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The Yoke

by Elizabeth Miller · English · Gutenberg #16583 · 916,562 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Yoke

Author: Elizabeth Miller


        
Release date: August 22, 2005 [eBook #16583]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16583

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YOKE ***




Produced by Al Haines









THE YOKE

A ROMANCE OF THE DAYS WHEN THE LORD REDEEMED THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
FROM THE BONDAGE OF EGYPT


BY

ELIZABETH MILLER




GROSSET & DUNLAP

Publishers  -:-  New York




COPYRIGHT, 1904

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY


JANUARY




TO

PERCY MILLER

MY BROTHER

WHO CONSTRUCTED

THE PLOT




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

       I  CHOOSING THE TENS
      II  UNDER BAN OF THE RITUAL
     III  THE MESSENGER
      IV  THE PROCESSION OF AMEN
       V  THE HEIR TO THE THRONE
      VI  THE LADY MIRIAM
     VII  ATHOR, THE GOLDEN
    VIII  THE PUNISHMENT OF ATSU
      IX  THE COLLAR OF GOLD
       X  THE DEBT OF ISRAEL
      XI  HEBREW CRAFT
     XII  CANAAN
    XIII  THE COMING OF THE PHARAOH
     XIV  THE MARGIN OF THE NILE
      XV  THE GODS OF EGYPT
     XVI  THE ADVICE OF HOTEP
    XVII  THE SON OF THE MURKET
   XVIII  AT MASAARAH
     XIX  IN THE DESERT
      XX  THE TREASURE CAVE
     XXI  ON THE WAY TO THEBES
    XXII  THE FAN-BEARER'S GUEST
   XXIII  THE TOMB OF THE PHARAOH
    XXIV  THE PETITION
     XXV  THE LOVE OF RAMESES
    XXVI  FURTHER DIPLOMACY
   XXVII  THE HEIR INTERVENES
  XXVIII  THE IDOLS CRUMBLE
    XXIX  THE PLAGUES
     XXX  HE HARDENED HIS HEART
    XXXI  THE CONSPIRACY
   XXXII  RACHEL'S REFUGE
  XXXIII  BACK TO MEMPHIS
   XXXIV  NIGHT
    XXXV  LIGHT AFTER DARKNESS
   XXXVI  THE MURKET'S SACRIFICE
  XXXVII  AT THE WELL
 XXXVIII  THE TRAITORS
   XXXIX  BEFORE EGYPT'S THRONE
      XL  THE FIRST-BORN
     XLI  THE ANGEL OF DEATH
    XLII  EXPATRIATION
   XLIII  "THE PHARAOH DREW NIGH"
    XLIV  THE WAY TO THE SEA
     XLV  THROUGH THE RED SEA
    XLVI  WHOM THE LADY MIRIAM SENT
   XLVII  THE PROMISED LAND




THE YOKE

A STORY OF THE EXODUS


CHAPTER I

CHOOSING THE TENS

Near the eastern boundary of that level region of northern Egypt, known
as the Delta, once thridded by seven branches of the sea-hunting Nile,
Rameses II, in the fourteenth century B. C., erected the city of Pithom
and stored his treasure therein.  His riches overtaxed its coffers and
he builded Pa-Ramesu, in part, to hold the overflow.  But he died
before the work was completed by half, and his fourteenth son and
successor, Meneptah, took it up and pushed it with the nomad
bond-people that dwelt in the Delta.

The city was laid out near the center of Goshen, a long strip of
fertile country given over to the Israelites since the days of the
Hyksos king, Apepa, near the year 1800 B. C.

Morning in the land of the Hebrew dawned over level fields, green with
unripe wheat and meadow grass.  Wherever the soil was better for
grazing great flocks of sheep moved in compact clouds, with a lank dog
and an ancient shepherd following them.

The low, shapeless tents and thatched hovels of the Israelites stood in
the center of gardens of lentils, garlic and lettuce, securely hedged
against the inroads of hares and roving cattle.  Close to these were
compounds for the flocks and brush inclosures for geese, and cotes for
the pigeons used in sacrifice.  Here dwelt the aged in trusteeship over
the land, while the young and sturdy builded Pa-Ramesu.

Sunrise on the uncompleted city tipped the raw lines of her half-built
walls with broken fire and gilded the gear of gigantic hoisting cranes.
Scaffolding, clinging to bald façades, seemed frail and cobwebby at
great height, and slabs of stone, drawn and held by cables near the
summit of chutes, looked like dice on the giddy slide.

Below in the still shadowy passages and interiors, speckled with fallen
mortar, lay chains, rubble of brick and chipped stone; splinters,
flinders and odd ends of timber; scraps of metal, broken implements and
the what-not that litters the path of construction.  Without, in the
avenues, vaguely outlined by the slowly rising structures on either
side, were low-riding, long, heavy, dwarf-wheeled vehicles and sledges
to which men, not beasts, had been harnessed.  Here, also, were great
cords of new brick and avalanches of glazed tile where disaster had
overtaken orderly stacks of this multi-tinted material.  In the open
spaces were covered heaps of sand, and tons of lime, in sacks; layers
of paint and hogsheads of tar; ingots of copper and pigs of bronze.
Roadways, beaten in the dust by a multitude of bare feet, led in a
hundred directions, all merging in one great track toward the camp of
the laboring Israelites.

This was pitched in a vast open in the city's center, wherein Rameses
II had planned to build a second Karnak to Imhotep.  Under the gracious
favor of this, the physician god, the great Pharaoh had regained his
sight.  But death stayed his grateful hand and Meneptah forgot his
father's debt.  Here, then, year in and year out, an angular sea of low
tents sheltered Israel.

Let it not be supposed that all the sons of Abraham were here.
Thousands labored yet in the perfection of Pithom, on the highways of
the Lower country, and on the Rameside canal, and the greater number
made the brick for all Egypt in the clay-fields of the Delta.
Therefore, within the walls of Pa-Ramesu there were somewhat more than
three thousand Hebrews, men, women and children.

On a slight eminence, overlooking the camp, were numerous small
structures of sun-dried brick, grouped about one of larger dimensions.
Above this was raised a military standard, a hawk upon a cross-bar,
from which hung party-colored tassels of linen floss.  By this sign,
the order of government was denoted.  The Hebrews were under martial
law.

The camp was astir.  Thin columns of blue smoke drifted up here and
there between the close-set tents, and the sibilant wearing of
stone-mills, as they ground the wheat, was heard in many households.
The nutty aroma of parching lentils, and the savor of roasting papyrus
root and garlic told the stage of the morning meal.  The strong-armed
women, rich brown in tint from the ardent sun, crowned with coil upon
coil of heavy hair, bent over the pungent fires.  Sturdy children,
innocent of raiment, went hither and thither, bearing well filled skins
of water.  Apart from these were the men of Israel, bearded and grave,
stalwart and scantily clad.  They repaired a cable or fitted an
ax-handle or mended a hoe.  But they were full of serious and absorbed
discourse, for the great Hebrew, Moses, from the sheep-ranges of
Midian, had been among them, showing them marvels of sorcery, preaching
Jehovah and promising freedom.  The first high white light of dawn was
breaking upon the century-long night of Israel.

Before one of the tents an old woman knelt beside a bed of live coals,
turning a browning water-fowl upon a pointed stick.  She was a
consummate cook, and the bird was fat and securely trussed.  Now and
again she sprinkled a pinch of crude salt on the embers to suppress the
odor of the burning drippings, and lifted the fowl out of the reach of
the pale flames that leaped up thereafter.  Presently she removed the
fowl and forked it off the spit into a capacious earthenware bowl near
by.  Then, with green withes as tongs, she drew forth a round tile from
under the coals and set it over the dish to complete the baking.  From
another tile-platter at hand she took several round slices of durra
bread and proceeded to toast them with much skill, tilting the hot tile
and casting each browned slice in on the fowl as it was done.  When she
had finished, she removed the cover and set the bowl on the large
platter, protecting her hands from its heat with a fold of her habit.
With no little triumph and some difficulty she got upon her feet and
carried the toothsome dish into her shelter, to place it beyond the
reach of stealthy hands.  No such meal was cooked that morning,
elsewhere, in Pa-Ramesu, except at the military headquarters on the
knoll.

There was little inside the tent, except the meagerest essential
furnishing.  A long amphora stood in a tamarisk rack in one corner; a
linen napkin hung, pinned to the tent-cloth, over it; a glazed laver
and a small box sat beside it.  A mat of braided reeds, the handiwork
of the old Israelite, covered the naked earth.  This served as seat or
table for the occupants.  Several wisps of straw were scattered about
and a heap of it, over which a cotton cloak had been thrown, lay in one
corner.

"Rachel," the old woman said briskly.

Evidently some one slept under the straw, for the heap stirred.

"Rachel!" the old woman reiterated, drawing off the cloak.

Without any preliminary pushing away of the straw, a young girl sat up.
A little bewildered, she divested her head and shoulders of a frowsy
straw thatch and stood erect, shaking it off from her single short
garment.

She was not more than sixteen years old.  Above medium height and of
nobler proportions than the typical woman of the race, her figure was
remarkable for its symmetry and utter grace.  The stamp of the
countenance was purely Semitic, except that she was distinguished, most
wondrously in color, from her kind.  Her sleep had left its exquisite
heaviness on eyes of the tenderest blue, and the luxuriant hair she
pushed back from her face was a fleece of gold.  Hers was that rare
complexion that does not tan.  The sun but brightened her hair and
wrought the hue of health in her cheeks.  Her forehead was low, broad,
and white as marble; her neck and arms white, and the hands, busied
with the hair, were strong, soft, dimpled and white.  The grace of her
womanhood had not been overcome by the slave-labor, which she had known
from infancy.

"Good morning, Deborah.  Why--thy bed--have I slept under it?" she
asked.

"Since the middle of the last watch," the old woman assented.

"But why?  Did Merenra come?" the girl inquired anxiously.

"Nay; but I heard some one ere the camp was astir and I covered thee."

"And thou hast had no sleep since," the girl said, with regret in her
voice.  "Thou dost reproach me with thy goodness, Deborah."

She went to the amphora and poured water into the laver, drew forth
from the box a horn comb and a vial of powdered soda from the Natron
Lakes, and proceeded with her toilet.

"Came some one, of a truth?" she asked presently.

Deborah pointed to the smoking bowl.  Rachel inspected the fowl.

"Marsh-hen!" she cried in surprise.

"Atsu brought it."

"Atsu?"

"Even so.  From his own bounty and for Rachel," Deborah explained.

Rachel smiled.

"Thou art beset from a new direction," the old woman continued dryly,
"but thou hast naught to fear from him."

"Nay; I know," Rachel murmured, arranging her dress.

The garb of the average bondwoman was of startling simplicity.  It
consisted of two pieces of stuff little wider than the greatest width
of the wearer's body, tied by the corners over each shoulder, belted at
the waist with a thong and laced together with fiber at the sides, from
the hips to a point just above the knee.  It was open above and below
this simple seam and interfered not at all with the freedom of the
wearer's movements.  But Rachel's habit was a voluminous surplice,
fitting closely at the neck, supplied with wide sleeves, seamed, hemmed
and of ample length.  Deborah was literally swathed in covering, with
only her withered face and hands exposed.  There was a hint of rank in
their superior dress and more than a suggestion of blood in the bearing
of the pair; but they were laborers with the shepherds and
serving-people of Israel.

"He would wed thee, after the manner of thy people, and take thee from
among Israel," Deborah continued.

The girl drooped her head over the lacing of her habit and made no
answer.  The old woman looked at her sharply for a moment.

"Well, eat; Rachel, eat," she urged at last.  "The marsh-hen will stand
thee in good stead and thou hast a weary day before thee."

Rachel looked at the old woman and made mental comparison between the
ancient figure and her strong, young self.  With great deliberation she
divided the fowl into a large and small part.

"This," she said, extending the larger to Deborah, "is thine.  Take
it," waving aside the protests of the old woman, "or the first taste of
it will choke me."

Deborah submitted duly and consumed the tender morsel while she watched
Rachel break her fast.

"What said Atsu?" Rachel asked, after the marsh-hen was less apparent.

"Little, which is his way.  But his every word was worth a harangue in
weight.  Merenra and his purple-wearing visitor, the spoiler, the
pompous wolf, departed for Pithom last night, hastily summoned thither
by a royal message.  But the commander returns to-morrow at sunset.
This morning, every tenth Hebrew in Pa-Ramesu is to be chosen and sent
to the quarries.  Atsu will send thee and me, whether we fall among the
tens of a truth or not.  So we get out of the city ere Merenra returns.
He called the ruse a cruel one and not wholly safe, but he would sooner
see thee dead than despoiled by this guest of Merenra's--or any other.
I doubt not his heart breaketh for thy sake, Rachel, and he would rend
himself to spare thee."

"The Lord God bless him," the girl murmured earnestly.

"Where dost thou say we go?" she asked after a little silence.

"To the quarries of Masaarah, opposite Memphis."

The color in the young Israelite's face receded a little.

"To the quarries," she repeated in a half-whisper.

"Fearest thou?"

"Nay, not for myself, at all, but we may not have another Atsu over us
there.  I fear for thee, Deborah."

The old woman waved her hands.

"Trouble not concerning me.  I shall not die by heavy labor."

But the girl shook her head and gazed out of the low entrance of the
tent.  Her face was full of trouble.  Once again the old woman looked
at her with suspicion in her eyes.  Presently the girl asked, coloring
painfully:

"Was Atsu commanded to hold me for this guest of Merenra's--ah!" she
broke off, "did Atsu name him?"

"Not by the titles by which the man would as lief be known," Deborah
answered grimly, "but I remember he called him 'the governor.'"

There was a brief pause.

"Not so," she resumed, answering Rachel's first question.  "Atsu but
overheard him say to Merenra to see to it that thou wast taken from
toil and made ready to journey with him to Bubastis."

"He can not take me by right save by a document of gift from the
Pharaoh," Rachel protested indignantly.

"Of a truth," the old woman admitted; "but Merenra is chief commander
over Pa-Ramesu and how shall thine appeal to the Pharaoh pass beyond
Merenra if he see fit to humor this ravening lord with a breach of the
law?  The message summoning him in haste to Pithom before the order
could be fulfilled was all that saved thee.  And if Merenra return ere
thou art safely gone, thou art of a surety undone."

Rachel moved away a little and stood thinking.  The old woman went on
with a note of despondency in her voice.

"Alas, Rachel! thou art in eternal peril because of thy lovely face.
Beauty is a curse to a bondwoman.  What I beheld in truth yesterday I
have seen in dreams--the discourteous hand put forth to seize thee and
the power back of it to enforce its demand.  And yet, I would not wish
thee old and uncomely, for that, too, is a curse to the bondwoman," she
added with a reflective shrug of the shoulders.

"If I but knew his name--" Rachel pondered aloud.

"What matter?" the old woman answered almost roughly.  "Suffice it to
know that he is a knave and a noble and hath evil in his heart against
thee."

"Now, if I might dye my hair or stain my face--" Rachel began after a
pause.

"Thou foolish child!  It would not wear, nor hide thy charm at all!"

"But I dread the quarries for thee, Deborah.  If only we might be
hidden here, somewhere."

"Come, dost thou want to marry Atsu?" the old woman demanded harshly.

The girl turned toward her, her face flushed with resentment.

"Nay!  And that thou knowest.  For this very mingling with Egypt is
Israel cursed.  The idolatrous have reached out their hands in marriage
and wedded the Hebrews away from the God of Abraham.  When did an
Egyptian desert his gods for the faith of the Hebrew he took in
marriage?  Not at any time.  Therefore have we fed the shrines of the
idols and increased the numbers of the idolaters and behold, the hosts
of Jehovah have dwindled to naught.  Therefore is He wroth with us, and
justly.  For are there not pitiful shrines to Ra, Ptah and Amen within
the boundaries of Goshen?  Nay, I wed not with an idolater," she
concluded firmly.

Deborah's wrinkled face lighted and she put a tender arm about the girl.

"Of a truth, then, it is for me that thou wouldst avoid the quarries,"
she said.  "I did but try thee, Rachel."

Rachel looked at her reproachfully, but the old woman smiled and drew
her out into the open.

Without, Israel of Pa-Ramesu made ready to surrender a tenth of her
number to the newest task laid on it by the Pharaoh.  Quarrying was
unusual labor for an Israelite and the name carried terror with it.
Long had it meant heavy punishment for the malefactor and now was the
Hebrew to take up its bitter life.  The hard form of oppression
following so closely upon the promise of liberty by Moses had
diversified effects upon the camp.  There was rebellion among the
optimists, and the less hopeful spirits were crushed.  There was the
scoffer, who exasperates; the enthusiast, the over-buoyant, who could
point out favorable omens even in this bitter affliction; and it could
not be divined which of these troubled the people more.  But whatever
the individual temper, the entire camp was overhung with distress.

Israel had gathered in families before her tents--the mothers hovering
their broods, the fathers tramping uneasily about them.  In the heart
of each, perhaps, was an indefinable conviction that he should fall
among the tens.  Since Israel had died in droves by hard labor in the
brick-fields and along the roadways and canals, in what numbers and
with what dire speed would not Israel perish in the dreaded stone-pits!

Just outside the doorway of their shelter, Deborah and Rachel
overlooked the troubled camp.

"Moses comes in time," Rachel said, speaking in a low tone, "for Israel
is in sore straits.  The hand of the oppressor assaileth with fury his
bones and his sinews now.  How shall it be with him if he is bequeathed
from Pharaoh to Pharaoh of an intent like unto the last three?  He
shall have perished from the face of the earth, for the Hebrew bends
not; he breaks."

Deborah did not answer at once.  Her sunken eyes were set and she
seemed not to hear.  But presently she spoke:

"Thou hast said.  But the Hebrew droppeth out of the inheritance of the
Pharaohs in thy generation, Rachel.  The end of the bondage is at hand.
Thou shalt see it.  Of a truth Israel shall perish.  If its afflictions
increase for long.  But they shall not continue.  Have we entered
Canaan as God sware unto Abraham we should?  Have we possessed the
gates of our enemies?  Shall He stamp us out, with His promise yet
unfulfilled?  Behold, we have gone astray from Him, but not utterly, as
all the other peoples of the earth.  For centuries, amid the great
clamor of prayers to the hollow gods, there arose only from this
compound of slaves, here, a call to Him.  Out of the reek of idolatrous
savors, drifted up now and again the straight column from the altar of
a Hebrew, sacrificing to the One God.  Where, indeed, are any faithful,
save in Israel?  Shall He condemn us who only have held steadfast?
Nay!  He hath but permitted the oppression that we may have our fill of
the glories of Egypt and be glad to turn our backs upon her.  He will
cure us of idols by showing forth their helplessness when they are
cried unto; and when Israel is in its most grievous strait and
therefore most prone to attach itself to whosoever helpeth it.  He will
prove Himself at last by His power.  Aye, thou hast said.  Israel can
suffer little more without perishing.  Therefore is redemption at hand."

Rachel had turned her eyes away from the humiliation of Israel to its
exaltation--from fact to prophecy.  She was looking with awed face at
Deborah.  The prophetess went on:

"Israel hath been a green tree, carried hither in seed and grown in the
wheat-fields of Mizraim.  The herds and the flocks of the Pharaoh
gathered under its branches and were sheltered from the sun by day and
from the wolves by night.  The early Pharaohs loved it, the later
Pharaohs used it and the last Pharaohs feared it.  For it grew
exceedingly and overshadowed the wheat-fields and they said: 'It will
come between us and Ra who is our god and he will bless it instead of
the wheat.  Let us cut it down and build us temples of its timber.'
But the Lord had planted the tree in seed and in its youth it grew
under the tendance of the Lord's hand.  And in later years, though it
lent its shadow as a grove for the idols and temples of gods, the most
of it faced Heaven, and for that the Lord loves it still.  The Pharaohs
have lopped its branches, unmolested, but lo! now that the ax strikes
at its girth, the Lord will uproot it and plant it elsewhere than in
Mizraim.  But the soil will not relinquish it readily, for it hath
struck deep.  There shall be a gaping wound in Mizraim where it stood
and all the land shall be rent with the violence of the parting."

The prophetess paused, or rather her voice died away as if she actually
beheld the scene she foretold, and no more words were needed to make it
plain.  Rachel's hands were clasped before her breast.  "Sayest thou
these things in prophecy?" she asked finally in an eager half-whisper.
Deborah's eyes seemed to awaken.  She looked at Rachel a moment and
answered with a nod.  The girl's vision wandered slowly again toward
the camp, and the sorrowful unrest of Israel subdued the inspired
elation that had begun to possess her.  Her face clouded once more.
Deborah touched her.

"Trouble not thyself concerning these people.  They go forth to labor,
but their burdens shall be lightened ere long.  As for thee and me--"
she paused and looked up toward the eminence on which the military
headquarters were built.

"As for thee and me--" Rachel urged her.  Deborah motioned in the
direction she gazed.  "Come, let us make ready," she said; "they are
beginning."

The Egyptian masters over Israel of Pa-Ramesu were emerging from the
quarters.  They were, almost uniformly, tall, slender and immature in
figure.  Dressed in the foot-soldier's tunic and coif, they looked like
long-limbed youths compared with the powerful manhood of the sons of
Abraham.

Among them, in white wool and enameled aprons, was a number of scribes,
without whom the official machinery of Egypt would have stilled in a
single revolution.

The men advanced, sauntering, talking with one another idly, as if
awaiting authority to proceed.

That came, presently, in the shape of an Egyptian charioteer.  The
vehicle was heavy, short-poled, set low on two broad wheels of six
spokes, and built of hard wood, painted in wedge-shaped stripes of
green and red.  The end was open, the front high and curved, the side
fitted with a boot of woven reeds for the ax and javelins of the
warrior.  Axle and pole were shod with spikes of copper and the joints
were secured with tongues of bronze.  The horses were bay, small,
short, glossy and long of mane and tail.  The harness was simple, each
piece as broad as a man's arm, stamped and richly stained with many
colors.

The man was an ideal soldier of Egypt.  He was tall and
broad-shouldered, but otherwise lean and lithe.  In countenance, he was
dark,--browner than most Egyptians, but with that peculiar ruddy
swarthiness that is never the negro hue.  His duskiness was accentuated
by low and intensely black brows, and deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes.
Although his features were marked by the delicacy characteristic of the
Egyptian face, there was none of the Oriental affability to be found
thereon.  One might expect deeds of him, but never words or wit.

He wore the Egyptian smock, or kamis--of dark linen, open in front from
belt to hem, disclosing a kilt or shenti of clouded enamel.  His
head-dress was the kerchief of linen, bound tightly across the forehead
and falling with free-flowing skirts to the shoulders.  The sleeves
left off at the elbow and his lower arms were clasped with bracelets of
ivory and gold.  His ankles were similarly adorned, and his sandals of
gazelle-hide were beaded and stitched.  His was a somber and barbaric
presence.  This was Atsu, captain of chariots and vice-commander over
Pa-Ramesu.

His subordinates parted and gave him respectful path.  He delivered his
orders in an impassive, low-pitched monotone.

"Out with them, and mark ye, no lashes now.  Leave the old and the
nursing mothers."

The drivers disappeared into the narrow ways of the encampment, and
Atsu, with the scribes at his wheels, drove out where the avenue of
sphinxes would have led to the temple of Imhotep.  Here was room for
three thousand.  He alighted and, with the scribes who stood, tablets
in hand, awaited the coming of the Israelites.

The camp emptied its dwellers in long wavering lines.  Into the open
they came, slowly, and with downcast eyes, each with his remnant of a
tribe.  Though the columns were in order, they were ragged with many
and varied statures--now a grown man, next to him a child, and then a
woman.  Here were the red-bearded sons of Reuben, shepherds in skins
and men of great hardihood; the seafaring children of Zebulon; a
handful of submissive Issachar, and some of Benjamin, Levi, and Judah.

"Do we not leave the aged behind?" the scribe asked, indicating Deborah
who came with Judah.

"Give her her way," Atsu replied indifferently, and the scribe subsided.

The lines advanced, filling up the open with moody humanity.  A scribe
placed himself at the head of each column, and as the hindmost
Israelite emerged into the field the movement was halted.

If an eye was lifted, it shifted rapidly under the stress of
desperation or suspense.  If any spoke, it was the rough and
indifferent, whose words fell like blows on the distressed silence.
Many were visibly trembling, others had whitened beneath the tropical
tan, and the wondering faces of children, who feared without
understanding, turned now and again to search for their elders up and
down the lines.

The drivers distributed themselves among the Israelites and each with a
scribe went methodically along the files choosing every tenth.

"Get thee to my house and bring me my lists," Atsu said to the soldier
who was beginning on Judah.  "I will look to thy work."  The man
crossed his left hand to his right shoulder and hastened away.

One by one nine Israelites dropped out of line as Atsu numbered them
and returned to camp.  He touched the tenth.

"Name?" the scribe asked.

"Deborah," was the reply.

Meanwhile Atsu walked rapidly down the line to Rachel.  The Hebrews
fell out as he passed, and the relief on the faces of one or two was
mingled with astonishment.  He paused before the girl, hesitating.
Words did not rise readily to his lips at any time; at this moment he
was especially at loss.

"Thou canst abide here, in perfect security--with me," he said at last.
She shook her head.  "I thank thee, my good master."

"For thy sake, not mine own, I would urge thee," he continued with an
unnatural steadiness.  "Thou canst accept of me the safety of marriage.
Nothing more shall I offer--or demand."

The color rushed over the girl's face, but he went on evenly.

"A part go to Silsilis, another to Syene, a third to Masaarah.  If
thine insulter asks concerning thy whereabouts I shall not trouble
myself to remember.  But what shall keep him from searching for
thee--and are there any like to defend thee, if he find thee, seeing I
am not there?  And even if thou art securely hidden, thou hast never
dreamed how heavy is the life of the stone-pits, Rachel."

"Keep Deborah here," the girl besought him, distressed.  "She is old
and will perish--"

"Nay, I will not send thee out alone," was the reply.  "If thou goest,
so must she.  But--hast thou no fear?"

Once again she shook her head.

"I trust to the triumph of the good," she replied earnestly.

The sound of the scribe's approach behind him, moved him on.

"Farewell," he said as he went, and added no more, for his composure
failed him.

"The grace of the Lord God attend thee," she whispered.  "Farewell."

All the morning the work went on, and when the Egyptian mid-winter noon
lay warm on the flat country, three hundred Israelites were ready for
the long march to the Nile.  They left behind them a camp oppressed
with that heart-soreness, which affliction added to old afflictions
brings,--the numb ache of sorrow, not its lively pain.  Only Deborah,
the childless, and Rachel, the motherless, went with lighter
hearts,--if hearts can be light that go forward to meet the unknown
fortunes of bond-people.

As they moved out, one of the older Hebrews in the forward ranks began
to sing, in a wild recitative chant, of Canaan and the freedom of
Israel.  The elders in the line near him took it up and every face in
the long column lighted and was lifted in silent concord with the
singers.  Atsu in his chariot, close by, scanned his lists absorbedly,
but one of the drivers hurried forward with a demand for silence.  A
young Hebrew, who had tramped in agitated silence just ahead, worked up
into recklessness by the fervor of the singers, defied him.  His voice
rang clear above the song.

"Go to, thou bald-faced idolater!  Israel will cease to do thy bidding
one near day."

The driver forced his way into the front ranks and began to lay about
him with his knout.  Instantly he was cast forth by a dozen brawny arms.

"Mutiny!" he bawled.

A group of drivers reinforced him at once.

"By Bast," the foremost cried, as he came running.  "The sedition of
the renegade, Mesu,[1] bears early fruit!"

But the spirit of rebellion became contagious and the men of Israel
began to throw themselves out of line.  At this moment, Atsu seemed to
become conscious of the riot and drove his horses between the
combatants.

"Into ranks with you!" he commanded, pressing forward upon the Hebrews.
The men obeyed sullenly.

"I have said there was to be no use of the knouts," he said sharply,
turning upon the drivers.  "Forward with them!"

The first driver muttered.

"What sayest thou?" Atsu demanded.

The man's mouth opened and closed, and his eyes drew up, evilly, but he
made no answer.

"Forward with them," Atsu repeated, without removing his gaze from the
driver.

Slowly, and now silently, the hereditary slaves of the Pharaoh moved
out of Pa-Ramesu.  And of all the departing numbers and of all that
remained behind, none was more stricken in heart than Atsu, the stern
taskmaster over Israel.


[1] Moses.




CHAPTER II

UNDER BAN OF THE RITUAL

Holy Memphis, city of Apis, habitat of Ptah!

Not idly was she called Menefer, the Good Place.  Not anywhere in Egypt
were the winds more gentle, the heavens more benign, the environs more
august.

To the south and west of her, the Libyan hills notched the horizon.  To
the east the bald summits of the Arabian desert cut off the traveling
sand in its march on the capital.  To the north was a shimmering level
that stretched unbroken to the sea.  Set upon this at mid-distance, the
pyramids uplifted their stupendous forms.  In the afternoon they
assumed the blue of the atmosphere and appeared indistinct, but in the
morning the polished sides that faced the east reflected the sun's rays
in dazzling sheets across the valley.

Out of a crevice between the heights to the south the broad blue Nile
rolled, sweeping past one hundred and twenty stadia or sixteen miles of
urban magnificence, and lost itself in the shimmering sky-line to the
north.

The city was walled on the north, west, and south, and its river-front
was protected by a mighty dike, built by Menes, the first king of the
first dynasty in the hour of chronological daybreak.  Within were
orderly squares, cross-cut by avenues and relieved from monotony by
scattered mosaics of groves.  Out of these shady demesnes rose the
great white temples of Ptah and Apis, and the palaces of the various
Memphian Pharaohs.

About these, the bazaars and residences, facade above facade, and tier
upon tier, as the land sloped up to its center, shone fair and white
under a cloudless sun.

Memphis was at the pinnacle of her greatness in the sixth year of the
reign of the divine Meneptah.  She had fortified herself and resisted
the great invasion of the Rebu.  Her generals had done battle with him
and brought him home, chained to their chariots.

And after the festivities in celebration of her prowess, she laid down
pike and falchion, bull-hide shield and helmet, and took up the chisel
and brush, the spindle and loom once more.

The heavy drowsiness of a mid-winter noon had depopulated her booths
and bazaars and quieted the quaint traffic of her squares.  In the
shadows of the city her porters drowsed, and from the continuous wall
of houses blankly facing one another from either side of the streets,
there came no sound.  Each household sought the breezes on the
balconies that galleried the inner walls of the courts, or upon the
pillared and canopied housetops.

Memphis had eaten and drunk and, sheltered behind her screens, waited
for the noon to pass.

Mentu, the king's sculptor, however, had not availed himself of the
hour of ease.  He did not labor because he must, for his house stood in
the aristocratic portion of Memphis, and it was storied, galleried,
screened and topped with its breezy pavilion.  Within the hollow space,
formed by the right and left wings of his house, the chamber of guests
to the front, and the property wall to the rear, was a court of
uncommon beauty.  Palm and tamarisk, acacia and rose-shrub, jasmine and
purple mimosa made a multi-tinted jungle about a shadowy pool in which
a white heron stood knee-deep.  There were long stretches of sunlit
sod, and walks of inlaid tile, seats of carved stone, and a single
small obelisk, set on a circular slab, marked with measures for
time--the Egyptian sun-dial.  On every side were evidences of wealth
and luxury.

So Mentu labored because he loved to toil.  In a land languorous with
tropical inertia, an enthusiastic toiler is not common.  For this
reason, Mentu was worth particular attention.  He towered a palm in
height over his Egyptian brethren, and his massive frame was entirely
in keeping with his majestic stature.  He was nearly fifty years of
age, but no sign of the early decay of the Oriental was apparent in
him.  His was the characteristic refinement of feature that marks the
Egyptian countenance, further accentuated by self-content and some
hauteur.  The idea of dignity was carried out in his dress.  The kilt
was not visible, for the kamis had become a robe, long-sleeved,
high-necked and belted with a broad band of linen, encompassing the
body twice, before it was fastened with a fibula of massive gold.

That he was an artisan noble was another peculiarity, but it was proof
of exceptional merit.  He had descended from a long line of royal
sculptors, heightening in genius in the last three.  His grandsire had
elaborated Karnak; his father had decorated the Rameseum, but Mentu had
surpassed the glory of his ancestors.  In the years of his youth, side
by side with the great Rameses, he had planned and brought to
perfection the mightiest monument to Egyptian sculpture, the
rock-carved temple of Ipsambul.  In recognition of this he had been
given to wife a daughter of the Pharaoh and raised to a rank never
before occupied by a king's sculptor.  He was second only to the
fan-bearers, the most powerful nobles of the realm, and at par with the
market, or royal architect, who was usually chosen from among the
princes.  And yet he had but come again to his own when he entered the
ranks of peerage.  In the long line of his ancestors he counted a king,
and from that royal sire he had his stature.

He sat before a table covered with tools of his craft, rolls of
papyrus, pens of reeds, pots of ink of various colors, horns of oil,
molds and clay images and vessels of paint.  Hanging upon pegs in the
wooden walls of his work-room were saws and the heavier drills, chisels
of bronze and mauls of tamarisk, suspended by thongs of deer-hide.

The sculptor, rapidly and without effort, worked out with his pen on a
sheet of papyrus the detail of a frieze.  Tiny profile figures, quaint
borders of lotus and mystic inscriptions trailed after the swift reed
in multitudinous and bewildering succession.  As he worked, a young man
entered the doorway from the court and, advancing a few steps toward
the table, watched the development of the drawings with interest.

Those were the days of early maturity and short life.  The Egyptian of
the Exodus often married at sixteen, and was full of years and ready to
be gathered to Osiris at fifty-five or sixty.  The great Rameses lived
to the unheard-of age of seventy-seven, having occupied the throne
since his eleventh year.

This young Egyptian, nearly eighteen, was grown and powerful with the
might of mature manhood.  A glance at the pair at once established
their relationship as father and son.  The features were strikingly
similar, the stature the same, though the young frame was supple and
light, not massive.

The hair was straight, abundant, brilliant black and cropped midway
down the neck and just above the brows.  There was no effort at
parting.  It was dressed from the crown of the head as each hair would
naturally lie and was confined by a circlet of gold, the token of the
royal blood of his mother's house.  The complexion was the hue of a
healthy tan, different, however, from the brown of exposure in that it
was transparent and the red in the cheek was dusky.  The face was the
classic type of the race, for be it known there were two physiognomies
characteristic of Egypt.

The forehead was broad, the brows long and delicately penciled, the
eyes softly black, very long, the lids heavy enough to suggest serenity
rather than languor.  The nose was of good length, aquiline, the
nostril thin and sharply chiseled.  The cut of the mouth and the warmth
of its color gave seriousness, sensitiveness and youthful tenderness to
the face.

Egypt was seldom athletic.  Though running and wrestling figured much
in the pastime of youths, the nation was languid and soft.  However,
Seti the Elder demanded the severest physical exercise of his sons, and
Rameses II, who succeeded him, made muscle and brawn popular by
example, during his reign.  Here, then, was an instance of
king-mimicking that was admirable.

Originally the young man had been gifted with breadth of shoulder,
depth of chest, health and vigor.  He would have been strong had he
never vaulted a pole or run a mile.  To these advantages were added the
results of wise and thorough training, so wise, so thorough, that
defects in the national physique had been remedied.  Thus, the calves
were stanch and prominent, whereas ancient Egypt was as flat-legged as
the negro; the body was round and tapered with proper athletic rapidity
from shoulder to heel, without any sign of the lank attenuation that
was characteristic of most of his countrymen.

The suggestion of his presence was power and bigness, not the
good-natured size that is hulking and awkward, but bigness that is
elegant and fine-fibered and ages into magnificence.

He wore a tunic of white linen, the finely plaited skirt reaching
almost to the knees.  The belt was of leather, three fingers in breadth
and ornamented with metal pieces, small, round and polished.  His
sandals were of white gazelle-hide, stitched with gold, and, by way of
ornament, he had but a single armlet, and a collar, consisting of ten
golden rings, depending by eyelets from a flexible band of the same
material.  The metal was unpolished and its lack-luster red harmonized
wonderfully with the bronze throat it clasped.

Diminutive Isis in profile had emerged part-way from the background of
papyrus, and the sculptor lifted his pen to sketch in the farther
shoulder as the law required.  The young man leaned forward and
watched.  But as the addition was made, giving to the otherwise shapely
little goddess an uncomfortable but thoroughly orthodox twist, he
frowned slightly.  After a moment's silence he came to the bench.

"Hast thou caught some great idea on the wing or hast thou the round of
actual labor to perform?" he asked.

His attention thus hailed, the sculptor raised himself and answered:

"Meneptah hath a temple to Set[1] in mind; indeed he hath stirred up
the quarries for the stone, I am told, and I am making ready, for I
shall be needed."

The older a civilization, the smoother its speech.  Age refines the
vowels and makes the consonants suave.  They spoke easily, not hastily,
but as oil flows, continuously and without ripple.  The younger voice
was deep, soft enough to have been wooing and as musical as a chant.

"Would that the work were as probable as thou art hopeful," the young
man said with a sigh.

"Out upon thee, idler!" was the warm reply.  "Art thou come to vex me
with thy doubts and scout thy sovereign's pious intentions?"  The young
man smiled.

"Hath the sun shone on architecture or sculpture since Meneptah
succeeded to the throne?" he asked.

Mentu's eyes brightened wrathfully but the young man laid a soothing
palm over the hand that gripped the reed.

"I do not mock thee, father.  Rather am I full of sympathy for thee.
Thou mindest me of a war-horse, stabled, with his battle-love
unsatisfied, hearing in every whimper of the wind a trumpet call.  Nay,
I would to Osiris that the Pharaoh's intents were permanent."

Somewhat mollified, Mentu put away the detaining hand and went on with
his work.  Presently the young man spoke again.

"I came to speak further of the signet," he said.

"Aye, but what signet, Kenkenes?"

"The signet of the Incomparable Pharaoh."

"What! after three years?"

"The sanctuary of the tomb is never entered and it is more than worth
the Journey to Tape[2] to search for the scarab again."

"But you would search in vain," the sculptor declared.  "Rameses has
reclaimed his own."

Kenkenes shifted his position and protested.

"But we made no great search for it.  How may we know of a surety if it
be gone?"

"Because of thy sacrilege," was the prompt and forcible reply.  "Osiris
with chin in hand and a look of mystification on his brow, pondering
over the misdeeds of a soul!  Mystification on Osiris!  And with that,
thou didst affront the sacred walls of the royal tomb and call it the
Judgment of the Dead.  Not one law of the sculptor's ritual but thou
hadst broken, in the sacrilegious fresco.  Gods!  I marvel that the
rock did not crumble under the first bite of thy chisel!"

Mentu fell to his work again.  While he talked a small ape entered the
room and, discovering the paint-pots, proceeded to decorate his person
with a liberal hand.  At this moment Kenkenes became aware of him and,
by an accurately aimed lump of clay, drove the meddler out with a show
of more asperity than the offense would ordinarily excite.  Meanwhile
the sculptor wetted his pen and, poising it over the plans, regarded
his drawings with half-closed eyes.  Then, as if he read his words on
the papyrus he proceeded:

"Thou wast not ignorant.  All thy life hast thou had the decorous laws
of the ritual before thee.  And there, in the holy precincts of the
Incomparable Pharaoh's tomb, with the opportunity of a lifetime at
hand, the skill of thy fathers in thy fingers, thou didst execute an
impious whim,--an unheard-of apostasy."  He broke off suddenly,
changing his tone.  "What if the priesthood had learned of the deed?
The Hathors be praised that they did not and that no heavier punishment
than the loss of the signet is ours."

"But it may have caught on thy chisel and broken from its fastening.
Thou dost remember that the floor was checkered with deep black
shadows."

"The hand of the insulted Pharaoh reached out of Amenti[3] and stripped
it off my neck," Mentu replied sternly.  "And consider what I and all
of mine who come after me lost in that foolish act of thine.  It was a
token of special favor from Rameses, a mark of appreciation of mine
art, and, more than all, a signet that I or mine might present to him
or his successor and win royal good will thereby."

"That I know right well," Kenkenes interrupted with an anxious note in
his voice, "and for that reason am I possessed to go after it to Tape."

The sculptor lifted a stern face to his son and said, with emphasis:
"Wilt thou further offend the gods, thou impious?   It is not there,
and vex me no further concerning it."

Kenkenes lifted one of his brows with an air of enforced patience, and
sauntered across the room to another table similarly equipped for
plan-making.  But he did not concern himself with the papyrus spread
thereon.  Instead he dropped on the bench, and crossing his shapely
feet before him, gazed straight up at the date-tree rafters and
palm-leaf interbraiding of the ceiling.

Though the law of heredity is not trustworthy in the transmission of
greatness, Kenkenes was the product of three generations of heroic
genius.  He might have developed the frequent example of decadence; he
might have sustained the excellence of his fathers' gift, but he could
not surpass them in the methods of their school of sculpture and its
results.  There was one way in which he might excel, and he was born
with his feet in that path.  His genius was too large for the limits of
his era.  Therefore he was an artistic dissenter, a reformer with noble
ideals.

Mimetic art as applied to Egyptian painting and sculpture was a curious
misnomer.  Probably no other nation of the world at that time was so
devoted to it, and certainly no other people of equal advancement of
that or any other time so wilfully ignored the simplest rules of
proportion, perspective and form.  The sculptor's ability to suggest
majesty and repose, and at the same time ignore anatomical
construction, was wonderful.  To preserve the features and individual
characteristics of a model and obey the rules of convention was a feat
to be achieved only by an Egyptian.  There was no lack of genius in
him, but he had been denied liberty of execution until he knew no other
forms but those his fathers followed generations before.

All Egypt was but a padding that the structural framework of religion
supported.  Science, art, literature, government, commerce, whatever
the member, it was built upon a bone of religion.  The processes and
uses of sculpture were controlled by the sculptor's ritual and woe unto
him who departed therefrom in depicting the gods!  The deed was
sacrilege.

In the portrait-forms the limits were less severely drawn.  There were
a dozen permissible attitudes, and, the characteristic features might
be represented with all fidelity; but there were boundaries that might
not be overstepped.  The result was an artistic perversion that
well-nigh perpetrated a grotesque slander on the personal appearance of
the race.

After the manner of Egyptians it was understood that Kenkenes was to
follow his father's calling, and ahead of him were years of labor laid
in narrow lines.  If he rebelled, he incurred infinite difficulty and
opposition, and yet he could not wholly submit.  He had been an apt and
able pupil during the long process of his instruction, but when the
moment of actual practice of his art arrived, he had rebelled.  His
first work had been his last and, in the estimation of his father, had
entailed a grievous loss.  Thereafter he had been limited to copying
the great sculptor's plans, the work of scribes and underlings.

Thus, he had passed three years that chafed him because of their
comparative idleness and their implied rebuke.  The pressure finally
became too great, and he began to weigh the matter of compromise.  If
he could secretly satisfy his own sense of the beautiful he might
follow the ritual with grace.

His cogitations, as he sat before his table, assumed form and purpose.

Presently Mentu, raising his head, noted that the shadows were falling
aslant the court.  With an interested but inarticulate remark, he
dropped his pen among its fellows in an earthenware tray, his plans
into an open chest, and went out across the court, entering an opposite
door.

With his father's exit, Kenkenes shifted his position, and the
expression of deep thought grew on his face.  After a long interval of
motionless absorption he sprang to his feet and, catching a wallet of
stamped and dyed leather from the wall, spread it open on the table.
Chisel, mallet, tape and knife, he put into it, and dropped wallet and
all into a box near-by at the sound of the sculptor's footsteps.

The great artist reentered in court robes of creamy linen, stiff with
embroidery and gold stitching.

"Har-hat passes through Memphis to-day on his way to Tape, where he is
to be installed as bearer of the king's fan on the right hand.  He is
at the palace, and nobles of the city go thither to wait upon him."

"The king was not long in choosing a successor to the lamented Amset,"
Kenkenes observed.  "Har-hat vaults loftily from the nomarchship of
Bubastis to an advisership to the Pharaoh."

"Rather hath his ascent been slower than his deserts.  How had the Rebu
war ended had it not been for Har-hat?  He is a great warrior, hath won
honor for Egypt and for Meneptah.  The army would follow him into the
jaws of Tuat,[4] and Rameses, the heir, need never take up arms, so
long as Har-hat commands the legions of Egypt.  But how the warrior
will serve as minister is yet to be seen."

"Who succeeds him over Bubastis?"

"Merenra, another of the war-tried generals.  He hath been commander
over Pa-Ramesu.  Atsu takes his place over the Israelites."

"Atsu?" Kenkenes mused.  "I know him not."

"He is a captain of chariots, and won much distinction during the Rebu
invasion.  He is a native of Mendes."

Left alone, Kenkenes crossed the court to the door his father had
entered and emerged later in a street dress of mantle and close-fitting
coif.  He took up the wallet and quitted the room.  Passing through the
intramural park and the chamber of guests, he entered the street.  It
was a narrow, featureless passage, scarcely wide enough to give room
for a chariot.  The brown dust had more prints of naked than of
sandaled feet, for most men of the young sculptor's rank went abroad in
chariots.

Once out of the passage, he turned across the city toward the east.
Memphis had pushed aside her screens and shaken out her tapestries
after the noon rest and was deep in commerce once again.  From the low
balconies overhead the Damascene carpets swung, lending festivity to
the energetic traffic below.  The pillars of stacked ware flanking the
fronts of pottery shops were in a constant state of wreckage and
reconstruction; the stalls of fruiterers perfumed the air with crushed
and over-ripe produce; litters with dark-eyed occupants and fan-bearing
attendants stood before the doorways of lapidaries and booths of
stuffs; venders of images, unguents, trinkets and wines strove to
outcry one another or the poulterer's squawking stall.  Kenkenes met
frequent obstructions and was forced to reduce his rapid pace.
Curricles and chariots and wicker chairs halted him at many crossings.
Carriers took up much of the narrow streets with large burdens;
notaries and scribes sat cross-legged on the pavement, surrounded by
their patrons and clients, and beggars and fortune-tellers strove for
the young man's attention.  The crowd thickened and thinned and grew
again; pigeons winnowed fearlessly down to the roadway dust, and a
distant yapping of dogs came down the slanting street.  At times
Kenkenes encountered whole troops of sacred cats that wandered about
the city, monarchs over the monarch himself.  By crowding into doorways
he allowed these pampered felines to pass undisturbed.

In the district near the lower edge of the city he met the heavy carts
of rustics, laden with cages of geese and crates of produce, moving
slowly in from the wide highways of the Memphian nome.  The broad backs
of the oxen were gray with dust and their drivers were masked in grime.

The smell of the river became insistent.  In the open stalls the
fishmongers had their naked brood keeping the flies away from the stock
with leafy branches.  The limits of Memphis ended precipitately at a
sudden slope.  In the long descent to the Nile there were few permanent
structures.  Half-way down were great lengths of high platform built
upon acacia piling.  This was the flood-tide wharf, but it was used now
only by loiterers, who lay upon it to bask dog-like in the sun.  The
long intervening stretch between the builded city and the river was
covered with boats and river-men.  Fishers mending nets were grouped
together, but they talked with one another as if each were a furlong
away from his fellow.  Freight bearers, emptying the newly-arrived
vessels of cargo, staggered up toward the city.  Now and again sledges
laden with ponderous burdens were drawn through the sand by yokes of
oxen, oftener by scores of men, on whom the drivers did not hesitate to
lay the lash.

River traffic was carried on far below the flood-tide wharf.  Here the
long landings of solid masonry, covered with deep water four months of
the year, were lined with vessels.  Between yard-arms hanging aslant
and over decks, glimpses of the Nile might be caught.  It rippled
passively between its banks, for it was yet seven months before the
first showing of the June rise.  Here were the frail papyrus bari,
constructed like a raft and no more concave than a long bow; the huge
cedar-masted cangias, flat-bottomed and slow-moving; the ancient dhow
with its shapeless tent-cabin aft; the ponderous cattle barges and
freight vessels built of rough-hewn logs; the light passenger skiffs;
and lastly, the sumptuous pleasure-boats.  These were elaborate and
beautiful, painted and paneled, ornamented with garlands and sheaves of
carved lotus, and spread with sails, checkered and embroidered in many
colors.  From these emerged processions of parties returning from
pleasure trips up the Nile.  They came with much pomp and following,
asserting themselves and proceeding through paths made ready for them
by the obsequious laboring classes.

Presently there approached a corps of servants, bearing bundles of
throw-sticks, nets, two or three fox-headed cats, bows and arrows,
strings of fish and hampers of fowl.  Behind, on the shoulders of four
stalwart bearers, came a litter, fluttering with gay-colored hangings.
Beside it walked an Egyptian of high class.  Suddenly the bearers
halted, and a little hand, imperious and literally aflame with jewels,
beckoned Kenkenes from the shady interior of the litter.

He obeyed promptly.  At another command the litter was lowered till the
poles were supported in the hands of the bearers.  The curtains were
withdrawn, revealing the occupant--a woman.

This, to the glory of Egypt!  Woman was defended, revered, exalted
above her sisters of any contemporary nation.  No haremic seclusion for
her; no semi-contemptuous toleration of her; no austere limits laid
upon her uses.  She bared her face to the thronging streets; she
reveled beside her brother; she worshiped with him; she admitted no
subserviency to her lord beyond the pretty deference that it pleased
her to pay; she governed his household and his children; she learned,
she wrote, she wore the crown.  She might have a successor but no
supplanter; an Egyptian of the dynasties before the Persian dominance
could have but one wife at a time; none but kings could be profligate,
openly.  So, while Babylonia led her maidens to a market, while
Ethiopia ruled hers with a rod, while Arabia numbered hers among her
she-camels, Egypt gloried in national chivalry and spiritual love.

This was the sentiment of the nation, by the lips of Khu-n-Aten, the
artist king:

"Sweet love fills my heart for the queen; may she ever keep the hand of
the Pharaoh."

Whatever Egypt's mode of worshiping Khem and Isis, nothing could set at
naught this clean, impulsive, sincere avowal.

Here, then, openly and in perfect propriety was a woman abroad with her
suitor.

She might have been eighteen years old, but there was nothing girlish
in her gorgeous beauty.  She was a red rose, full-blown.

Her robes were a double thickness of loose-meshed white linen, with a
delicate stripe of scarlet; her head-dress a single swathing of scarlet
gauze.  She wore not one, but many kinds of jewels, and her anklets and
armlets tinkled with fringes of cats and hawks in carnelian.  Her hair
was brilliant black and unbraided.  Her complexion was transparent, and
the underlying red showed deeply in the small, full-lipped mouth; like
a stain in the cheeks; like a flush on the brow, and even faintly on
the dainty chin.  Her eyes were large and black, with the amorous lid,
and lined with kohl beneath the lower lash.  Her profile showed the
exquisite aquiline of the pure-blooded Egyptian.

Aside from the visible evidences of charm there was an atmosphere of
femininity that permeated her immediate vicinity with a witchery little
short of enchantment.  She was the Lady Ta-meri, daughter of Amenemhat,
nomarch[5] of Memphis.

The Egyptian accompanying the litter was nearly thirty years of age.
He was an example of the other type of the race, differing from the
classic model of Kenkenes.  The forehead retreated, the nose was long,
low, slightly depressed at the end; the mouth, thick-lipped; the eye,
narrow and almond-shaped; the cheek-bones, high; the complexion, dark
brown.  Still, the great ripeness of lip, aggressive whiteness of teeth
and brilliance of eye made his face pleasant.  He wore a shenti of
yellow, over it a kamis of white linen, a kerchief bound with a yellow
cord about his head, and white sandals.

He was the nephew of the king's cup-bearer, who had died without issue
at Thebes during the past month.  His elder brother had succeeded his
father to a high office in the priesthood, but he, Nechutes, was a
candidate for the honors of his dead uncle.

Kenkenes gave the man a smiling nod and bent over the lady's fingers.

"Fie!" was her greeting.  "Abroad like the rabble, and carrying a
burden."  She filliped the wallet with a pink-stained finger-nail.

"Sit here," she commanded, patting the cushioned edge of the litter.

The sculptor declined the invitation with a smile.

"I go to try some stone," he explained.

"Truly, I believe thou lovest labor," the lady asserted accusingly.
"Ah, but punishment overtakes thee at last.  Behold, thou mightst have
gone with me to the marshes to-day, but I knew thou wouldst be as deep
in labor as a slave.  And so I took Nechutes."

Kenkenes shot an amused glance at her companion.

"I would wager my mummy, Nechutes, that this is the first intimation
thou hast had that thou wert second choice," he said.

"Aye, thou hast said," Nechutes admitted, his eyes showing a sudden
light.  He had a voice of profound depth and resonance, that rumbled
like the purring of the king's lions.  "And not a moment since she
swore that it was I who made her sun to move, and that Tuat itself were
sweet so I were there."

"O Ma[6]," the lady cried, threatening him with her fan.  "Thou
Defender of Truth, smite him!"

Kenkenes laughed with delight.

"Nay, nay, Nechutes!" he cried.  "Thou dost betray thyself.  Never
would Ta-meri have said anything so bald.  Now, when she is moved to
give me a honeyed fact, she laps it with delicate intimation, layer on
layer like a lotus-bud.  And only under the warm interpretation of my
heart will it unfold and show the gold within."

Nechutes stifled a derisive groan, but the lady's color swept up over
her face and made it like the dawn.

"Nay, now," she protested, "wherein art thou better than Nechutes, save
in the manner of telling thy calumny?  But, Kenkenes," she broke off,
"thou art wasted in thy narrow realm.  They need thy gallant tongue at
court."

The young sculptor made soft eyes at her.

"If I were a courtier," he objected, "I must scatter my small eloquence
among many beauties that I would liefer save for one."

She appropriated the compliment at once.

"Thou dost not hunger after even that opportunity," she pouted.  "How
long hath it been since the halls of my father's house knew thy steps?
A whole moon!"

"I feared that I should find Nechutes there," Kenkenes explained.

During this pretty joust the brows of the prospective cup-bearer had
knitted blackly.  The scowl was unpropitious.

"Thou mayest come freely now," he growled, "The way shall be clear."

The lady looked at him in mock fear.

"Come, Nechutes," the sculptor implored laughingly, "be gracious.
Being in highest favor, it behooves thee to be generous."

But the prospective cup-bearer refused to be placated.  He rumbled an
order to the slaves and they shouldered the litter.

Ta-meri made a pretty mouth at him, and turned again to Kenkenes.

"Nay, Kenkenes," she said.  "It was mine to say that the way shall be
clear--but I promise it."

She nodded a bright farewell to him, and they moved away.  The
sculptor, still smiling, continued down to the river.

At the landing he engaged one of the numerous small boats awaiting a
passenger, and directed the clout-wearing boatman to drop down the
stream.

Directly opposite his point of embarkation there were farm lands,
fertile and moist, extending inland for a mile.  But presently the
frontier of the desert laid down a gray and yellow dead-line over which
no domestic plant might strike its root and live.

But the arable tracts were velvet green with young grain, the verdant
level broken here and there by a rustic's hut, under two or three
close-standing palms.  Even from the surface of the Nile the checkered
appearance of the country, caused by the various kinds of products, was
noticeable.  Egypt was the most fertile land in the world.

However, as the light bari climbed and dipped on the little waves
toward the north the Arabian hills began to approach the river.  Their
fronts became abrupt and showed the edges of stratum on stratum of
white stone.  About their bases were quantities of rubble and gray dust
slanting against their sides in slides and drifts.  Across the
narrowing strip of fertility square cavities in rows showed themselves
in the white face of the cliffs.  The ruins of a number of squat hovels
were barely discernible over the wheat.

"Set me down near Masaarah," Kenkenes said, "and wait for me."  The
boatman ducked his head respectfully and made toward the eastern shore.
He effected a landing at a bedding of masonry on which a wharf had once
been built.  The rock was now over-run with riotous marsh growth.

The quarries had not been worked for half a century.  The thrifty
husbandman had cultivated his narrow field within a few feet of the
Nile, and the roadway that had once led from the ruined wharf toward
the hills was obliterated by the grain.

Kenkenes alighted and struck through the wheat toward the pitted front
of the cliffs.  Before him was a narrow gorge that debouched into the
great valley over a ledge of stone three feet in height.  After much
winding the ravine terminated in a wide pocket, a quarter of a mile
inland.  Exit from this cul-de-sac was possible toward the east by a
steep slope leading to the top of one of the interior ridges of the
desert.  Kenkenes did not pause at the cluster of houses.  The roofs
had fallen in and the place was quite uninhabitable.  But he leaped up
into the little valley and followed it to its end.  There he climbed
the sharp declivity and turned back in the direction he had come, along
the flank of the hill that formed the north wall of the gorge.  The
summit of the height was far above him, and the slope was covered with
limestone masses.  There had been no frost nor rain to disturb the
original rock-piling.  Only the agencies of sand and wind had
disarranged the distribution on which the builders of the earliest
dynasty had looked.  And this was weird, mysterious and labyrinthine.

At a spot where a great deal of broken rock encumbered the ground,
Kenkenes unslung his wallet and tested the fragments with chisel and
mallet.  It was the same as the quarry product--magnesium limestone,
white, fine, close-grained and easily worked.  But it was broken in
fragments too small for his purpose.  Above him were fields of greater
masses.

"Now, I was born under a fortunate sign," he said aloud as he scaled
the hillside; "but I fear those slabs are too long for a life-sized
statue."

On reaching them he found that those blocks which appeared from a
distance to weigh less than a ton, were irregular cubes ten feet high.

He grumbled his disappointment and climbed upon one to take a general
survey of his stoneyard.  At that moment his eyes fell on a block of
proper dimensions under the very shadow of the great cube upon which he
stood.  It was in the path of the wind from the north and was buried
half its height in sand.

Kenkenes leaped from his point of vantage with a cry of delight.

"Nay, now," he exclaimed; "where in this is divine disfavor?"  He
inspected his discovery, tried it for solidity of position and purity
of texture.  Its location was particularly favorable to secrecy.

It stood at the lower end of an aisle between great rocks.  All view of
it was cut off, save from that position taken by Kenkenes when he
discovered it.  A wall built between it and the north would bar the
sand and form a nook, wholly closed on two sides and partly closed at
each end by stones.  All this made itself plain to the mind of the
young sculptor at once.  With a laugh of sheer content, he turned to
retrace his steps and began to sing.

Then was the harsh desolation of the hills startled, the immediate
echoes given unaccustomed sound to undulate in diminishing volume from
one to another.  He sang absently, but his preoccupation did not make
his tones indifferent.  For his voice was soft, full, organ-like,
flexible, easy with illimitable lung-power and ineffable grace.  When
he ceased the silence fell, empty and barren, after that song's
unaudienced splendor.


[1] Set--the war-god.

[2] Thebes.

[3] Amenti--The realm of Death.

[4] Tuat--The Egyptian Hades.

[5] Nomarch--governor of a civil division called a nome.  A high office.

[6] Ma--The goddess of truth.




CHAPTER III

THE MESSENGER

Mentu returned from the session at the palace, uncommunicative and
moody.  When, after the evening meal, Kenkenes crossed the court to
talk with him, he found the elder sculptor feeding a greedy flame in a
brazier with the careful plans for the new temple to Set.  Kenkenes
retired noiselessly and saw his father no more that night.

The next day Mentu was bending over fresh sheets of papyrus, and when
his son entered and stood beside him he raised his head defiantly.

"I have another royal obelisk to decorate," he said, fixing the young
man with a steady eye, "of a surety,--without doubt,--inevitably,--for
the thing is all but ready to be set up at On."

"I am glad of that," Kenkenes replied gravely.  "Let me make clean
copies of these which are complete."

He gathered up the sheets and took his place at the opposite table.
Then ensued a long silence, broken only by the loud and restless
investigations of the omnipresent and unabashed ape.

At last the elder sculptor spoke.

"The eye of heaven must be unblinkingly upon the divine Meneptah," he
observed, as though he had but thought aloud.

Kenkenes gazed at his father with the inquiry on his face that he did
not voice.  The sculptor had risen from his bench and was searching a
chest of rolled plans near him.  He caught his son's look and closed
his mouth on an all but spoken expression.  Kenkenes continued to gaze
at him in some astonishment, and the elder man muttered to himself:

"I like him not, though if Osiris should ask me why, I could not tell.
But he hath a too-ready smile, and by that I know he will twirl
Meneptah like a string about his finger."

The eyes of the young man widened.  "The new adviser?" he asked.

"Even so," was the emphatic reply.

Before Kenkenes could ask for further enlightenment a female slave
bowed in the doorway.

"The Lady Senci sends thee greeting and would speak with thee.  She is
at the outer portal in her curricle," she said, addressing Mentu.

The great man sprang to his feet, glanced hurriedly at his ink-stained
fingers, at his robe, and then fled across the court into the door he
had entered to change his dress the day before.

Kenkenes smiled, for Mentu had been a widower these ten Nile floods.

The slave still lingered.

"Also is there a messenger for thee, master," she said, bowing again.

"So?  Let him enter."

The man whom the slave ushered in a few minutes later was old, spare
and bent, but he was alert and restless.  His eyes were brilliant and
over them arched eyebrows that were almost white.  He made a jerky
obeisance.

"Greeting, son of Mentu.  Dost thou remember me?"

The young man looked at his visitor for a moment.

"I remember," he said at last.  "Thou art Ranas, courier to Snofru,
priest of On.  Greeting and welcome to Memphis.  Enter and be seated."

"Many thanks, but mine errand is urgent.  I have been a guest of my
son, who abideth just without Memphis, and this morning a messenger
came to my son's door.  He had been sent by Snofru to Tape, but had
fallen ill on the river between On and Memphis.  As it happened, the
house of my son was the nearest, and thither he came, in fever and
beyond traveling another rod.  As the message he bore concerned the
priesthood, I went to Asar-Mut and I am come from him to thee.  He bids
thee prepare for a journey before presenting thyself to him, at the
temple."

Kenkenes frowned in some perplexity.

"His command is puzzling.  Am I to become a messenger for the gods?"

"The first messenger was a nobleman," the old courier explained in a
conciliatory tone, "and the holy father spoke of thy fidelity and
despatch."

"Mine uncle is gracious.  Salute him for me and tell him I obey."

The old man bowed once more and withdrew.

When Kenkenes crossed the court a little time later he met his father.

"The Lady Senci brings me news that makes me envious," Mentu began at
once, "and shames me because of thee!"

Kenkenes lifted an expressive brow at this unexpected onslaught.  "Nay,
now, what have I done?"

"Nothing!" Mentu asserted emphatically; "and for that reason am I
wroth.  The Lady Senci's nephew, Hotep, is the new chief of the royal
scribes."

"I call that good tidings," Kenkenes replied, a cheerful note in his
voice, "and worth greeting with a health to Hotep.  But thou must
remember, my father, that he is older than I."

"How much?" the elder sculptor asked.

"Three whole revolutions of Ra."

The artist regarded his son scornfully for a moment.

"The Lady Senci wishes me to prepare plans for the further elaboration
of her tomb," he went on, at last, "but the work on the obelisk may not
be laid aside.  If I might trust you to go on with them, the Lady Senci
need not wait."

"But I have, this moment, been summoned by my holy uncle, Asar-Mut, to
go on a journey, and I know not when I return," Kenkenes explained.

Mentu gazed at him without comprehending.

"A messenger on his way to Tape from Snofru was overtaken with
misfortune here, and Asar-Mut, getting word of it, sent for me," the
young man continued.  "I can only guess that he wishes me to carry on
the message."

"Humph!" the elder sculptor remarked.  "Asar-Mut has kingly tastes.
The couriers of priests are not usually of the nobility.  But get thee
gone."

The pair separated and the young man passed into the house.  The ape
under the bunch of leaves in a palm-top looked after him fixedly for a
moment, and then sliding down the tree, disappeared among the flowers.

When, half an hour later, Kenkenes entered a cross avenue leading to a
great square in which the temple stood, he found the roadway filled
with people, crowding about a group of disheveled women.  These were
shrieking, wildly tearing their hair, beating themselves and throwing
dust upon their heads.  Kenkenes immediately surmised that there was
something more than the usual death-wail in this.

He touched a man near him on the shoulder.

"Who may these distracted women be?" he asked.

"The mothers of Khafra and Sigur, and their women."

"Nay!  Are these men dead?  I knew them once.

"They are by this time.  They were to be hanged in the dungeon of the
house of the governor of police at this hour," the man answered with
morbid relish in his tone.  Kenkenes looked at him in horror.

"What had they done?" he asked.  The man plunged eagerly into the
narrative.

"They were tomb robbers and robbed independently of the brotherhood of
thieves.[1]  They refused to pay the customary tribute from their spoil
to the chief of robbers, and whatsoever booty they got they kept, every
jot of it.  Innumerable mummies were found rifled of their gold and
gems, and although the chief of robbers and the governor of police
sought and burrowed into every den in the Middle country, they could
not find the missing treasure.  Then they knew that the looting was not
done by any of the licensed robbers.  So all the professional thieves
and all the police set themselves to seek out the lawless plunderers."

"Humph!" interpolated Kenkenes expressively.

"Aye.  And it was not long with all these upon the scent until Khafra
and Sigur were discovered coming forth from a tomb laden with spoil,
and in the struggle which ensued they did murder.  But the constabulary
have not found the rest of the booty, though they made great search for
it and may have put the thieves to torture.  Who knows?  They do dark
things in the dungeon under the house of the governor of police."

"And so they hanged them speedily," said Kenkenes, desirous of ending
the grisly tale.

"And so they hanged them.  I could not get in to see, and these
screaming mothers attracted me, so I am here.  But my neighbor's son is
a friend of the jailer, and I shall know yet how they died."

But Kenkenes was stalking off toward the temple, his shoulders lifted
high with disgust.

"O, ye inscrutable Hathors," he exclaimed finally; "how ye have
disposed the fortunes of four friends!  Two of us hanged, a third in
royal favor, a fourth an--an--an offender against the gods."

Presently the avenue opened into the temple square.  With reverential
hand Memphis put back her dwellings and her bazaars, that profane life
might not press upon the sacred precincts of her mighty gods.  Here was
a vast acreage, overhung with the atmosphere of sanctity.  The grove of
mysteries was there, dark with profound shadow, and silent save for a
lonesome bird song or the suspirations of the wind.  The great pool in
its stone basin reflected a lofty canopy of sunlit foliage, and the
shaggy peristyle of palm-tree trunks.

The shadow of the great structure darkened its approaches before it was
clearly visible through the grove.  The devotee entered a long avenue
of sphinxes--fifty pairs lining a broad highway paved with polished
granite flagging.

At its termination the two truncated pyramids that formed the entrance
to the temple towered upward, two hundred feet of massive masonry.
Egypt had dismantled a dozen mountains to build two.

When he reached the gateway that opened like a tunnel between the
ponderous pylons, he was delayed some minutes waiting till the porter
should admit him through the wicket of bronze.  At last, a lank youth,
the son of the regular keeper, appeared, and, with an inarticulate
apology, bade him enter.

Within the overarching portals he was met by a novice, a priest of the
lowest orders, to whom he stated his mission.  With a sign to the young
man to follow, the priest passed through the porch into the inner court
of the temple.  This was simply an immense roofless chamber.  Its sides
were the outer walls of the temple proper, reinforced by stupendous
pilasters and elaborated with much bas-relief and many intaglios.  The
ends were formed by the inner pylons of the porch and outer pylons of
the main temple.  The latter were guarded by colossal divinities.  Down
the center of the court was a second aisle of sphinxes.  They had
entered this when the priest, with a startled exclamation, sprang
behind one of the recumbent monsters in time to avoid the frolicsome
salutation of an ape.

"Anubis!  Mut, the Mother of Darkness, lends you her cloak!  Out!"
Kenkenes cried, striking at his pet.  The wary animal eluded the blow
and for a moment revolved about another sphinx, pursued by his master,
and then fled like a phantom out of the court by the path he came.  By
this time the priest had emerged from his refuge and was attempting to
prevent the young man's interference with the will of the ape.

"Nay, nay; I am sorry!" the priest exclaimed as Anubis disappeared.
"It is an omen.  Toth[2] visiteth Ptah; Wisdom seeketh Power!  Came he
by divine summons or did he seek the great god?  It is a problem for
the sorcerers and is of ominous import!"

"The pestiferous creature followed me unseen from the house," Kenkenes
explained, rather flushed of countenance.  "To me it is an omen that
the idler who keeps the gate is not vigilant."

The priest shook his head and led the way without further words into
the temple.  Here the young sculptor was conducted through a wilderness
of jacketed columns, over pavements that rang even under sandaled feet,
to the center of a vast hall.  The priest left him and disappeared
through the all-enveloping twilight into the more sacred part of the
temple.

In a moment, Asar-Mut, high priest to Ptah, appeared, approaching
through the dusk.  He wore the priestly habiliments of spotless linen,
and, like a loose mantle, a magnificent leopard-skin, which hung by a
claw over the right shoulder and, passing under the left arm, was
fastened at the breast by a medallion of gold and topaz.  He was a
typical Egyptian, but thinner of lip and severer of countenance than
the laity.  The wooden dolls tumbled about by the children of the realm
were not more hairless than he.  His high, narrow head was ghastly in
its utter nakedness.

Kenkenes bent reverently before him and was greeted kindly by the
pontiff.

"Hast thou guessed why I sent for thee?" he asked at once.

"I have guessed," Kenkenes replied, "but it may be wildly."

"Let us see.  I would have thee carry a message for the brotherhood."

Kenkenes inclined his head.

"Good.  Be thy journey as quick as thy perception.  I ask thy pardon
for laying the work of a temple courier upon thy shoulders, but the
message is of such import that I would carry it myself were I as young
and unburdened with duty as thou."

"I am thy servant, holy Father, and well pleased with the opportunity
that permits me to serve the gods."

"I know, and therefore have I chosen thee.  My trusted courier is dead;
the others are light-minded, and Tape is in the height of festivity.
They might delay--they might be lured into forgetting duty, and," the
pontiff lowered his voice and drew nearer to Kenkenes, "and there are
those that may be watching for this letter.  A nobleman would not be
thought a messenger.  Thou dost incur less danger than the
clout-wearing runner for the temple."

A light broke over Kenkenes.

"I understand," he said.

"Go, then, by private boat at sunset, and Ptah be with thee.  Make all
speed."  He put a doubly wrapped scroll into Kenkenes' hands.  "This is
to be delivered to our holy Superior, Loi, priest of Amen.  Farewell,
and fail not."

Kenkenes bowed and withdrew.

It was long before sunset, and he had an unfulfilled promise in mind.
He crossed the square thoughtfully and paused by the pool in its
center.  The surface, dark and smooth as oil, reflected his figure and
face faithfully and to his evident satisfaction.  He passed around the
pool and walked briskly in the direction of another narrow passage
lined by rich residences.

He knocked at a portal framed by a pair of huge pilasters, which
towered upward, and, as pillars, formed two of the colonnade on the
roof.  A portress admitted him with a smile and led him through the
sumptuously appointed chamber of guests into the intramural park.
There she indicated a nook in an arbor of vines and left him.

With a silent foot he crossed the flowery court and entered the bower.
The beautiful dweller sat in a deep chair, her little feet on a carved
footstool, a silver-stringed lyre tumbled beside it.  She was alone and
appeared desolate.  When the tall figure of the sculptor cast a shadow
upon her she looked up with a little cry of delight.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "a god led thee hither to save me from the
solitude.  It is a moody monster not catalogued in the list of
terrors."  She thrust the lyre aside with her sandal and pushed the
footstool, only a little, away from her.

"Sit there," she commanded.  Kenkenes obeyed willingly.  He drew off
his coif and tossed it aside.

"Thou seest I am come in the garb of labor," he confessed.

"I see," she answered severely.  "Am I no longer worthy the robe of
festivity?"

"Ah, Ta-meri, thou dost wrong me," he said.  "Chide me, but impugn me
not.  Nay, I am on my way to Tape.  I was summoned hurriedly and am
already dismissed upon mine errand, but I could not use myself so ill
as to postpone my visit for eighteen days."

She jeered at him prettily.

"To hear thee one would think thou hadst been coming as often as
Nechutes."

"How often does Nechutes come?"

"Every day."

"Of late?" he asked, with a laugh in his eyes.

"Nay," she answered sulkily.  "Not since the day--that day!"

Kenkenes was silent for a moment.  Then he put his elbow on the arm of
her chair and leaned his head against his hand.  The attitude brought
him close to her.

"All these days," he said at length, "he has been unhappy among the
happy and the unhappiest among the sad.  He has summoned the shuddering
Pantheon, to hear him vow eternal unfealty to thee, Ta-meri--and lo!
while they listened he begged their most potent charm to hold thee to
him still.  Poor Nechutes!"

"Thou dost treat it lightly," she reproached him, her eyes veiled, "but
it is of serious import to--to Nechutes."

"Nay, I shall hold my tongue.  I efface myself and intercede for him,
and thou dost call it exulting.  And when I am fallen from thy favor
there will be none to plead my cause, none to hide her misty eyes with
contrite lashes."

"Mine eyes are not misty," she retorted.

"Thou hast said," he admitted, in apology.  "It was not a happy term.
I meant bejeweled with repentant dew."

She shook her little finger at him.

"If thou dost persist in thy calumny of me, thou mayest come to test
thy dismal augury," she warned.

He dropped his eyes and his mouth drooped dolorously.

"I come for comfort, and I get Nechutes and all the unpropitious
possibilities that his name suggests."

"Comfort?  Thou, in trouble?  Thou, the light-hearted?" she laughed.

"Nay; I am discontented, but I might as well hope to heave the skies
away with my shoulders as to rebel against mine oppression.  So I came
to be petted into submission."

"Nay, dost thou hear him?" the lady cried.  "And he came, because he
was sure he would get it!"

"And he will go away because the Lady Ta-meri means he shall not have
it," he exclaimed.  He reached toward his coif and immediately a
panic-stricken little hand stayed him.

"Nay," she said softly.  "I was but retaliating.  Hast thou not plagued
me, and may I not tease thee a little in revenge?  Say on."

"My--but now I bethink me, I ought not to tell thee.  It savors of that
which so offends thy nice sense of gentility--labor," he said, sinking
back in his easy attitude again.

"Fie, Kenkenes," she said.  "Hath some one put thy slavish love of toil
under ban?  Does that oppress thee?"  He reproved her with a pat on the
nearest hand.

"The king toils; the priests toil; the powers of the world labor.  None
but the beautiful idle may be idle, and that for their beauty's sake.
Nay, it is not that I may not work, but I may not work as I wish and I
am heart-sick therefore."

His last words ended in a tone of genuine dejection.  His eyes were
fixed on the grass of the nook and his brows had knitted slightly.  The
expression was a rare one for his face and in its way becoming--for the
moment at least.  The hand he had patted drew nearer, and at last,
after a little hesitancy, was laid on his black hair.  He lifted his
face and took cheer, from the light in her eyes, to proceed.

"Since I may speak," he began, "I shall.  Ta-meri, thou knowest that as
a sculptor I work within limits.  The stature of mine art must crouch
under the bounds of the ritual.  It is not boasting if I say that I
see, with brave eyes, that Egypt insults herself when she creates
horrors in stone and says, 'This is my idea of art.'  And these things
are not human; neither are they beasts--they are grotesques that verge
so near upon a semblance of living things as to be piteous.  They
thwart the purpose of sculpture.  Why do we carve at all, if not to
show how we appear to the world or the world appears to us?  Now for my
rebellion.  I would carve as we are made; as we dispose ourselves; aye,
I would display a man's soul in his face and write his history on his
brow.  I would people Egypt with a host of beauty, grace and
naturalness--"

"Just as if they were alive?" Ta-meri inquired with interest.

"Even so--of such naturalness that one could guess only by the hue of
the stone that they did not breathe."

The lady shrugged her shoulders and laughed a little.

"But they do not carve that way," she protested.  "It is not sculpture.
Thou wouldst fill the land with frozen creatures--ai!" with another
little shrug.  "It would be haunted and spectral.  Nay, give me the old
forms.  They are best."

Kenkenes fairly gasped with his sudden descent from earnest hope to
disappointment.  A flood of half-angry shame dyed his face and the
wound to his sensibilities showed its effect so plainly that the beauty
noted it with a sudden burst of compunction.

"Of a truth," she added, her voice grown wondrous soft, "I am full of
sympathy for thee, Kenkenes.  Nay, look up.  I can not be happy if thou
art not."

"That suffices.  I am cheered," he began, but the note of sarcasm in
his voice was too apparent for him to permit himself to proceed.  He
caught up the lyre, and drawing up a diphros--a double seat of fine
woods--rested against it and began to improvise with an assumption of
carelessness.  Ta-meri sank back in her chair and regarded him from
under dreamy lids--her senses charmed, her light heart won by his
comeliness and talent.  Kenkenes became conscious of her inspection, at
last, and looked up at her.  His eyes were still bright with his recent
feeling and the hue in his cheeks a little deeper.  The admiration in
her face became so speaking that he smiled and ran without pausing into
one of the love-lyrics of the day.  Breaking off in its midst, he
dropped the lyre and said with honest apology in his voice:

"I crave thy pardon, Ta-meri.  What right had I to weight thee with my
cares!  It was selfish, and yet--thou art so inviting a confidante,
that it is not wholly my fault if I come to seek of thee, my oldest and
sweetest friend, the woman comfort that was bereft me with my rightful
comforter."

"Neither mother nor sister nor lady-love," she mused.  He nodded, but
the slight interrogative emphasis caught him, and he looked up at her.
He nodded again.

"Nay, nor lady-love, thanks to the luck of Nechutes."

"Nechutes is no longer lucky," she said deliberately.

"No matter," Kenkenes insisted.  "I shall be gone eighteen days, and
his luck will have changed before I can return."

"Thine auguries seem to please thee," she pouted.

He put the back of her jeweled hand against his cheek.

"Nay, I but comfort thee at the sacrifice of mine own peace."

"A futile sacrifice."

"What!"

"A futile sacrifice!"

"Ah, Ta-meri, beseech the Goddess Ma to forget thy words!" he cried in
mock horror.  She tossed her head, and instantly he got upon his feet,
catching up his coif as he did so.

"Come, bid me farewell," he said putting out his hand, "and one of
double sweetness, for I doubt me much if Nechutes will permit a welcome
when I return."

"Nechutes will not interfere in mine affairs," she said, as she rose.

"Nay, I shall know if that be true when I return," he declared.

She stamped her foot.

"Fie!" he laughed.  "Already do I begin to doubt it."

She turned from him and kept her face away.  Kenkenes went to her and,
taking both her hands in his, drew her close to him.  She did not
resist, but her face reproached him--not for what he was doing, but for
what he had done.  With his head bent, he looked down into her eyes for
a moment.  Her red mouth with its sulky pathos was almost irresistible.
But he only pressed one hand to his lips.

"I must wait until I return," he said from the doorway, and was gone.

On the broad bosom of the Nile at sunset, four strong oarsmen were
speeding him swiftly up to Thebes.  Off the long wharves at the
southernmost limits of the city, the rapid boat overtook and passed
low-riding, slowly moving stone-barges laden with quarry slaves.  The
unwieldy craft progressed heavily, nearer and within the darkening
shadow of the Arabian hills.  Kenkenes watched them as long as they
were in sight, an unwonted pity making itself felt in his heart.  For
even in the dusk he distinguished many women and the immature figures
of children; and none knew the quarry life better than he, who was a
worker in stone.



[1] In ancient Egypt burglary was reduced to a system and governed by
law.  The chief of robbers received all the spoil and to him the
victimized citizen repaired and, upon payment of a certain per cent. of
the value of the object stolen, received his property again.  The
original burglar and the chief of robbers divided the profits.  This
traffic was countenanced in Egypt until the country passed into British
hands.

[2] The ape was sacred to and an emblem of Toth, the male deity of
Wisdom and Law.




CHAPTER IV

THE PROCESSION OF AMEN

Thebes Diospolis, the hundred-gated, was in holiday attire.  The great
suburb to the west of the Nile had emptied her multitudes into the
solemn community of the gods.  Besides her own inhabitants there were
thousands from the entire extent of the Thebaid and visitors even from
far-away Syene and Philae.  It was an occasion for more than ordinary
pomp.  The great god Amen was to be taken for an outing in his ark.

Every possible manifestation of festivity had been sought after and
displayed.  The air was a-flutter with party-colored streamers.
Garlands rioted over colossus, peristyle, obelisk and sphinx without
conserving pattern or moderation.  The dromos, or avenue of sphinxes,
was carpeted with palm and nelumbo leaves, and copper censers as large
as caldrons had been set at equidistance from one another, and an
unceasing reek of aromatics drifted up from them throughout the day.

For once the magnificence of the wondrous city of the gods was set down
from its usual preeminence in the eyes of the wondering spectator, and
the vastness of the multitude usurped its place.  The bari of Kenkenes
seeking to round the island of sand lying near the eastern shore
opposite the village of Karnak, met a solid pack of boats.  The young
sculptor took in the situation at once, and, putting about, found a
landing farther to the north.  There he made a portage across the flat
bar of sand to the arm of quiet water that separated the island from
the eastern shore.  Crossing, he dismissed his eager and excited
boatmen and struck across the noon-heated valley toward the temple.
The route of the pageant could be seen from afar, cleanly outlined by
humanity.  It extended from Karnak to Luxor and, turning in a vast loop
at the Nile front, countermarched over the dromos and ended at the
tremendous white-walled temple of Amen.  Between the double ranks of
sightseers there was but chariot room.  The side Kenkenes approached
sloped sharply from the dromos toward the river, and the rearmost
spectators had small opportunity to behold the pageant.  The multitude
here was less densely packed.  Kenkenes joined the crowd at this point.

Here was the canaille of Thebes.

They wore nothing but a kilt of cotton--or as often, only a cincture
about the loins, and their lean bodies were blackened by the terrible
sun of the desert.  They were the apprentices of paraschites,[1]
brewers, professional thieves, slaves and traffickers in the unclean
necessities of a great city, and only their occasional riots, or such
events as this, brought them into general view of the upper classes.
They had nothing in common with the gentry, whom they were willing to
recognize as creatures of a superior mold.  Among themselves there were
established castes, and members of each despised the lower and hated
the upper.  Kenkenes slackened his pace when he recognized the
character of these spectators, and after hesitating a moment, he hung
the flat wallet containing the message around his neck inside his kamis
and pushed on.  Every foot of progress he essayed was snarlingly
disputed until the rank of the aggressive stranger was guessed by his
superior dress, when he was given a moody and ungracious path.  But he
finally met an immovable obstacle in the shape of a quarrel.

The stage of hostilities was sufficiently advanced to be menacing, and
the young sculptor hesitated to ponder on the advisability of pressing
on.  While he waited, several deputies of the constabulary,
methodically silencing the crowd, came upon these belligerents in turn
and belabored the foremost into silence.  The act decided the young
man.  The feelings of the rabble were now in a state sufficiently
warlike to make them forget their ancient respect for class and turn
savagely upon him, should he show any desire to force his way through
their lines.  Therefore he gave up his attempt to reach the temple and
made up his mind to remain where he was.  At that moment, several
gorgeous litters of the belated wealthy rammed a path to the very front
and were set down before the rabble.  Kenkenes seized upon their
advance to proceed also, and, dropping between the first and second
litter, made his way with little difficulty to the front.  With the
complacency of a man that has rank and authority on his side he turned
up the roadway and continued toward the temple.  He was halted before
he had proceeded ten steps.  A litter richly gilded and borne by four
men, came pushing through the crowd and was deposited directly in his
path.

But for the unusual appearance of the bearers, Kenkenes might have
passed around the conveyance and continued.  Instead, he caught the
contagious curiosity of the crowd and stood to marvel.  The men were
stalwart, black-bearded and strong of feature, and robed in no Egyptian
garb.  They were draped voluminously in long habits of brown linen,
fringed at the hem, belted by a yellow cord with tasseled ends.  The
sleeves were wide and showed the wristbands of a white under-garment.
The head-dress was a brown kerchief bound about the brow with a cord,
also yellow.

While Kenkenes examined them in detail, a long, in-drawn breath of
wonder from the circle of spectators caused him to look at the
alighting owner of the litter.

He took a backward step and halted, amazed.

Before him was a woman of heroic proportions, taller, with the
exception of himself, than any man in the crowd.  Upon her, at first
glance, was to be discerned the stamp of great age, yet she was as
straight as a column and her hair was heavy and midnight-black.  Hers
was the Semitic cast of countenance, the features sharply chiseled, but
without that aggressiveness that emphasizes the outline of a withered
face.  Every passing year had left its mark on her, but she had grown
old not as others do.  Here was flesh compromising with age--accepting
its majesty, defying its decay--a sublunar assumption of immortality.
There was no longer any suggestion of femininity; the idea was dread
power and unearthly grace.  Of such nature might the sexless archangels
partake.

"Holy Amen!" one of the awed bystanders exclaimed in a whisper to his
neighbor.  "Who is this?"

"A princess from Punt," [2] the neighbor surmised.

"A priestess from Babylon," another hazarded.

"Nay, ye are all wrong," quavered an old man who had been looking at
the new-comers under the elbows of the crowd.  "She is an Israelite."

"Thou hast a cataract, old man," was the scornful reply from some one
near by.  "She is no slave."

"Aye," went on the unsteady voice, "I know her.  She was the favorite
woman of Queen Neferari Thermuthis.  She has not been out of the Delta
where her people live since the good queen died forty years ago.  She
must be well-nigh a hundred years old.  Aye, I should know her by her
stature.  It is of a truth the Lady Miriam."

At the sound of his mistress' name one of the bearers turned and shot a
sharp glance at the speaker.  Instantly the old man fell back, saying,
as a sneer of contempt ran through the rabble at the intelligence his
words conveyed: "Anger them not.  They have the evil eye."

Kenkenes had guessed the nationality of the strangers immediately, but
had doubted the correctness of his surmise, because of their noble
mien.  If he suffered any disappointment in hearing proof of their
identity, it was immediately nullified by the joy his artist-soul took
in the stately Hebrew woman.  He forgot the mission that urged him to
the temple and, permitting the shifting, restless crowd to surround
him, he lingered, thinking.  This proud disdain must mark his goddess
of stone in the Arabian hills, this majesty and power; but there must
be youth and fire in the place of this ancient calm.

A porter that stood beside him, emboldened by barley beer and the
growing disapproval among the on-lookers, cried:

"Ha! by the rags of my fathers, she outshines her masters, the
brickmaking hag!"

Kenkenes, who towered over the ruffian, became possessed of a sudden
and uncontrollable indignation.  He pecked the man on the head with the
knuckle of his forefinger, saying in colloquial Egyptian:

"Hold thy tongue, brawler, nor presume to flout thy betters!"

The stately Israelite, who had taken no notice of any word against her,
now turned her head toward Kenkenes and slowly inspected him.  He had
no opportunity to guess whether her gaze was approving, for the crowd
about him, grown weary of waiting, had become quarrelsome and was
loudly resenting his defense of the Hebrews.  The porter, supported by
several of his brethren, was already menacing the young sculptor when
some one shouted that the procession was in sight.

From his position Kenkenes commanded a long view of the street that
declined sharply toward the river.  As yet there was nothing to be seen
of the pageant, but the dense crowds far down the highway swayed
backward from the narrow path between them.  Presently, scantily-clad
runners were distinguished coming in a slow trot between the
multitudes.  The lane widened before the swing of their maces and there
were cries of alarm as the spectators in the middle were pressed
between the retreating forward ranks and the immovable rear.  Running
water-bearers pursued the couriers with gurglets, sprinkling the way.
Directly after these, slim bare-limbed youths came in a rapid pace
strewing the path with flowers and palm-leaves.  By this time the
intermittent sound of music had grown insistent and continuous.  Solemn
bodies of priests approached, series after series of the shaven,
white-robed ministers of Amen.  The murmur had grown to an uproar.  The
wild clamor of trumpet, pipe, cymbal and sistrum, with the long drone
of the arghool as undertone, drifted by.  The upper orders of priests
followed in the vibrating wake of the musicians.  Then came Loi,
high-priest to the patron god of Thebes, walking alone, his ancient
figure most pitifully mocked by the richness of his priestly robes.

After him the great god, Amen, in his ark.

The air was rent with acclaim.  The crowd was too dense for any one to
prostrate himself, but every Egyptian, potentate or slave, assumed as
nearly as possible the posture of humility.  Kenkenes bent reverently,
but he lifted his eyes and looked long at the passing ark.  Six priests
bore it upon their shoulders.  It was a small boat, elaborately carved,
and the cabin in the center--the retreat of the deity--was picketed
with a cordon of sacred images.  The entire feretory was overlaid with
gold and crusted with gems.

Mentu, his father, had planned one for Ptah, and a noble work it
was,--quite equal to this, Kenkenes thought.

His artistic deliberations were interrupted by an angry tone in the
clamor about him.  The Israelites had called out a demonstration of
contempt before, and he guessed at once that they had further
displeased the rabble.  It was even as he had thought.  The four
bearers with folded arms contemplated the threatening crowd with a
sidelong gaze of contempt.  The stately Israelite stood in a dream, her
brilliant eyes fixed in profound preoccupation on the distance.
Kenkenes knew by the present attitude of the group that they had made
no obeisance to Amen.  Hence the mutterings among the faithful.  Few
had seen the offense at first, but the demonstration spread
nevertheless, and assumed ominous proportions.

"Nay, now," Kenkenes thought impatiently, "such impiety is foolhardy."
But he drifted into the group of Hebrews and stood between the woman of
Israel and her insulters.  The bearers glanced at him, at one another,
and closed up beside him, but he had eyes only for the majestic
Israelite.  Not till he saw her bend with singular grace did he look
again on the pageant, interested to know what had won her homage.

She had done obeisance before the crown prince of Egypt.  He stood in a
sumptuous chariot drawn by white horses and driven by a handsome
charioteer.  The princely person was barely visible for the pair of
feather fans borne by attendants that walked beside him.  Through
continuous cheering he passed on.  Seti, the younger, followed, driving
alone.  His eyes wandered in pleased wonder over the multitude which
howled itself hoarse for him.

Close behind him was a chariot of ebony drawn by two plunging,
coal-black horses.  A robust Egyptian, who shifted from one foot to the
other and talked to his horses continually, drove therein alone.  As he
approached, the Hebrew woman raised herself so suddenly that one of the
nervous animals side-stepped affrighted.  The swaggering Egyptian, with
a muttered curse, struck at her with his whip.  The four bearers sprang
forward, but she quieted them with a few words in Hebrew.  Reentering
her litter she was borne away, while the Thebans were still lost in the
delights of the procession.

In the few strange words of the woman of Israel, Kenkenes had caught
the name of Har-hat.  This then was the bearer of the king's fan--this
insulter of age and womanhood.  And the words of Mentu seemed very
fitting,--"I like him not."

The Thebans were in raptures.  The splendors of the pageant had far
surpassed their expectations.  Priests, soldiers and officials came in
companies, rank upon rank, of exalted and ornate dignity.  Chariots and
horses shone with gilding, polished metal and gay housings, while the
marching legions clanked with pike and blade and shield.  Now that the
chief luminaries of the procession had passed, the rich and lofty
departed with a great show of indifference to the rest of the parade.
But the humbler folk, all unlearned in the art of assumption, had not
reached that nice point of culture, and lingered to see the last
foot-soldier pass.

Kenkenes, urged by his mission, was departing with the rich and lofty,
when his attention was attracted by the chief leading the section of
royal scribes now passing.  His was a compact, plump figure, amply
robed in sheeny linen, and he balanced himself skilfully in his light
shell of a chariot, which bumped over the uneven pavement.  He was not
a brilliant mark in the long parade, but something other than his mere
appearance made him conspicuous.  Behind him, walking at a respectful
distance, was his corps of subordinates--all mature, many of them aged,
but the years of their chief were fewer than those of the youngest
among them.  From the center of the crowd his face appeared boyish, and
the multitude hailed him with delight.  But the crown prince himself
was not more unmoved by their acclaim.  His silent dignity,
misunderstood, brought forth howls of genuine pleasure, and groups of
young noblemen, out of the great college of Seti I, saluted him by
name, adding thereto exalted titles in good-natured derision.

"Hotep!" ejaculated Kenkenes aloud, catching the name from the lips of
the students.  "By Apis, he is the royal scribe!"

Not until then had he realized the extent of his friend's exaltation.

He turned again toward the temple, walking between the crowds and the
marching soldiers, indifferent to the shouts of the spectators--lost in
contemplation.  But the procession moved more swiftly than he and the
last rank passed him with half his journey yet to complete.  Instantly
the vast throng poured out into the way behind the rearmost soldier and
swallowed up the sculptor in a shifting multitude.  For an hour he was
hurried and halted and pushed, progressing little and moving much.
Before he could extricate himself, the runners preceding the pageant
returning the great god to his shrine, beat the multitude back from the
dromos and once again Kenkenes was imprisoned by the hosts.  And once
again after the procession had passed, he did fruitless battle with a
tossing human sea.  But when the street had become freer, he stood
before the closed portal of the great temple.  The solemn porter
scrutinized the young sculptor sharply, but the display of the
linen-wrapped roll was an efficient passport.  In a little space he was
conducted across the ringing pavements, under the vaulted shadows, into
the presence of Loi, high priest to Amen.

The ancient prelate had just returned from installing the god in his
shrine and was yet invested in his sacerdotal robes.  At one time this
splendid raiment had swathed an imposing figure, but now the frame was
bowed, its whilom comfortable padding fallen away, its parchment-like
skin folded and wrinkled and brown.  He was trembling with the long
fatigue of the spectacle.

He spelled the hieratic writings upon the outer covering of the roll
which the young man presented to him, and asked with some eagerness in
his voice:

"Hast thou traveled with all speed?"

"Scarce eight days have I been on the way.  Only have I been delayed a
few hours by the crowds of the festival."

"It is well," replied the pontiff.  "Wait here while I see what says my
brother at On."

He motioned Kenkenes to a seat of inlaid ebony and retired into a
curtained recess.

The apartment into which Kenkenes had been conducted was small.  It was
evidently the study of Loi, for there was a small library of papyri in
cases against the wall; a deep fauteuil was before a heavy table
covered with loosely rolled writings.  The light from a high slit under
the architrave sifted down on the floor strewn with carpets of
Damascene weave.  Two great pillars, closely set, supported the
ceiling.  They were of red and black granite, and each was surmounted
by a foliated encarpus of white marble.  The ceiling was a marvelous
marquetry of many and wondrously harmonious colors.

In one wall was the entrance leading to another chamber.  It was
screened by a slowly swaying curtain of broidered linen, which was tied
at its upper corners to brass rings sunk in the stone frame of the
door.  This frame attracted the attention of the young sculptor.  It
consisted of two caryatides standing out from the square shaft from
which they were carved, their erect heads barely touching the ceiling.
The figures were of heroic size and wore the repose and dignity of
countenance characteristic of Egyptian statues.  The sculptor had been
so successful in bringing out this expression that Kenkenes stood
before them and groaned because he had not followed nature to the
exquisite achievement he might have attained.

He was deeply interested in his critical examination of the figures
when the old priest darted into the apartment, his withered face
working with excitement.

"Go!  Go!" he cried.  "Eat and prepare to return to Memphis with all
speed.  Thine answer will await thee here to-night at the end of the
first watch,--and Set be upon thee if thou delayest!"

Kenkenes, startled out of speech, did obeisance and hastened from the
temple.

The outside air was thick with dust and intensely hot under the
reddening glare of the sun.  It was late afternoon.  The city was still
crowded, the river front lined with a dense jam of people awaiting
transportation to the opposite shore.  Kenkenes knew that many would
still be there on the morrow, since the number of boats was inadequate
to carry the multitude of passengers.

He began to think with concern upon the security of his own bari, left
in the marsh-growth by the Nile side, north of Karnak.  He left the
shifting crowd behind and struck across the sandy flat toward the arm
of quiet water.  Straggling groups preceded and followed him and at the
Nile-side he came upon a number contending for the possession of his
boat.  They were image-makers and curriers, equally matched against one
another, and a Nubian servitor in a striped tunic, who remained neutral
that he might with safety join the winning party.  The appearance of
the nobleman checked hostilities and the contestants, recognizing the
paternalism of rank after the manner of the lowly, called upon him to
arbitrate.

"The boat is mine, children," [3] was his quiet answer.  He pushed it
off, stepped into it, and turned it broadside to them.

"See here, the scarab of Ptah," he said, tapping the bow with a paddle,
"and the name of Memphis?"  With that he drew away to the sandbar
before the astonished men had realized the turn of events.  Then they
looked at one another in silence or muttered their disgust; but the
Nubian went into transports of rage, making such violent demonstrations
that the image-makers and curriers turned on him and bade him cease.

At the Libyan shore Kenkenes gave his bari into the hands of a
river-man and by a liberal fee purchased its security from
confiscation.  Then he turned his face toward the center of the western
suburb of Thebes Diospolis.  He had the larger palace of Rameses II in
view and he walked briskly, as one who goes forward to meet pleasure.
Only once, when he passed the palace and temple of the Incomparable
Pharaoh, which stood at the mouth of the Valley of the Kings, he
frowned in discontent.  Far up the tortuous windings of this gorge was
the tomb of the great Rameses and there had the precious signet been
lost.  As he looked at the high red ridge through which this crevice
led, he remembered his father's emphatic prohibition and bit his lip.
Thereafter, throughout a great part of his walk, he railed mentally
against the useless loss of a most propitious opportunity.

To the first resplendent member of the retinue at Meneptah's palace,
who cast one glance at the fillet the sculptor wore, and bent suavely
before him, Kenkenes stated his mission.  The retainer bowed again and
called a rosy page hiding in the dusk of the corridor.

"Go thou to the apartments of my Lord Hotep and tell him a visitor
awaits him in his chamber of guests."

The lad slipped away and the retainer led Kenkenes into a long chamber
near the end of the corridor.  The hall had been darkened to keep out
the glare of the day, air being admitted only through a slatted blind
against which a shrub in the court outside beat its waxen leaves.
Before his eyes had become accustomed to the dusk Kenkenes heard
footsteps coming down the outer passage, with now and then the light
and brisk scrape of the sandal toe on the polished floor.  The young
sculptor smiled at the excited throb of his heart.  The new-comer
entered the hall and drew up the shutter.  The brilliant flood of light
revealed to him the tall figure of the sculptor rising from his
chair--to the sculptor the trim presence of the royal scribe.

The friends had not met in six years.

For a space long enough for recognition to dawn upon the scribe, he
stood motionless and then with an exclamation of extravagant delight he
seized his friend and embraced him with woman-like emotion.


[1] Undertakers--embalmers, an unclean class.

[2] Punt--Arabia.

[3] The oriental master calls his servants "children."




CHAPTER V

THE HEIR TO THE THRONE

Loi was not present at the sunset prayers in Karnak.  An hour before he
had summoned the trustiest priest in the brotherhood of ministers to
Amen and bade him conduct the ceremonies of the evening.  Then he sent
to the temple stores, put into service another boat and was ferried
over to the Libyan suburb of Thebes.  He had himself borne in a litter
to the greater palace of Rameses II, and asked an audience with
Meneptah.

The king was at prayers in the temple of his father, close to the
palace, and the dusk of twilight was settling on the valley of the
Nile, before Loi was summoned to the council chamber.

The hall he entered was vast and full of deep shadows.  The two windows
set in one wall, many feet above the floor, showed two spaces of
darkening sky.  A single torch of aromatics flared and hissed beside
the throne dais.  Tremendous wainscoting covered the base of the walls,
more than a foot above a man's height.  It was massively carved with
colossal sheaves of lotus-blooms and sword-like palm-leaves.  Columns
of great girth, bouquets of conventional stamens, ending in foliated
capitals, supported by the lofty ceiling.  The few men gathered in
council were surrounded, over-shadowed, and dwarfed by monumental
strength and solemnity.

Behind a solid panel of carved cedar, which hedged the royal dais,
stood Meneptah.  Above his head were the intricate drapings of a canopy
of gold tissue.  On a level with his eyes, at his side, was the single
torch.  His vision, like his father's, was defective.  He was forty
years old, but appeared to be younger.  His person was plump, and in
stature he was shorter than the average Egyptian.  His coloring was
high and of uniform tint.  The arch of the brow, and the conspicuous
distance between it and the eye below, the disdainful tension of the
nostril and the drooping corners of the mouth, gave his face the
injured expression of a spoiled child.  The lips were of similar
fullness and the chin retreated.  There was refinement in his face, but
no force nor modicum of perception.

Below, with the light of the torch wavering up and down his robust
figure, was Har-hat, Meneptah's greatest general and now the new
fan-bearer.  In repose his face was expressive of great good-humor.
Merriment lighted his eyes and the cut of his mouth was for laughter.
But the smile seemed to be set and, furthermore, indicated that the
fan-bearer found much mirth in the discomfiture of others.  Aside from
this undefined atmosphere of heartlessness, it can not be said that
there was any craft or wickedness patent on his face, for his features
were good and indicative of unusual intelligence.  To the unobservant,
he seemed to be a lovable, useful, able man.  However, we have seen
what Mentu thought of him, and Mentu's estimation might have
represented that of all profound thinkers.  But to the latter class,
most assuredly, Meneptah did not belong.

Har-hat, taking the place of the king during the Rebu war, had
displayed such generalship that the Pharaoh had rewarded him at the
first opportunity with the highest office, except the regency, at his
command.

To the king's right, beside the dais, with a hand resting on the back
of a cathedra, or great chair, was the crown prince, Rameses.  The old
courtiers of the dead grandsire, visiting the court of Meneptah, flung
up their hands and gasped when they beheld the heir to the double crown
of Egypt.  They looked upon the old Pharaoh, renewed in youth and
strength.  There were the same narrow temples with the sloping brow,
the same hawked nose, the same full lips, the same heavy eye with the
smoldering ember in its dusky depths.  The only radical dissimilarity
was the hue of the prince's complexion.  It was a strange, un-Egyptian
pallor, an opaque whiteness with dark shadows that belied the testimony
of vigor in his sinewy frame.

The old courtiers that were still attached to the court of Meneptah
watched with fascination the development of the heir's character.  He
was twenty-two years old now and had proved that no alien nature had
been housed in the old Pharaoh's shape.  If any pointed out the
prince's indolence as proving him unlike his grandsire the old
courtiers shook their heads and said: "He does not reign as yet and he
but saves his forces till the crown is his."  So Egypt, stagnated at
the pinnacle of power by the accession of Meneptah, began to look
forward secretly to the reign of Rameses the Younger, with a hope that
was half terror.

To-night he stood in semi-dusk robed in festal attire, for somewhere a
rout awaited him.  And of the groups of power and rank about him, none
seemed to fit that majestic council chamber so well as he.  It was not
the robe of costly stuffs he wore, nor the trappings of jewels, which
if he moved never so slightly emitted a shower of frosty sparks--but a
peculiar emanation of magnetism that at once repelled and attracted,
and made him master over the monarch himself.  He had never met repulse
or defeat; he had never entered the presence of his peer; he had never
loved, he had never prayed.  He was a solitary power, who admitted
death as his only equal, and defied even him.

The other counselors were minor members of the cabinet, who had been
summoned, but expected only to hear and keep silence while the great
powers--the king, the prince, the priest and the fan-bearer--conferred.

Loi entered, bowing and walking with palsied step.  At one time the
three central figures of the hall had been his pupils.  He had taught
them from the simplest hieratic catechism to the initiation into the
mysteries.  As novices they had kissed his hand and borne him
reverence.  Now as the initiated, exalted through the acquisition of
power, it lay with them to reverse conditions if they pleased.  But as
the old prelate prepared to do obeisance before Meneptah, he was stayed
with a gesture, and after a word of greeting was dismissed to his
place.  Rameses saluted him with a motion of his hand and Har-hat bowed
reverently.  The pontiff backed away to the great council table set
opposite the throne and was met there by a courtier with a chair.

At a sign from the king, who had already sunk into his throne, the old
man sat.

"Thou bringest us tidings, holy Father?"

"Even so, O Son of Ptah."

"Say on."

The priest moved a little uncomfortably and glanced at the ministers
grouped in the shadows.

"Save for the worthy Har-hat and our prince, O my King, thou hast no
need of great council," he said.

Meneptah raised his hand and the supernumerary ministers left the
chamber.  When they were gone, Loi unwrapped the roll Kenkenes had
brought and began to read:


"To Loi, the most high Servant of Amen, Lord of Tape, the Servant of
Ra, at On, sends greeting:

"The gods lend me composure to speak calmly with thee, O Brother.  And
let the dismay which is mine explain the lack of ceremony in this
writing.

"It is not likely that thou hast forgotten the good Queen Neferari
Thermuthis' foster-son--the Hebrew Mesu, whom she found adrift in a
basket on Nilus.  But lest the years have driven the memory of his
misdeeds from thy mind, I tell again the story.  Thou knowest he was
initiated a priest of Isis, and scarce had the last of the mysteries
been disclosed to him, ere it was seen that the brotherhood had taken
an apostate unto itself.

"By the grace of the gods, he interfered in a brawl at Pithom and
killed an Egyptian.  Before he could be taken he fled into Midian, and
the secrets of our order were safe, for a time.

"One by one our fellows have entered Osiris.  The young who knew not
have filled their places.  Thou and I, only, are left--and the Hebrew!

"He hath returned!

"The gods make strong our hands against him!  He went away as a menace,
but he returneth as a pestilence.  The demons of Amend are with him,
and his hour is most propitious.  He hath sunk himself in the
Israelitish pool here in the north, and he will breathe therefrom such
vapors as may destroy Egypt--faith--state--all!

"The bond-people are already in ferment.  There was mutiny at Pa-Ramesu
recently, when three hundred were chosen to work the quarries.
Moreover, the taskmasters are corrupt.  The commander, one Atsu by
name, appointed when the chief Merenra became nomarch over Bubastis,
hath disarmed the under-drivers, removed the women from toil and
restored many privileges which are ruinous to law and order.  The whole
Delta is in commotion.  The nomad tribes near the Goshen country are
agitated; communities of Egyptian shepherds have been won over to the
Hebrew's cause, and now the Israelitish renegade needs but to betray
the secrets to bring such calamity upon Egypt as never befell a nation.

"But, Brother, he is within reach of an avenging hand!  Commission us,
I pray thee, to protect the mysteries after any manner that to us
seemeth good.

"Despatch is urgent.  He may fly again.  Give us thine answer as we
have sent this to thee--by a nobleman--a swift and trusty one, and the
blessings of the Radiant Three be upon thy head.

"Thy servant, the Servant of Ra,

"Snofru."


When the priest finished, the king was sitting upright, his face
flushed with feeling.

"Sedition!" he exclaimed; "organized rebellion in the very heart of my
realm!"

He paused for a space and thrust back the heavy fringes of his cowl
with a gesture of peevish impatience.

"What evil humor possesses Egypt?" he burst forth irritably.  "Hardly
have I overthrown an invader before my people break out.  I quiet them
in one place and they revolt in another.  Must I turn a spear upon mine
own?"

"Well," he cried, stamping his foot, when the three before him kept
silence, "have ye no word to say?"

His eyes rested on Har-hat, with an imperious expectation in them.  The
fan-bearer bent low before he answered.

"With thy gracious permission, O Son of Ptah," he said, "I would
suggest that it were wise to cool an insurrection in the simmering.
The disaffection seems to be of great extent.  But the Rameside army
assembled on the ground might check an open insurrection.  Furthermore,
thou hast seen the salutary effect of thy visit to Tape when she forgot
her duty to her sovereign.  Thy presence in the Delta would undoubtedly
expedite the suppression of the rebellion likewise."

"O, aye," Meneptah declared.  "I must go to Tanis.  It seems that I
must hasten hither and thither over Egypt pursuing sedition like a
scent-hunting jackal.  Mayhap if I were divided like Osiris[1] and a
bit of me scattered in each nome, I might preserve peace.  But it goes
sore against me to drag the army with me.  Hast thou any simpler plan
to offer, holy Father?"

The old priest shifted a little before he answered.

"The mysteries of the faith are in possession of Mesu," he began at
last.  "The writing saith he hath exerted great influence over the
bond-people--in truth he hath entered a peaceful land and stirred it
up--and time is but needed to bring the unrest to open warfare.  Thou,
O Meneptah, and thou, O Rameses, and thou, O Har-hat, each being of the
brotherhood--ye know that we hold the faith by scant tenure in the
respect of the people.  Ye know the perversity of humanity.  Obedience
and piety are not in them.  Though they never knew a faith save the
faith of their fathers, we must pursue them with a gad, tickle them
with processions and awe them with manifestations.  So if it were to
come over the spirit of this Hebrew to betray the mysteries, to scout
the faith and overturn the gods, he would have rabble Egypt following
at his heels.

"As the writing saith, he hath the destruction of the state in mind,
and his own aggrandizement.  He but beginneth on the faith because he
seeth in that a rift wherein to put the lever that shall pry the whole
state asunder.  So with two and a half millions of Hebrews and a horde
of renegade Egyptians to combat, I fear the Rameside army might spill
more good blood than is worth wasting on a mongrel multitude.  The
rabble without a leader is harmless.  Cut off the head of the monster,
and there is neither might nor danger in the trunk.  Put away Mesu, and
the insurrection will subside utterly."

The priest paused and Meneptah stroked the polished coping of the panel
before him with a nervous hand.  There was complete silence for a
moment, broken at last by the king.

"Mesu, though a Hebrew, an infidel and a malefactor, is a prince of the
realm, my foster-brother--Neferari's favorite son.  I can not rid
myself of him on provocation as yet misty and indirect."

"Nay," he added after another pause, "he shall not die by hand of
mine."  The prelate raised his head and met the eyes of the king.
After he read what lay therein, the dissatisfaction that had begun to
show on his ancient face faded.

The Pharaoh settled back into his seat and his brow cleared as if the
problem had been settled.  But suddenly he sat up.

"What have I profited by this council?  Shall I take the army or leave
it distributed over Egypt?"  He stopped abruptly and turned to the
crown prince.  "Help us, my Rameses," he said in a softer tone.  "We
had well-nigh forgotten thee."

Rameses raised himself from the back of his cathedra, against which he
lounged, and moved a step forward.

"A word, my father," he said calmly.  "Thy perplexity hath not been
untangled for thee, nor even a thread pulled which shall start it
raveling.  The priesthood can kill Mesu," he said to Loi, "and it will
do them no hurt.  And thou, my father, canst countenance it and seem no
worse than any other monarch that loved his throne.  Thus ye will
decapitate the monster.  But there be creatures in the desert which,
losing one head, grow another.  Mesu is not of such exalted or
supernatural villainy that they can not fill his place.  Wilt thou
execute Israel one by one as it raises up a leader against thee?  Nay;
and wilt thou play the barbarian and put two and a half million at once
to the sword?"

The trio looked uncomfortable, none more so than the Pharaoh.  The
prince went on mercilessly.

"Are the Hebrews warriors?  Wouldst thou go against a host of
trowel-wielding slaves with an army that levels lances only against
free-born men?  And yet, wilt thou wait till all Israel shall crowd
into thy presence and defy thee before thou actest?  And again, wilt
thou descend on them with arms now when they may with Justice cry 'What
have we done to thee?'  Thou art beset, my father."

The Pharaoh opened his lips as if to answer, but the level eye of the
prince silenced him.

"Thou hast not fathomed the Hebrew's capabilities, my father," Rameses
continued.  "In him is a wealth, a power, a magnificence that thy
fathers and mine built up for thee, and the time is ripe for the
garnering of thy profit.  What monarch of the sister nations hath two
and a half millions of hereditary slaves--not tributary folk nor
prisoners of war--but slaves that are his as his cattle and his flocks
are his?  What monarch before thee had them?  None anywhere, at any
time.  Thou art rich in bond-people beyond any monarch since the gods
reigned."

The chagrin died on the Pharaoh's face and he wore an expectant look.
The prince continued in even tones.

"By use, they have fitted themselves to the limits laid upon them by
the great Rameses.  The feeble have died and the frames of the sturdy
have become like brass.  They have bred like beetles in the Nile mud
for numbers.  Ignorant of their value, thou hast been indifferent to
their existence.  Forgetting them was pampering them.  They have lived
on the bounty of Egypt for four hundred years and, save for the wise
inflictions of a year or two by the older Pharaohs, they have
flourished unmolested.  How they repay thee, thou seest by this
writing.  Now, by the gods, turn the face of a master upon them.
Remove the soft driver, Atsu, and put one in his stead who is worthy
the office.  Tickle them to alacrity and obedience with the lash--yoke
them--load them--fill thy canals, thy quarries, thy mines with them--"
He broke off and moved forward a step squarely facing the Pharaoh.

"Thou hast thine artist--that demi-god Mentu, in whom there is
supernatural genius for architecture as well as sculpture.  Make him
thy murket[2] as well, and with him dost thou know what thou canst do
with these slaves?  Thou canst rear Karnak in every herdsman's village;
thou canst carve the twin of Ipsambul in every rock-front that faces
the Nile; thou canst erect a pyramid tomb for thee that shall make an
infant of Khufu; thou canst build a highway from Syene to Tanis and
line it with sisters of the Sphinx; thou canst write the name of
Meneptah above every other name on the world's monuments and it shall
endure as long as stone and bronze shall last and tradition go on from
lip to lip!"

The prince paused abruptly.  Meneptah was on his feet, almost in tears
at the contemplation of his pictured greatness.

"Mark ye!" the prince began again.  His arm shot out and fell and the
flash of its jewels made it look like a bolt of lightning.  "I would
not fall heir to Israel--and if these things are done in thy lifetime I
must build my monuments with prisoners of war!"

The old hierarch, who had been nervously rubbing the arm of his chair
during the last of the prince's speech, broke the dead silence with an
awed whisper.

"Ah, then spake the Incomparable Pharaoh!"

Meneptah put out his hand, smiling.

"No more.  The way is shown, I follow, O my Rameses!"



[1] Osiris--the great god of Egypt, was overcome by Set, his body
divided and scattered over the valley of the Nile.  Isis, wife of
Osiris, gathered up the remains and buried them at This or Abydos.

[2] Murket--the royal architect, an exalted office usually held by
princes of the realm.




CHAPTER VI

THE LADY MIRIAM

Meanwhile the scribe of the "double house of life," and the son of the
royal sculptor were taking comfort on the palace-top beneath the subdued
light of a hooded lamp.

The pair had spoken of all Memphis and its gossip; had given account of
themselves and had caught up with the present time in the succession of
events.

"Hotep, at thy lofty notch of favor, one must have the wisdom of Toth,"
Kenkenes observed, adding with a laugh, "mark thou, I have compared thee
with no mortal."

Hotep shook his head.

"Nay, any man may fill my position so he but knows when to hold his
tongue and what to say when he wags it."

"O, aye," the sculptor admitted in good-natured irony.  "Those be simple
qualifications and easy to combine."

The scribe smiled.

"Mine is no arduous labor now.  During my years of apprenticeship I was
sorely put to it, but now I have only to wait upon the king and look to
it that mine underlings are not idle.  If another war should come--if any
manner of difficulty should arise in matters of state, I doubt not mine
would be a heavy lot."

The young man spoke of war and fellowship with a monarch as if he had
been a lady's page and gossiped of fans and new perfumes.

Kenkenes looked at him with a full realization of the incongruity of the
youth of the man and the weight of the office that was his.

But at close range the scribe's face was young only in feature and tint.
He was born of an Egyptian and a Danaid, and the blond alien mother had
impressed her own characteristics very strongly on her son.

He had a plump figure with handsome curves, waving, chestnut hair and a
fair complexion.  Nose and forehead were in line.  The eyes were of that
type of gray that varies in shade with the mental state.  His temper
displayed itself only in their sudden hardening into the hue of steel;
content and happiness made them blue.  They were always steady and
comprehending, so that whoever entered his presence for the first time
said to himself: "Here is a man that discovers my very soul."

Whatever other blunder Meneptah might have made, he had redeemed himself
in the wisdom he displayed in choosing his scribe.  Kenkenes had been led
to ask how Hotep had come to his place.

"My superior, Pinem, died without a son," the scribe had explained; "and
as my record was clean, and the princes had ever been my patrons, the
Pharaoh exalted me to the scribeship."

Kenkenes had then set down a mark in favor of the princes.

"I doubt not," the scribe observed at last, "that my time of ease is
short-lived."

The sculptor looked at him with inquiry in his eyes.

"When sedition arises and defies the Pharaoh in his audience chamber,"
Hotep went on, "it has reached the stage of a single alternative--success
or death.  Dost know the Lady Miriam?"

"The Israelite?"

"Even so."

"I saw her this day."

"Good.  Now, look upon the scene.  Thou knowest she is the sister of
Prince Mesu, and the favorite waiting-woman of the good Queen Thermuthis.
She has lived in obscurity for forty years, but this morning she swept
into the audience chamber, did majestic obeisance and besought a word
'with him who was an infant in her maturity,' she said.  The council
chamber was filled with those gathered to welcome Har-hat.  Meneptah bade
her speak.  Hast thou ever heard an Israelitish harangue?" he broke off
suddenly.

Kenkenes shook his head.

"Ah, theirs is pristine oratory--occult eloquence," the scribe said
earnestly, "and she is mistress of the art.  She told the history of
Israel and catalogued its wrongs in a manner that lacked only measure and
music to make it a song.  But, Kenkenes, she did not move us to
compunction and pity.  When she had done, we had not looked on a picture
of suffering and oppression, but of insulted pride and rebellion.
Instead of compunction, she awakened admiration, instead of pity,
respect.  For the moment she represented, not a multitude of complaining
slaves, but a race of indignant peers.

"Meneptah--ah! the good king," the scribe went on, "was impressed like
the rest of us.  But finally he showed her that the Israelites were what
they were by the consent of the gods; that their unwillingness but
increased the burden.  He pointed out the example of his illustrious
sires as justification for his course; enumerated some of their
privileges,--the fertile country given them by Egypt, and the freedom
that was theirs to worship their own God,--and summarily refused to
indulge them further.

"Then she became ominous.  She bade him have a care for the welfare of
Egypt before he refused her.  Her words were dark and full of evil
portent.  The air seemed to winnow with bat-wings and to reek with vapors
from witch-potions and murmur with mystic formulas.  Every man of us
crept, and drew near to his neighbor.  When she paused for an answer, the
king hesitated.  She had menaced Egypt and it stirreth the heart of the
father when the child is threatened.  He turned to Har-hat in his
perplexity and craved his counsel.  The fan-bearer laughed good-naturedly
and begged the Pharaoh's permission to send her to the mines before she
bewitched his cattle and troubled him with visions.  Har-hat's unconcern
made men of us all once more, but Meneptah shook his head.  'The name of
Neferari Thermuthis defends her,' he said; 'let her go hence'."

"'And I take no amelioration to my people?' she demanded.  'Nay,' he
replied, 'not in the smallest part shall their labor be lessened.'

"Holy Isis, thou shouldst have seen her then, Kenkenes!

"She approached the very dais of the throne and, throwing up her arms,
flung her defiance into the face of her sovereign.  It were treason to
utter her words again.  I have seen men white and shaking from rage, but
Meneptah never hath so much of temper to display.  Far be it from me to
say that the king was afraid, but I tell you, Kenkenes, mine own hair is
not yet content to lie flat.  She concentrated all the denunciatory
bitterness of the tongue and pronounced and gloried in the doom of the
dynasty, heaping the blame of its destruction upon the head of Meneptah!"

The scribe finished his story in a whisper.  Kenkenes was by this time
sitting up, his eyes shining with interest and wonder.

"Gods!  Hotep, thou dost make me creep."

"Creep!" the scribe responded heartily, "never in my life have I so
wanted to flee a royal audience.  When she had done, she turned and swept
from the presence and no man lifted a finger to stay her."

For a moment there was an expressive silence between the two young men.
At last Kenkenes broke it in a voice of intense admiration.

"What an intrepid spirit!  Small wonder that she did not heed the
condemnation of the rabble at mid-day--she who was fresh from a triumph
over the Pharaoh!"

Hotep's eyes widened warningly and he shook his head.

"Nay, hush me not, Hotep," Kenkenes went on in a reckless whisper.  "I
must say it.  Would to the gods I had been there to copy it in stone!"

"Hush! babbler!" the scribe exclaimed, his eyes twinkling nevertheless,
"thine art will make an untimely mummy of thee yet."

Kenkenes poured out his first glass of wine and set it down untasted.
The contemplated sacrilege in stone opposite Memphis confronted him.

"If Egypt's lack of art does not kill me first," he added in defense.

"Nay," Hotep protested, "why wouldst thou perpetuate the affront to the
Pharaoh?"

"Because it is history and a better delineation of the Israelitish
character than all the wordy chronicles of the historians could depict,"
was the spirited reply.

"But the ritual," Hotep began, with the assurance of a man that feels he
is armed with unanswerable argument.

"Sing me no song of the ritual," Kenkenes broke in impatiently.  "The
ritual offends mine ears--my sight, my sense.  We have quarreled beyond
any treaty-making--ever."

The other looked at him with amazement and much consternation.

"Art thou mad?" he exclaimed.

"Nay, but I am rebellious--as rebellious as the Israelite, for I have
already shaken my fist in the face of the sculptor's canons.  And the
time will come when the world will call my revolt just.  I would there
were a chronicler, here, now, to write me down, since I would be
remembered as the pioneer.  I shall win no justification, in these days,
perhaps only persecution, but I would reap my reward of honor, though it
be a thousand years in coming."

"Thou hast a grudge against the conventional forms and the rules of the
ritual?" Hotep asked, after a thoughtful silence.

"I have a distaste for the horrors it compels and am ignorant of their
use," Kenkenes answered stubbornly.

"Kenkenes," the scribe began, "Law is a most inexorable thing.  It is the
governor of the Infinite.  It is a tyrant, which, good or bad, can demand
and enforce obedience to its fiats.  It is a capricious thing and it
drags its vassal--the whole created world--after it in its mutations, or
stamps the rebel into the dust while the time-serving obedient ones
applaud.  So thou hast set up resistance against a thing greater than
gods and men and I can not see thee undone.  I love thee, but I should be
an untrue friend did I abet thee in thy lawlessness.  Submit gracefully
and thy cause shall have an audience with Law some day--if it have merit."

The young sculptor's face was passive, but his eyes were fixed sadly on
the remote stars strewn above him.  He felt inexpressibly solitary.  His
zest in his convictions did not flag, but it seemed that the whole world
and the heavens had receded and left him alone with them.

Again Hotep spoke.

"There is more court gossip," he began cheerily, as if no word had been
said that could depress the tone of the conversation.

Kenkenes accepted the new subject gladly.

"Out with it," he said.  "Within the four walls of my world I hear naught
but the clink of mallet and falling stone."

"The breach between Meneptah and Amon-meses, his mutinous brother, may be
healed by a wedding."

"So?"

"Of a surety--nay, and not of a surety, either, but mayhap.  A match
between the niece of Amon-meses, the Princess Ta-user, and the heir,
Rameses."

Kenkenes sat up again in his earnestness.  "Nay," he exclaimed.  "Never!"

"Wherefore, I pray thee?" Hotep asked with a deprecating smile.

"There is no mating between the lion and the eagle; the stag and the asp!
They could not love."

"Thou dreamy idealist!" Hotep laughed.  "The half of great marriages are
moves of strategy, attended more by Set[1] than Athor.[2]  Ta-user is mad
for the crown, Rameses for undisputed power.  Each has one of these two
desirable things to give the other."

"And how shall they appease Athor?" Kenkenes demanded warmly.  "Ta-user
loves Siptah, the son of Amon-meses, and Rameses will crown whom he loves
though he had a thousand other crown-loving, treaty-dowered wives!"

Hotep smiled.  "I thought the four walls of thy world hedged thee, but it
seems thou art right well acquainted with royalty."

"Scoff!" Kenkenes cried.  "But I can tell thee this: Rameses will put his
foot on the neck of Amon-meses if the pretender trouble him, and will wed
with a slave-girl if she break the armor over his iron heart."

Hotep laughed again and suggested another subject.

"The new fan-bearer," he began.

"Nay, what of him?" Kenkenes broke in at once.

"And shall we quarrel about him, also?"

"Dost thou know him?" Hotep queried.

"Right well--from afar and by hearsay."

"Do thou express thyself first concerning him, and I shall treat thee to
the courtier's diplomacy if I agree not."

"I like him not," Kenkenes responded bluntly.

Hotep leaned toward him, with the smile gone from his face, the jest from
his manner, and laid his hand on the sculptor's.  The pressure spoke
eloquently of hearty concord.  "But he has a charming daughter," he said.

Kenkenes inspected his friend's face critically, but there was nothing to
be read thereon.

A palace attendant approached across the paved roof and bent before the
scribe.

"A summons from the Son of Ptah, my Lord," he said.

"At this hour?" Hotep said in some surprise as he arose.  "I shall return
immediately," he told Kenkenes.

"Nay," the sculptor observed, "my time is nearly gone.  Let me depart
now."

"Not so.  I would go with thee.  This will be no more than a note.  If it
be more I shall put mine underlings to the task."

He disappeared in the dark.  Kenkenes lay back on the divan and thought
on the many things that the scribe had told him.  But chiefly he pondered
on Har-hat and the Israelite.

When Hotep returned he carried his cowl and mantle, and a scroll.  "I
too, am become a messenger," he said, "but I am self-appointed.  This
note was to go by a palace courier, but I relieved him of the task."

The pair made ready and departed through the still populous streets of
Thebes to the Nile.  There they were ferried over to the wharves of Luxor.

At the temple the porter conducted them into the chamber in which the
ancient prelate spent his shortening hours of labor.  He was there now,
at his table, and greeted the young men with a nod.  But taking a second
look at Hotep, he beckoned him with a shaking finger.

"Didst bring me aught, my son?" he asked as the scribe bent over him.

"Aye, holy Father; this message to the taskmaster over Pa-Ramesu."

"Ah," the old man said.  "Is that not yet gone?"

"Nay, the Pharaoh asks that thou insert the name of him whom thou didst
recommend for Atsu's place.  The Son of Ptah had forgotten him."

The old man pushed several scrolls aside and prepared to make the
addition..

"But thou art weary, holy Father; let me do it," Hotep protested gently.

"Nay, nay, I can do it," the old man insisted.  "See!" drawing forth a
scroll unaddressed, "I have written all this in an hour.  O aye, I can
write with the young men yet."  He made the interlineation, rolled the
scroll and sealed it.  "I am sturdy, still."  At that moment, he dropped
his pen on the floor and bent to pick it up, but was forestalled by
Hotep.  Then he addressed the scrolls, carefully dried the ink with a
sprinkling of sand and delivered one to Hotep, the other to Kenkenes.
"This to the king, and that to Snofru.  The gods give thee safe journey,"
he continued to Kenkenes.  "Who art thou, my son?"

"I am the son of Mentu, holy Father.  My name is Kenkenes," the young man
answered.

"Mentu, the royal sculptor?"

Kenkenes bowed.

"Nay, but I am glad.  I knew thy father, and since thou art of his blood,
thou art faithful.  Let neither death nor fear overtake thee, for thou
hast the peace of Egypt in thy very hands.  Fail not, I charge thee!"

After a reverent farewell, the two young men went forth.

A slender Egyptian youth went with them to the wharves and awakened the
sleeping crew of a bari.

Hotep they carried across and set ashore on the western side.

"May the same favoring god that brought thee hither, grant thee a safe
journey home, my friend.  The court comes to Memphis shortly.  Till then,
farewell," said Hotep.

"All Memphis will hail her illustrious son, O Hotep.  Farewell."

It was not long until the sculptor was drifting down toward Memphis under
a starry sky--the shadowy temples of Thebes hidden by the sudden
closing-in of the river-hills about her.



[1] Set--the war-god.

[2] Athor--the Egyptian Venus; the feminine love-deity.




CHAPTER VII

ATHOR, THE GOLDEN

At sunrise the morning after his return from On, Kenkenes appeared at
the Nile, attended by a burden-bearing slave.

The first lean, brown boatman who touched his knee and offered his bari
for hire, Kenkenes patronized.  The slave had eased his load into the
boat and Kenkenes was on the point of embarking when a four-oared bari,
which had passed them like the wind a moment before, put about several
rods above them and returned to the group on shore.

A bent and withered servitor was standing in the bow of the boat,
wildly gesticulating, as if he feared Kenkenes would insist on pulling
away despite his efforts.  The young man recognized the servant of
Snofru, old Ranas.

The large bari was beached and the servitor alighted with agility and,
beckoning to Kenkenes, took him aside.

"There has been an error--a grave error, concerning the message," the
old man began in excitement; "but thou art in no wise at fault.  Yet
mayhap thou canst aid us in unraveling the tangle.  See!"

He displayed the linen-wrapped roll, the covering split where Snofru
had opened it, but the wavering hieratic characters of the address in
Loi's hand, still intact.

When the young sculptor had gazed, the old servant nervously undid the
roll, and showed within a letter to the commander over Pa-Ramesu,
written in the strong epistolary symbols of the royal scribe.

Kenkenes frowned with vexation.  Innocent and efficient though he had
been, the miscarriage of his mission stung him nevertheless.  The
blunder was not long a mystery to him.

Summoning all the patience at his command, he recounted the events in
the apartments of the ancient hierarch of Amen.

"There were two Scrolls," he explained; "one to the Servant of Ra at
On, the other to Atsu.  The holy father sealed them both before he
addressed them and confused the directions.  The one which I should
have brought to thine august master, hath gone to the taskmaster over
Pa-Ramesu."

"Thou madest all speed?" the servant demanded, trembling with eagerness.

"A half-day's journey less than the usual time I made in returning.  I
doubt much, if the messenger with the other scroll hath passed Memphis
yet, since he may not have been despatched in such hot haste.
Furthermore, because of the festivities in Tape, it would have been
well-nigh impossible for him to hire a boat until the next day."

This information kindled a light of hope on the old servant's face.

"Thou givest me life again," he exclaimed.  "The blessings of Ra be
upon thee!"

Without further words he ran back to the boat, and the last Kenkenes
saw of him, he was frantically urging his boatmen to greater speed,
back to On.

Kenkenes had come to the Nile that morning, rejoicing in the
propitiousness of his opportunity.  Mentu was at that moment in On,
seeing to the decoration of the second obelisk reared by Meneptah to
the sun.  The great artist had prepared to be absent a month, and had
left no work for his son to do.  But the coming of Ranas with the news
of his mission's failure had filled Kenkenes with angry discomfiture.

He dismissed his slave and rowed down-stream toward Masaarah.

As he approached the abandoned wharf, a glance showed him that some
effort toward restoring it had been made.  The overgrowth of vines had
been cut away and the level of the top had been raised by several
fragments of rough stone.

The tracks of heavy sledges had crushed the young grain across the
field toward the cliffs.

Kenkenes stood up and looked toward the terraced front of the hills, in
which were the quarries.

There were dust, smoke, stir and moving figures.

The stone-pits were active again after the lapse of half a century.

"By the grace of the mutable Hathors," the young man muttered as he
dropped back into his seat, "my father may yet decorate a temple to
Set, but by the same favor, it seems that I shall be snatched from the
brink of a sacrilege."

He permitted his boat to drift while he contemplated his predicament.
Suddenly he smote his hands together.

"Grant me pardon, ye Seven Sisters!" he exclaimed.

"I misread your decree.  Ye have but covered my tracks toward
transgression."

After a little thought he resumed his felicitations.

"Who of Memphis will think I come to Masaarah, save to look after the
taking out of stone?  Is it not part of my craft?  Nay, but I shall
make offering in the temple for this.  And need any of these unhappy
creatures in Masaarah see me except as it pleases me to show myself?"

He seized his oars and rowed down the river another furlong.  Leaving
the craft fixed in the tangle of herbage at the water's edge, he
shouldered his cargo and crossed the narrow plain to the cliffs below
Masaarah.  There he made a difficult ascent of the fronts facing the
Nile and reached his block of stone without approaching the hamlet of
laborers.

Depositing his burden, he set forth to reconnoiter.  He descended again
into the Nile valley by the way he had come and wandered toward the
mouth of the gorge.  From a little distance he looked upon a scene of
great activity.  In the shadow of one of the dilapidated hovels, four
humped oxen stood, their heavy harness still hanging upon them, though
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
curiously collected.

"The Pharaoh addeth to the burden of the chosen people.  We dig stone
for a temple to the war-god."

"The chosen people!" Kenkenes repeated inquiringly.

"The children of Israel," the Hebrew explained.  Kenkenes lifted one
eyebrow quizzically and went his way.  As he leaped up into the gorge
he vaguely realized that he had seen no trace of an encampment near the
hamlet, which he knew to be uninhabitable.

"Of a truth, the chosen people seem to follow me of late," he said to
himself as he rambled up the valley.  "Meneptah must have scattered
them out of Goshen into all the corners of Egypt."

As he turned the last winding of the gorge he came upon a cluster of
some threescore tents, spread over the level pocket at the valley's
end.  Almost against the northern wall the house of the commander had
been built to receive the earliest shadow of the afternoon.  The
military standard was raised upon its roof and a scribe, making entries
on a roll of linen, sat cross-legged on a mat before the door.  In one
of the narrow ways between the tents an old woman, very bowed and
voluminously clad, prepared a great hamper of lentils and another of
papyrus root for the noonday meal.  One or two children sitting on the
earth beside her rendered her assistance, and a third kept the turf
fire glowing under a huge bubbling caldron.  Kenkenes passed through
the camp by this narrow way and paused to look with much curiosity at
the ancient Israelite.  Never had he seen any old person so active or a
slave so wrapped in covering.  He hoped she would lift her head that he
might see her face; and even as he wished, she pierced him with a look
which, from her midnight eyes, seemed like lightning from a
thunder-cloud.

"Gods!" he exclaimed as he retreated up the slope behind the camp.  And
a moment later he continued his soliloquy in a voice that struggled
between mirth and amazement: "Have I never seen an Israelite until I
beheld these twain, the Lady Miriam and that bent dart of lightning in
the valley?  If these be Israelites I never saw one before.  If those
cowed shepherds that have strayed now and again out of Goshen be
Hebrews, then these are not.  And the gods shield me from the disfavor
of them, be they slaves or sibyls!"

When he reached his block of stone he unrolled his load of equipments
and set to work without delay.  He was remote from any possible
interruption from Memphis, and the slaves in the gorge and in the
stone-pits had no opportunity to come upon his sacrilege in idle hours.
They would be held like prisoners within the limits of the quarries.
His sense of security had been strengthened by the renewed activities
in Masaarah.

With a shovel of tamarisk he cleared the slab of its drift of sand.  He
found that the block broadened at the base and was separate from the
sheet of rock on which it stood.  Among his supplies was a roll of reed
matting, and with this cut into proper lengths, he carpeted a
considerable space about the block.  Precaution rather than luxury had
prompted this procedure, since the chipped stone falling on the
covering could be carried cleanly and at once from the spot.

Pausing long enough to eat a thin slice of white bread and
gazelle-meat, and to drink a draft from the porous and ever cooling
water bottle, he turned to the protection and concealment of his statue.

The place was strewn with tolerably regular fragments, and the building
of a segment of wall to the north at the edge of the matting required
more time than strength or skill.  He built solidly against the
penetrative sand, and as high as his head.  The early afternoon blazed
upon him and passed into the mellower hours of the later day before he
had finished.  He hid his shovel and two cylindrical billets of wood,
such as were used to roll great weights, under the edge of his reed
carpet, and his preparations were complete.  He wiped his brow,
congratulating himself on the snugness of his retreat and the
auspicious beginning of his transgression.

Weary and happy, he rowed himself back to Memphis and slept soundly on
the eve of a great offense against the laws of Egypt.

But the next day, when the young sculptor faced the moment of actual
creation, he realized that his goddess must take form from an
unembodied idea.  The ritual had been his guide before, and his genius,
set free to soar as it would, fluttered wildly without direction.  His
visions were troubled with glamours of the old conventional forms; his
idea tantalized him with glimpses of its perfect self too fleeting for
him to grasp.  The sensation was not new to him.  During his maturer
years he had tried to remember his mother's face with the same yearning
and heart-hurting disappointment.  But this time he groped after
attributes which should shape the features--he had spirit, not form, in
mind; and the odds against which his unguided genius must battle were
too heroic for it to succeed without aid.  The young sculptor realized
that he was in need of a model.  Stoically, he admitted that such a
thing was as impossible as it was indispensable.  It seemed that he had
met complete bafflement.

He took up his tools and returned to Memphis.  But each succeeding
morning found him in the desert again, desperately hopeful--each
succeeding evening, in the city disheartened and silent.

So it followed for several days.

On the sixth of January the festival in honor of the return of Isis
from Phenicia was celebrated in Memphis.  Kenkenes left the revel in
mid-afternoon and crossed the Nile to the hills.  He found no content
away from his block of stone--no happiness before it.  But he wandered
back to the seclusion of the niche that he might be moody and sad of
eye in all security.

The stone-pits were deserted.  The festivities in Memphis had extended
their holiday to the dreary camp at Masaarah.  Kenkenes climbed up to
his retreat and remained there only a little time.  The unhewn rock
mocked him.

He descended through the gorge and found that the Hebrews were but
nominally idle.  A rope-walk had been constructed and the men were
twisting cables of tough fiber.  The Egyptians lounged in the long
shadows of the late afternoon and directed the work with no effort and
little concern.  The young sculptor overlooked the scene as long as it
interested him and continued down the valley toward the Nile.

Presently a little company of Hebrew children approached, their bare
feet making velvety sounds in the silence of the ravine.  Each balanced
a skin of water on his head.  The little line obsequiously curved
outward to let the nobleman pass, and one by one the sturdy children
turned their luminous eyes up to him, some with a flash of white teeth,
some with a downward dip of a bashful head.  One of them disengaged a
hand from his burden and swept a tangle of moist black curls away from
his eyes.  The sun of the desert had not penetrated that pretty thatch
and the forehead was as fair as a lotus flower.

Kenkenes caught himself looking sharply at each face as he passed, for
it contained somewhat of that for which he sought.  As he walked along
looking after them he became aware that some one was near him, He
turned his head and stopped in his tracks.

He confronted his idea embodied--Athor, the Golden!

It was an Israelitish maiden, barely sixteen years old, but in all his
life he had never looked upon such beauty.  He had gazed with pleased
eyes on the slender blush-tinted throats and wrists of the Egyptian
beauties, but never had he beheld such whiteness of flesh as this.  He
had sunk himself in the depths of the dusky, amorous eyes of high-born
women of Memphis, but here were fathomless profundities of azure that
abashed the heavens.  He had been very near to loveliest hair of Egypt,
so close that its odorous filaments had blown across his face and his
artist senses had been caught and tangled in its ebon sorcery.  But
down each side this broad brow was a rippling wave of gold, over each
shoulder a heavy braid of gold that fell, straightened by its own
weight, a span below the waist.  The winds of the desert had roughened
it and the bright threads made a nimbus about the head.  Its glory
overreached his senses and besieged his soul.  Here was not witchery,
but exaltation.

Enraptured with her beauty, her perfect fulfilment of his needs, he
realized last the unlovely features of her presence.  She balanced a
heavy water pitcher on her head and wore a rough surplice, more
decorous than the dress of the average bondwoman, but the habit of a
slave, nevertheless.  He had halted directly in her path, and after a
moment's hesitancy she passed around him and went on.

Immediately Kenkenes recovered himself and with a few steps overtook
her.  Without ceremony he transferred the heavy pitcher to his own
shoulder.  The girl turned her perfect face, full of amazement, to him,
and a wave of color dyed it swiftly.

"Thy burden is heavy, maiden," was all he said.

The bulk of the jar on the farther shoulder made it necessary for him
to turn his face toward her, but she was uneasy under the intent gaze
of his level black eyes.  She dropped behind him, but he slackened his
pace and kept beside her.  For the moment he was no longer the man of
pulse and susceptibility but the artist.  Therefore her thoughts and
sensations were apart from his concern.  The unfamiliar perfection of
the Semitic countenance bewildered him.  He took up his panegyric.
Never was a mortal countenance so near divine.  And the sumptuousness
of her figure--its faultless curves and lines, its lissome roundness,
its young grace, the beauty of arm and neck and ankle!  Ah! never did
anything entirely earthly dwell in so fair, so splendid a form.

As they neared the camp the girl spoke to him for the first time.  He
recognized in her voice the same serene tone he had noted in his talk
with the Hebrew some days before.

"Give me my burden now," she said.  "Thou hast affronted thy rank for
me, and I thank thee many times."

The sculptor paused and for a moment stood embarrassed.  It went sorely
against his gallantry to lay the burden again upon her and he said as
much.

"Nay, Egypt has no qualms against loading the Hebrew," she said
quietly.  "Wouldst thou put thy nation to shame?"

Kenkenes opened his eyes in some astonishment.

"Now am I even more loath," he declared.  "What art thou called?"

"Rachel."

"It hath an intrepid sound, but Athor would become thee better.  Now I
am a sculptor from the city, come to study thy women for a frieze," he
continued unblushingly, "and I would go no farther in my search.
Rachel repeated will be beauty multiplied.  Let me see thee once in a
while,--to-morrow."

A sudden flush swept over her face and her eyes darkened.

"It shall not keep thee from thy labor," he added persuasively.

The color deepened and she made a motion of dissent.

"Nay! thou dost not refuse me!" he exclaimed, his astonishment evident
in his voice.

"Of a surety," she replied.  "Give me my burden, I pray thee."

Dumb with amazement, too genuine to contain any anger, Kenkenes obeyed.
As she went up the shady gorge, walking unsteadily under the heavy
pitcher, he stood looking after her in eloquent silence.

And in eloquent silence he turned at last and continued down the
valley.  There was nothing to be said.  His appreciation of his own
discomfiture was too large for any expression.

In a few steps he met the short captain who governed the quarries.
Kenkenes guessed his office by his dress.  He was adorned in festal
trappings, for he had spent most of the day in revel across the Nile.

"Dost thou know Rachel, the Israelitish maiden?" Kenkenes asked,
planting himself in the man's way.

"The yellow-haired Judahite?" the man inquired, a little surprised.

"Even so," was the reply.

The soldier nodded.

"Look to it that she is put to light labor," the sculptor continued,
gazing loftily down into the narrow eyes.  The soldier squared off and
inspected the nobleman.  It did not take him long to acknowledge the
young sculptor's right to command.

"It does not pay to be tender with an Israelite," the man answered
sourly.

Kenkenes thrust his hand into the folds of his tunic over his breast
and, drawing forth a number of golden rings strung on a cord, jingled
them musically.

The soldier grinned.

"That will coax a man out of his dearest prejudice.  I will put her
over the children."

Kenkenes dropped the money into the man's palm.

"I shall have an eye to thee," he said warningly.  "Cheat me not."

He went his way.  The incident restored to him the power of speech.

"Now, by Horus," he began, "am I to be denied by an Israelite that
which the favoring Hathors designed I should have?  Not while the arts
of strategy abide within me.  The children, I take it, will come here
with the water," he cogitated, stamping upon the wet and deserted ledge
which he had reached, "and here will she be, also."

He raised his eyes to the ragged line of rocks topping the northern
wall of the gorge.

"I shall perch myself there like a sacred hawk and filch her likeness.
Nay, now that I come to ponder on it, it is doubtless better that she
know naught about it.  She might drop certain things to the Egyptians
hereabout that would lead to mine undoing.  The gods are with me, of a
truth."

He descended into the larger valley and went singing toward the Nile.




CHAPTER VIII

THE PUNISHMENT OF ATSU

One late afternoon, in the streets of Pa-Ramesu, a curious new-comer
bowed before Atsu, the commander of Israel of the treasure city.  The
visitor was old and tremulous from fatigue, and the stains of hard
travel were evident upon him.

"Greeting, Atsu.  The peace of the divine Mother attend thee," he said.
"Snofru, the beloved of Ra at On, sends thee greeting by his servant,
Ranas."

"Greeting," the taskmaster replied, after he had inspected the
white-browed servant.  "The shelter of my roof and the bread of my
board are thine;" adding after a little pause, "and in truth thou
seemest to need these things."

The old man smiled an odd wry smile and followed lamely after the long
swinging stride of the commander toward the headquarters on the knoll.

Within the house of Atsu, Ranas delivered into the hands of the soldier
the message that Kenkenes had brought to Snofru.  While Atsu undid the
roll the old servant made voluble apologies for the broken seal.  The
commander stepped to the doorway for better light and read the writing.

The old servant back in the dusk of the interior saw the stern face
harden, the heavy brows knit blackly, the dusky red fade from the
cheek.  Ranas knew what the soldier read, for he had had the roll with
its broken seal, from On to Memphis and from Memphis back to On again.
But with all his astuteness he could not have guessed what extremes of
wrath and grief the insulted taskmaster suffered.  The sheet rolled
itself together again and was broken and crushed in the iron fingers
that gripped it.  Presently he tossed it aside.  Hardly had it left his
hand before he hastened to pick it up, straightened it out and re-read
it feverishly.  He forgot the old servant; but had he remembered the
man's curious gaze, no resolution could have hidden that joy which
slowly wrote itself upon his face.  There was balm in the barb for all
the wound it made.  This is what he read:


"To Atsu, Commander over the Builders of Pa-Ramesu, These: To mine ears
hath come report of mutiny and idleness through thy weak government of
my bond-people.  Also that thou hast enforced my commands but feebly,
and so defeated my purposes, which were my sire's, after whose
illustrious example I reign.

"For these and kindred inefficiencies art thou removed from the
government over Pa-Ramesu.

"I hereby bestow upon thee another office within the limits of thy
capacity.  Thou wilt take up the flagellum over Masaarah when thou hast
surrendered Pa-Ramesu to thy successor.

"By this thou shalt learn that the Pharaohs will be ably served.

"Horemheb of Bubastis, thy successor, accompanieth these.

"Give him honor.            MENEPTAH."


The diction was manifestly the king's.  None other of high estate would
have inspired so spiteful a letter.  But the appointment to Masaarah
made Atsu forget the sting in the second reading.  To Masaarah!  To
Masaarah and Rachel!  He folded the broken sheet and thrust it into his
bosom.  Meeting the keen eye of his guest, the color rushed back to the
taskmaster's face and he summoned two attendant Hebrews to wait upon
the old man while he went forth to gain composure in the air.

After the old man had been fed and given such other comfort as the
soldier's house afforded, the taskmaster returned.  Then Ranas shifted
his position so that he might watch his host's face most intelligently,
and turned to the real purpose of his visit.

"Thou canst see, my master, that if thy message bore the wrapping for
the epistle to Snofru, the message to the holy father must have borne
thy name.  Thou hast received no letter as yet which was not intended
for thee?"

The question was delivered politely, but the old man thrust his curious
face forward and shook his head with a combination of interrogation and
dissent, which was highly insincere.

"I have received naught which was not intended for me," the taskmaster
replied warmly.

After a moment's intent contemplation of Atsu's face the courier went
on: "Nay, so had I thought.  The messenger came to Snofru with all
speed and out-stripped the courier bound for Pa-Ramesu.  It is even as
I had thought.  He may arrive shortly, but I must tarry till he comes."

Atsu assented bluntly, and after that if they talked it was of
impersonal things and in a desultory manner.  When night came Atsu
called his attendants and had the weary old man put to bed in a
curtained corner of the house.  For himself there was no sleep.

At midnight there came the beat of hoofs on the dust-muffled ways of
Pa-Ramesu.  A sentry knocked at the door of the commander and announced
a visitor.  Atsu, who still sat under the unextinguished reed light,
greeted the new-comer with an exclamation of concern.  The man was
covered with dust, his dress was torn and bloody, his right hand
swathed in cloths, and his lip, right cheek and eye were swollen and
discolored.

"By Horus, friend, thou lookest ill-used," the taskmaster exclaimed.
"What has befallen thee?"

"Naught--naught of any lasting hurt," the newcomer replied carelessly.
"We were set upon by a troop of murdering Bedouins this side of
Bubastis and had a pretty fight."

"Aye, thou hast the stamp of its beauty upon thy face.  A slave, here,
with some balsam," Atsu continued, addressing the sentry, "and a
captain of the constabulary next.  We will cure these Bedouins and
their hurt at once."

"Nay," the visitor protested.  "It is only a spear-slit in my hand, and
a flying stirrup marred my face.  I am well.  Look to the Bedouins,
however; they ran our messenger through--Set consume them!"

"Doubt not, we shall look to them.  They grow strangely insolent of
late."

"Small wonder," the other responded heartily.  "Is not the whole north
a seething pot of lawlessness; and by the demons of Amenti, is not the
Israelite the fire under the caldron?  Nay, but I shall have especial
joy in damping him!"

The man laughed and dropped into the chair Atsu had offered him.

"Then thou art Horemheb, the new taskmaster over Pa-Ramesu?"

"So! has my news outridden me?" the man exclaimed in very evident
amazement.

Ranas, indifferently clad in a hastily donned kamis, at this moment
parted the curtains of his retreat and came forth with an apologetic
courtesy.

"And thy messenger, sir?  What of him?" he asked eagerly.

"Dead, and left at a wayside house."

"And the message?" the old man persisted.

Horemheb surveyed him with increasing astonishment.

"Where hast thou these tidings?" he demanded.  "They are scarce three
hours old.  Who reached thee with them before me?"

Atsu interposed and explained the interchange of letters.

"Oh," said Horemheb.  "So the correct message came to thee,
nevertheless, good Atsu.  But I can not tell thee aught of the other.
It is lost."

"Lost!" Ranas shrieked.

"Gods! old man.  It was only pigment and papyrus, not gold or jewels.
A kindly disposed Hebrew came to our help with some of his people, and
we put the Bedouins to flight.  But after the struggle, search as we
might with torches which the Hebrew brought, the message was not to be
found.  A Bedouin made off with it, I doubt not."

Ranas stood speechless for an instant, and then he rushed up to the new
taskmaster.

"His name?" he demanded fiercely.  "The Hebrew!  What was he like?
Where does he dwell?"

"A murrain on the maniac!" Horemheb exploded.

"He called himself Aaron!"

Ranas staggered against the wall for support and beat the air with his
arms.

"Aaron, the brother of Mesu!  O ye inscrutable Hathors!" he babbled.
"A Bedouin made off with it!  Oh!  Oh!  What idiocy!"




CHAPTER IX

THE COLLAR OF GOLD

The next morning after his meeting with the golden-haired Israelite,
Kenkenes came early to the line of rocks that topped the north wall of
the gorge and, ensconced between the gray fragments, looked down unseen
on her whenever she came to the valley's mouth.  All day long the
children came staggering up from the Nile, laden with dripping hides,
or returned in a free and ragged line down the green slope of the field
to the river again.

Vastly more simple and time-saving would have been one of the capacious
water carts.  But what would have employed these ten youthful Hebrews
in the event of such improvement?  There was to be no labor-saving in
the quarries.  Therefore, through the dust, up the weary slanting
plane, again and again till the day's work amounted to a journey of
miles, the Hebrew children toiled with their captain and co-laborer,
Rachel.

At the summit of the wooden slope the beautiful Israelite, who had
preceded her charges, passed up the burden of each one to the Hebrews
on the scaffold.  From his aery Kenkenes watched this particular phase
of her tasks with interest.  She was not too far from him for the
details of her movements to be distinguishable, and the posture of the
outstretched arms and lifted face fulfilled his requirements.  He
abandoned the modeling of her features for that day and copied the
attitude.  Once in the morning and once in the afternoon a countryman
of hers, strong, young and but lightly bearded, stepped down from his
place on the scaffold and relieved her.  The sculptor noted the act
with some degree of disquiet, hoping that the graceful protests of the
girl might prevail.  When the stalwart Hebrew overrode her
remonstrances, and motioned her toward a place at the side of the
frame-work where she might rest, the young sculptor frowned
impatiently.  But his humane heart chid him and he waited with some
assumption of grace till she should take up her burden again.

At sunset he retired cautiously, but several dawns found him among the
rocks, with reed pen, papyri and molds of clay.  When he climbed to his
retreat within the walls of stone, on the hillside in the late
afternoon, he hid several studies of the girl's head and statuettes of
clay under the matting.

At last he began the creation of Athor the Golden.  For days he labored
feverishly, forgetting to eat, fretting because the sun set and the
darkness held sway for so long.  Having overstepped the law, he placed
no limit to the extent of his artistic transgression.

After choosing nature as his model, he followed it slavishly.  On the
occasion of his initial departure from the accepted rules, he had never
dreamed it possible to disregard ritualistic commandments so
absolutely.  He even ignored the passive and meditative repose,
immemorial on the carven countenances of Egypt.

The face of Athor, as she put forth her arms to receive the sun, must
show love, submission, eagerness and great appeal.

As Kenkenes said this thing to himself, he lowered chisel and mallet
and paused.  Posture and form would avail nothing without these
emotions written on the face.  He began to wonder if he might carve
them, unaided.  He had not found them in the Israelite, and he
confessed to himself, with a little laugh, a doubt that he should ever
see them on her countenance.

Then a vagabond impulse presented itself unbidden in his mind and was
frowned down with a blush of apology to himself.  And yet he remembered
his coquetry with the Lady Ta-meri as some small defense in the form of
precedent.

"Nay," he replied to this evidence, "it is a different woman.  Between
myself and Ta-meri it is even odds, and the vanquished will have
deserved his defeat."

That evening--it was several days after the face of the goddess had
begun to emerge from the block of stone--he went to the upper end of
the gorge and passed through the camp on his way home, that he might
meet his model.

The laborers had not returned from the quarries, though the evening
meal bubbled and fumed over the fires in the narrow avenue between the
tents.  Kenkenes passed by on the outskirts of the encampment and went
on.

Deep shadow lay on the stone-pits when Kenkenes reached the mouth of
the gorge, and a cool wind from the Nile swept across the grain.  The
day's work had been prolonged in the lowering of a huge slab from its
position in its native bed.  The monolith was already on the brink of
the wooden incline, and every man was at the windlasses by which the
cables controlling its descent were paid out.  Kenkenes saw at a glance
that none of the water-bearers was present, and he knew the lovely
Israelite was with them.  He did not pause.

Before the sound of the quarry stir had been left behind he heard a
sharp report, the frightened shrieks of women and shouts of warning.
He looked back in time to see the huge stone turn part way round on the
chute and rush, end first, earthward.  Expectant silence fell, broken
only by the vicious snarl of a flying windlass crank.  But in an
instant the great slab struck the earth with a thunderous sound that
reverberated again and again from the barren hills about.  A vast
all-enveloping cloud of dust and earth filled the hollow quarry like
smoke from an explosion.  But there was no further outcry, and through
the outskirts of the lifting cloud men were seen making deliberate
preparations to repair the parted cable.  Assured that no calamity had
occurred, Kenkenes went on.

In a few steps he met the children water-bearers flying to the scene of
the accident.  Not one of them bore a water-skin.  The excited young
Hebrews did not stop to question the sculptor, but ran on, and were
swallowed up in dust.

Half-way to the Nile he came upon her whom he sought.  She was standing
alone in the midst of ten sheepskins, and the grain was wetted with the
spilled water.  He pointed to the discarded hides about her.

"The camp will go thirsty if the runaways do not return," he said.
"Thy burden is too heavy for even me to-night."

"They will return," she answered.

"Aye, it was naught but a parting cable and a falling rock.  I was near
and saw no evidence of disaster.  Had the children asked me, I should
have told them as much."

"They will return," she repeated, and Kenkenes fancied that there was a
dismissal in this quiet repetition.  But he did not mean to see it.  He
went on, with a smile.

"I am glad they did not stop, for I wanted to see thee, with that
frightened longing of a man who hath resolved on confession and meeteth
his confessor on a sudden.  Now that the moment hath arrived I marvel
how I shall make my peace with Athor, whose command I most deliberately
broke."

She raised her beautiful eyes to his face and waited for him to
proceed.  The pose of the head was exactly what he wanted.  Rapidly he
compared every detail of her face with his memory of the statue of
Athor, noting with satisfaction that his studies had been happily
faithful.  His scrutiny was so swift and skilful that there seemed to
be nothing unusual in his gaze.

"I am culpable but impenitent," he continued.  "I shall not forswear
mine offense.  Neither is there any need of a plea to justify myself,
for my very sin is its own justification.  Behold me!  I perched myself
like a sacred hawk at the mouth of the valley and filched thy likeness.
Do with me as thou wilt, but I shall die reiterating approval of my
deed."

His extravagant speech wrought an interesting change on the face before
him.  There was a pronounced curve of her mouth, a slight tension in
the chiseled nostril--in fact, an indefinable disdain that had not been
there before.  It would become Athor well.  Kenkenes understood the
look but he did not flinch.  Instead he let his head drop slowly until
he looked at her from under his brows.  Then he summoned into his eyes
all the wounded feeling, pathos, soft reproach and appeal, of which his
graceless young heart was capable, and gazed at her.

Khufu might have been as easily melted by the twinkle of a rain drop.
Never in his life had he faced such comprehensive contemplation.  Calm,
monumental and icy disdain deepened on every feature.

Kenkenes stood motionless and suffered her to look at him.  Being a man
of fine soul, the eloquent gaze spoke well-deserved rebuke.  He knew
that his color had risen, and his eyes fell in spite of heroic efforts
to keep them steady.  His sensations were unique; never had he
experienced the like.  When he recovered himself her blue eyes were
fixed absently on the distant quarries.

Every impulse urged him to set himself right in the eyes of this most
discerning slave.

"Wilt thou forgive me?" he asked earnestly.  "I would I could make thee
know I crave thy good will."

There was no mistaking the honesty in these words.

Her face relaxed instantly.

"But I fear I have not set about it wisely," he added.  "Let me give
thee a peace-offering to prove my contrition."

He slipped from about his neck the collar of golden rings and moved
forward to put it about her throat.

She drew back, her face flushing hotly under an expression of positive
pain.

Kenkenes dropped his hands to his sides with a limpness highly
suggestive of desperate perplexity.  Was not this a slave?  And yet
here was the fine feeling of a princess.  He stood, for once in his
life, at a loss what to do.  He could not depart without the greatest
awkwardness, and yet, if he lingered, he sacrificed his comfort.
Presently he exclaimed helplessly:

"Rachel, do thou tell me what to say or do.  It seems that I but sink
myself the deeper in the quicksand of thy disapproval at every struggle
to escape.  Do thou lead me out."

He had met a slave, justed with an equal and flung up his hands in
surrender to his better.  He did not confess this to himself, but his
words were admission enough.  Never would his high-born spirit have
permitted him to make such a declaration to one slavish in soul.

The straightforward acknowledgment of defeat and the genuine concern in
his voice were irresistible.  She answered him at once, distantly and
calmly.

"Thou, as an Egyptian, hast honored me, a Hebrew, with thy notice.  I
have deserved neither gift nor fee."

"Nay, but let us put it differently," he replied.  "I, as a man, have
given thee, a maiden, offense, and having repented, would appease thee
with a peace-offering.  Believe me, I do not jest.  By the gentle
goddesses, I fear to speak," he added breathlessly.

The Israelite's blue eyes were veiled quickly, but the Egyptian guessed
aright that she had hidden a smile in them.

"Am I forgiven?" he persisted.

"So thou wilt offend no further," she said without raising her eyes.

"I promise.  And now, since the goddess hath refused mine offering, I
may not take it back.  What shall I do with this?" he asked, holding up
the collar of gold.

"Put it about thy statue's neck," she said softly.

Kenkenes gasped and retreated a step.  Instantly she was imploring his
pardon.

"It was a forward spirit in me that made me say it.  I pray thee,
forgive me."

"Thou hast given no offense, but how dost thou know of this--tell me
that."

"I came upon it by accident three days ago.  Several of the children
had gone fowling for the taskmaster's meal, and were so long absent
that I was sent to look for them.  The path down the valley is old, and
I have followed it with the idea of labor ever in my mind.  And this
was a moment of freedom, so I thought to spend it where I had not been
a slave, I went across the hills, and, being unfamiliar with them, lost
my way.  When I climbed upon one of the great rocks to overlook the
labyrinth, lo! at my feet was the statue.  I knew myself the moment I
looked, and it was not hard to guess whose work it was."

She paused and looked at him with appeal on her face.

"Thou hast told no one?"

"Nay," was the quick and earnest answer.

"Thou hast caught me in a falsehood," he said.  The statement was
almost brutal in its directness.

But the question that came back swiftly was not less pointed.

"There was no frieze of bondmaidens--naught of anything thou hast told
me?"

"Nay, not anything.  I am carving a statue against the canons of the
sculptor's ritual for the sake of my love of beauty.  Until thou didst
come upon it, I alone possessed the secret.  Thou knowest the
punishment which will overtake me?"

"Aye, I know right well.  Yet fear not.  The statue is right cunningly
concealed and none will ever find it, for the children were
unsuccessful and the meals for the overseer will be brought him from
the city hereafter.  And I will not betray thee--I give thee my word."

Her tone was soft and earnest; her assurances were spoken so
confidently, her interest was so genuine, that a queer and
unaccountable satisfaction possessed the young artist at once.

At this moment the runaway water-bearers came in sight and in obedience
to very evident dismissal in the Israelite's eyes, Kenkenes bade her
farewell and left her.

But he had not gone two paces before she overtook him.

"Approach thy work from various directions," she cautioned, "else thou
wilt wear a path which may spy on thee one day."

The moment the words passed her lips, Kenkenes, who still held the
collar, put it about her neck, passing his hands under the thick
plaits, and snapped the clasp accurately.

The act was done instantly, and with but a single movement.  He was
gone, laughing on his way, before she had realized what he had done.

There was revel in the young man's veins that evening, but the great
house of his father was silent and lonely.  If he would find a
companion he must leave its heavy walls.  His resolution was not long
in making nor his instinct slow in directing him.  An hour after the
evening meal, when he entered the chariot that waited, he had laid
aside the simple tunic, and in festal attire was, every inch of his
many inches, the son of the king's favorite artist.  His charioteer
drove in the direction of the nomarch's house.

The portress conducted him into the faintly lighted chamber of guests
and went forth silently.  Kenkenes interpreted her behavior at once.

"There is another guest," he thought with a smile, "and I can name him
as promptly as any chanting sorcerer might."  When the serving woman
returned she bade him follow her and led the way to the house-top.

There, under the subdued light of a single lamp, was the Lady Ta-meri;
at her feet, Nechutes.

"I should wear the symbol-broidered robe of a soothsayer," the sculptor
told himself.

"You made a longer sojourn of your visit to Tape than you had
intended," the lady said, after the greetings.

"Nay, I have been in Memphis twenty days at least."

"So?" queried Nechutes.  "Where dost thou keep thyself?"

"In the garb of labor among the ink-pots and papyri of the sculptor
class," the lady answered.  "I warrant there are pigment marks on his
fingers even now."

Kenkenes extended his long right hand to her for inspection.  She
received it across her pink palm and scrutinized it laughingly.

"Nay, I take it back.  Here is naught but henna and a suspicion of
attar.  He has been idle these days."

"Hast thou forgotten the efficacy of the lemon in the removal of
stains?" the sculptor asked with a smile.

The lady frowned.

"Give us thy news from Tape, then," she demanded, putting his hand away.

"The court is coming to Memphis sooner.  That is all.  O, aye, I had
well-nigh forgot.  There is also talk of a marriage between Rameses and
Ta-user."

"Fie!" the lady scoffed.  "Nechutes hath more to tell than that, and he
hath stayed in Memphis."

"Thou wilt come to realize some day, Ta-meri, that I am fitted to the
yoke of labor, when I fail thee in all the nicer walks thou wouldst
have me tread.  Come, out with thy gossip, Nechutes."

"I had a letter from Hotep to-day--a budget of news, included with
official matters with which the king would acquaint me.  Ta-user, with
Amon-meses and Siptah, hath joined the court at Tape--"

"And Siptah, she brought with her--" the sculptor interrupted softly.

Nechutes cast an expressive look at Kenkenes and went on.

"And the courting hath begun."

Silence fell, and the lady looked at the two young men with wonder in
her eyes.

"Nay, but that is interesting," Kenkenes admitted, recovering himself.
"Tell me more."

"The offices of cup-bearer and murket are to be bestowed in Memphis,"
Nechutes continued.

"And the one falls to Nechutes," the lady declared triumphantly.

"Of a truth thou hast a downy lot before thee, Nechutes," the young
sculptor said heartily.  "And never one so deserving of it.  I give
thee joy."

"And the other goes to the noble Mentu," Nechutes added in a meek voice.

"Sphinx!" Ta-meri cried, tapping him on the head.  "You did not tell me
that."

The surprised delight of Kenkenes was not so bewildering as to blind
him to the reason why Nechutes had withheld this news from Ta-meri.
The blunt Egyptian was not anxious to speed his rival's cause.

"Does my father know of this?" he asked.

"I doubt not.  The same messenger that brought me news of mine own
appointment departed for On when he learned that Mentu was there."

"Nay, but that will be wine in his veins," Kenkenes mused happily.  "It
will make him young again.  His late inactivity hath chafed him sorely."

"You have come honestly by your labor-loving," Nechutes commented.
"Hotep adds further that Mentu is the only one of the king's new
ministers that is no longer a young man."

"It is Rameses who counsels him, I doubt not," the sculptor replied.
"He hath great faith in the powers of youth.  And behold what a cabinet
he hath built up for his father.  First," Kenkenes continued,
enumerating on his fingers, "there is Nechutes--"

The new cup-bearer waved his hand, and Kenkenes went on.

"There is my father, the murket.  He needs no further praise than the
utterance of his name.  There is Hotep, on whose lips Toth abideth.
There is Seneferu, the faithful, whom the Rebu dreads.  Next is
Kephren, the mohar,[1] who would outshine his father, the right hand of
the great Rameses, had he but nations to conquer.  After him, Har-hat--"

"Hold!  He is not appointed of the prince.  He was Meneptah's
choice--and his alone," Nechutes interrupted.  "It is rumored that
Rameses is not over-fond of him."

"He will be put to it to hold his high place in the face of the
prince's disfavor," Kenkenes cogitated.

"Nay, but he presses the prince hard for generalship.  It must be so,
since he could win the king's good will over the protest of Rameses.
So I doubt not he can hold his own at court by prudence and strategy."

Meanwhile Ta-meri, in the depths of her chair, gazed at the pair
resentfully.  They had grown interested in weighty things and had
seemingly forgotten her.  So she sighed and bethought her how to punish
them.

"What a relief it will be when the Pharaoh returns to Memphis!" she
murmured in the pause that now followed.  "He will be more welcome to
me than the Nile overflow.  The city has been a desert to me since he
departed."

Nechutes looked at her with reproach in his eyes.

"Consider the desert, O sweet Oasis," Kenkenes said softly.  "Is not
its portion truly grievous if its single palm complain?"

The lady dropped her eyes and her cheeks glowed even through the dusk.
After the long interval of Nechutes' blunt love-making the sculptor's
subtleties fell most gratefully on her ear.

Nechutes scowled, sighed and finally spoke.

"Tape is afflicted in anticipation of the king's departure," he
observed disjointedly.

"Tape does not love Meneptah as Memphis loves him," Kenkenes answered.
"Hast thou not this moment heard Memphis pine for him?  Tape would not
have spoken thus.  She would have said: 'Would that the king were here
that I might ask a boon of him.'  Memphis is the cradle of kings; Tape,
their tomb.  Memphis is full of reverence for the Pharaohs; Tape, of
pride; Memphis of loyalty; Tape, of boon-craving.  Meneptah returns to
the bosom of his mother when he returns to Memphis."

"But he will not remain here long," Nechutes went on.  "He goes to
Tanis to be near the scene of the Israelitish unrest."

"Alas, Ta-meri, and wilt thou droop again?" Kenkenes asked.

"I fear," she assented with a little sigh.  Then, after a pause, she
asked: "Does the murket follow the court?"

Kenkenes shook his head.  "Not when the Pharaoh travels.  But should he
depart permanently from Memphis my father would go.  Many of the court
returning hither will not proceed to Tanis.  The city will not be so
desolate then as now."

"Nay, but I am glad," she said.  "Those who remain will suffice."

"Of a truth?" Nechutes demanded angrily.

"Have I not said?" she replied.

Nechutes rose slowly and made his way to a chair some distance away
from her.  Kenkenes immediately guessed why the cup-bearer was hurt,
but the lady was innocent.  He knew that he had but to speak to restore
Nechutes to favor.

Meanwhile the lady, amazed and deeply offended at the desertion of the
cup-bearer, had turned her back on him.  Kenkenes arose.

Ta-meri sat up in alarm.

"O, do not go.  You have but this moment come," she said.

"Already have I stayed too long," he replied.  "But thy hospitality
makes one forget the debt one owes to a prior guest."

She looked at him from under silken lashes.

"Nechutes has misconducted himself," she objected, "and I would not be
left alone with him."

"Wouldst thou have me stay and see him restored to favor under my very
eyes?  Ah, Ta-meri, where is thy womanly compassion?"

She smiled and extended her hand.  Kenkenes took it and felt it relax
and lie willingly in his palm.

"Nay, do not go," she pleaded softly.

"Give me leave to come again instead."

"To-morrow," she said, half questioning, half commanding.  He did not
promise, but as he bent over to kiss her hand, he said in a low tone:

"Hast thou forgotten that Nechutes leaves Memphis with the going of the
king?"

The lady started and flung a conscience-stricken glance at the scowling
cup-bearer.  And while her face was turned, Kenkenes departed like a
shadow.  But the portals of the nomarch's house had hardly closed
behind him before he demanded of himself, impatiently, why he had made
Nechutes' peace, why he kept the cup-bearer for ever between himself
and Ta-meri.  And as if to evade this catechism something arose in him
and asked him why he should not.

And to this he could give no answer.



[1] Mohar--The king's pioneer, an office that might be defined as
minister of war.




CHAPTER X

THE DEBT OF ISRAEL

For an instant after the sculptor had put the collar about her throat,
Rachel stood motionless, her face flushing and whitening with
conflicting emotions.

But her indecision was only momentary.  Rebellion was in the ascendant.

She thrust her fingers under the band and essayed to wrench off the
offending necklace, but the stout fastening held and the flexible braid
printed its woof on the back of the soft neck.  Almost in tears she
undid the clasp and flung the collar away.

It struck the earth with a musical ring, and the green of the wheat hid
all but a faint ray of the red metal.

The rout of children descended on her, each clamoring a story of the
accident.  But without a word she marshaled them and turned once again
toward the river to refill the hides.  At the water's edge she kept her
eyes resolutely from the broad dimpling breast of the Nile toward the
south.  She feared that she might see the light bari that was driving
back to Memphis against that slow but mighty current as easily as if
wind and water went with it.

But even before she turned again toward Masaarah, her better nature
began to chide her.  She remembered her impetuous act with a flush of
shame.

"His peace-offering--a proof of his good will, and thou didst mistreat
it, as if he had meant it for a purchase or a fee.  The indignity thou
hast petulantly fancied, Rachel."

After a time another thought came to her.

"The act was not womanly.  Wherein hast thou rebuked him, in casting
away the trinket?  Thou hast the dignity of Israel to uphold in thy
dealings with this young man."

When she reached the spot where the collar had fallen, she sought for
it furtively, and having found it, thrust it into the bosom of her
dress.

"I shall not keep it," she said, quieting the protests of her pride.
"I shall make him take it back to-morrow."

Entering her low shelter in the camp some time later, she found Deborah
absent.  Impelled by an unreasoning desire to keep secret this event,
she hastily hid the collar in the sand of the tent floor and laid the
straw matting of her bed smoothly over its burial place.  Again she
struggled with her pride and demanded of herself why she had become
secretive.

"Fie!" she replied.  "How couldst thou tell this story to Deborah?
Why, it is well-nigh unbecoming."

The dusk settled down over the valley.  Deborah came in like a phantom
from the camp-fires with the evening meal, and the pair sat down
together to eat, Rachel silent, Deborah thoughtful.

"Another Egyptian comes to govern Masaarah," the old woman observed.
"Agistas departed but now, leaving the camp in charge of the
under-drivers."

"It makes little odds with us--this change of taskmasters, Deborah--be
he Agistas or any other Egyptian.  They are masters and we continue to
be slaves," Rachel answered after a little silence.

"Nay, art thou losing spirit?" Deborah asked with animation.  "How
shall the elders keep of good heart if the young surrender?"

"I despair not," the girl protested.  "I did but remark this 

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