shoes, the buttons on the boys' jackets, and the coral of the
girls' necklaces.

'Do say something,' whispered Anthea.

'We come,' said Cyril, with some dim remembrance of a dreadful
day when he had had to wait in an outer office while his father
interviewed a solicitor, and there had been nothing to read but
the Daily Telegraph--'we come from the world where the sun never
sets. And peace with honour is what we want. We are the great
Anglo-Saxon or conquering race. Not that we want to conquer
YOU,' he added hastily. 'We only want to look at your houses and
your--well, at all you've got here, and then we shall return to
our own place, and tell of all that we have seen so that your
name may be famed.'

Cyril's speech didn't keep the crowd from pressing round and
looking as eagerly as ever at the clothing of the children.
Anthea had an idea that these people had never seen woven stuff
before, and she saw how wonderful and strange it must seem to
people who had never had any clothes but the skins of beasts.
The sewing, too, of modern clothes seemed to astonish them very
much. They must have been able to sew themselves, by the way,
for men who seemed to be the chiefs wore knickerbockers of
goat-skin or deer-skin, fastened round the waist with twisted
strips of hide. And the women wore long skimpy skirts of
animals' skins. The people were not very tall, their hair was
fair, and men and women both had it short. Their eyes were blue,
and that seemed odd in Egypt. Most of them were tattooed like
sailors, only more roughly.