That is what you will do tomorrow morning!"

And apparently in the best of all possible humors, Dr. Dean
accompanied his young friend to the portico of the hotel and
watched him drive off down the stately avenue of palm-trees which
now cast their refreshing shade on the entire route from the
Pyramids to Cairo. When he had fairly gone, the thoughtful savant
surveyed the different tourists who were preparing to ascend the
Pyramids under the escort of their Arab guides, regardless of the
risks they ran of dislocated arms and broken shoulder-bones,--and
in the study of the various odd types thus presented to him, he
found himself fairly well amused.

"Protoplasm--mere protoplasm!" he murmured. "The germ of soul has
not yet attained to individual consciousness in any one of these
strange bipeds. Their thoughts are as jelly,--their reasoning
powers in embryo,--their intellectual faculties barely
perceptible. Yet they are interesting, viewed in the same light
and considered on the same scale as fish or insects merely. As men
and women of course they are misnomers,--laughable
impossibilities. Well, well!--in the space of two or three
thousand years, the protoplasm may start into form out of the
void, and the fibres of a conscious Intellectuality may sprout,--
but it will have to be in some other phase of existence--certainly
not in this one. And now to shut myself up and write my memoranda-
-for I must not lose a single detail of this singular Egyptian
psychic problem. The whole thing I perceive is rounding itself
towards completion and catastrophe--but in what way? How will it--
how CAN it end?"