the sledges they drew, covered with stone dust and broken pieces, were
some distance away from them. A company of half a score of children
were ascending in single file, along a slanting plane of planks, into
the hollow in the cliff upon which work had been renewed. Along the
rock-wall ahead of them a scaffold had been erected and here were men
drilling holes in the stone, or driving wooden wedges into the holes
already made, or pouring water on the wedges as the skins the children
bore were passed up to them.

Kenkenes picked his way through the debris of sticks, stones, dust and
cast-off water-skins, and serenely disregarding the stare of the
laborers, went up to the edge of the stone-pit and watched the work
with interest. A constant stream of broken stone rattled down under
the scaffold and long runlets of water fed an ever increasing pool in
the depression before the cliff. A single slab of irregular dimensions
lay on the sand at the base of a wooden chute, down which it had
descended from the hollow in the cliff the evening before. The cavity
it left bade fair to enlarge by nightfall, for the swelling wedges were
rending another slab from its bedding with loud reports and the sudden
etching of fissures.

The young sculptor noted with some wonder that the laborers were
Israelites.

After a time Kenkenes turned away and addressed one of the bearded men
at that moment, ascending the wooden plane.

"What do ye here?" he asked.

The man answered in unready Egyptian, but, for an inferior, in a manner