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was buried, conferring the life of his body on a field of corn.
    To come upon somebody who wanted to leave, as a personal bequest to the whole of mankind, a series of documented samples of the past, one typical family home from each major culture of the pre-skelter period, but was content to store up his reports until he was safely dead – yes, that had seemed like a tremendous stroke of luck.
    But Mustapha was wise to the ways in which a man could change. He knew beyond any possible doubt that the idea of being famous in his life time was eroding Hans’s original determination as surely as a river erodes the lip of a waterfall.
    Sooner or later be would make a mistake. Sooner or later he would be tempted beyond endurance; he would carry home with him some precious object – more likely to be a tool, perhaps a camera, than a mere ornament – and it would be recognized by someone aware that Hans Dykstra was not entitled to possess it … There was a great deal left from the heyday of mankind’s inventiveness, but not so much that it was impossible to figure out such things.
    And when that moment came, there would be trouble.Dreadful trouble. Therefore the moment had better not arrive at all.
    More content after having reached that decision, Mustapha relaxed into pure enjoyment of the sounds and scents that the breeze bore to him. He was glad he had chosen to settle here in Middle Egypt; it was a place of strong vivid stimuli, its wind alive with grit from the deserts to the west, its sunshine harsh and its night air cold, its water flavored with the essence of inner Africa, and many, many of its rocks chased with inscriptions left by long-dead hands.
    It was about time he went back to the Luxor ruins and refreshed his fingertip acquaintance with the statues and the stelae.
    Establishing himself here had not been easy. There was much history in the area, both ancient and modern, with a great gap in between the two. First, a community had flourished and faded in Pharaonic times. Then, for a long while, nothing much happened; the life of a small village repeated and repeated itself. And then they built the Aswan High Dam – not the first, which did little damage, but the second newer dam – and stole away the annual floods from the peasants lower down and rendered millions of hectares down-river infertile, sterile, useless. Starving, whole villages of people had trudged south seeking new homes, and an exhausted few had given up the journey here where it was possible to raise subsistence crops and pasture a small herd of goats.
    Later, when Cairo and Alexandria were bombed, the Aswan High Dam was destroyed too. Another horde of refugees, this time much larger, straggled along the banks of Father Nile, and found that this was as far as they need travel in search of regular floods and revitalizing deposits of silt. In a year there was a huge new town: too big for a village, built of too many shabby hovels to be called a city.
    At first they were jealous of their well-watered land, and declined to offer strangers any welcome. But they were growing slowly more tolerant. Indeed, they were becoming proud that their neighbor in the handsome mansion, though not Egyptian by birth, was admired the world around, andwas generous to the poor, and gave work to the deserving, and altogether behaved in a manner befitting those enjoying Allah’s favor … bar one thing. He had truck with that instrument of shaitan, the skelter. Even the most ignorant mud-grubbing
fellahin
were aware that the impiety of this invention had caused divine wrath to descend upon the world.
    Their reservations, however, were being tempered by time. And by the judicious donation of good seed, new strong baby camels and donkeys, useful tools … Those could be cleansed of the smirch the skelter had left on them and put to honest use. Slowly he was winning the people over. Now, when he held open house on a feast-day and invited the local imams to preside at a