power. Oh, so many things to see! He had heard talk of motion pictures.

But he must endure these last few days on his native soil without complaint. There was a good library here, Elliott had said. He'd load up with science textbooks and study, and then slip out at night to stand before the Sphinx and speak to the spirits of his ancestors.

Not that he believed they were really there. No. He did not. Even in ancient times he had not really believed in the gods, perhaps because men called him a god; and so much of his stamina had been sapped by ritual. He had known he was no god.

Would a god have struck down the priestess with one great blow of his bronze sword, after drinking the elixir? But he was not the man who had done that thing. Oh, no, if life had taught him nothing else, it had taught him the meaning of cruelty.

It was the spirit of modern science that he worshipped now. He dreamed of a laboratory in some safe and isolated place, where he could break down the chemical components of the elixir. The ingredients he knew, of course. And he knew as well that he could find them today as easily as he had found them centuries ago. He had

seen the very fish in the markets at Luxor. He had seen the very frogs hopping in the marshes along the Nile. The plants grew wild still in those marshes.

Ah, to think that such a chemical action came from such simple things. But who would have combined them but some ancient magician throwing things in a pot like an old woman making a stew?

But the laboratory would have to wait. He and Julie must travel first. And before this could begin, she must say her painful farewells. And when he thought of her saying farewell to her rich and beautiful world, it sent a coldness through him. Yet whatever his fears, he wanted her too much to do anything about them.

And then there was Henry, Henry who had not dared to show his face since their return--Henry who had made a gambling den in old Cairo of a belly dancer's house.

The clerks had been most forthcoming with that information. Seems that young Mr. Stratford had paid them very little not to talk of his excesses.

But what was Ramses to do with the information, if Julie would not let him act? Surely they could not leave the man alive when they departed. But how was it to be accomplished so that Julie did not suffer any more pain?

Elliott sat on his bed, his back to the ornate wooden headboard, the veils of mosquito netting pinned back on either side of him. It felt good to be settled into a suite at Shepheard's.