PART I

[Illustration: Part I]

AKHNATON, KING OF EGYPT

I

Tutankhamon-Tutankhaton, the envoy of Akhnaton, the king of Egypt, brought him a marvellous gift from the island of Crete--Dio, the dancer, the pearl of the Kingdom of the Seas.

He boasted that he had saved her from death: but it was not he who saved her. When she killed the god-Bull in the Knossos arena to avenge her friend Eoia who had been sacrificed to the Beast, she was sentenced to be burned at the stake. But Tammuzadad, a Babylonian who loved Dio, went to the stake in her place and Tutankhaton merely hid her in his ship and brought her to Egypt.

Before bringing Dio to the king in the new capital, Akhetaton, the City of the Sun, he settled her near Thebes, or Nut-Amon, in the country house of his distant relative Khnumhotep, formerly the chief superintendent of the granaries of Amon's temple.

Khnumhotep's estate was enclosed by high brick walls that formed an oblong quadrangle making it look like a fortress. Within it were granaries, cattle-yards, wine-presses, hay-lofts, barns and other buildings, vineyards and gardens divided into regular squares: kitchen garden, orchard, flower garden, woods of pine and other trees and a palm plantation with three ponds, one large and two small ones. Two high three-storied houses, a brick one for winter and a wooden one with a brick bottom storey for the summer, stood facing each other on opposite sides of the big pond.

Dio spent a couple of months in this quiet country place resting from all that had happened to her in Crete and learning Egyptian dances.

One afternoon, in the middle of winter, she was lying on carpets and cushions on the flat roof of the summer house, in a light trellised shelter supported by a row of cedar pillars, carved, gilded and brightly painted. She was looking at the sun in the dark, almost black-blue sky, so abysmally clear that it seemed there never had been, nor ever could be, a cloud in it. The sun of southern winter--of winter's summer--bright but not dazzling, warm but not scorching, was like the smile of a child asleep. Half closing her eyes, she looked straight at it and the light broke into a diamond rainbow like a tear on the eyelashes.

"Ra the Sun, the Sun Ra--no better name than Ra could be invented for the sun: Ra cleaves the darkness with a sword," thought Dio.

The winter swallows cleaved the radiant darkness of the blue with the sword of their whirring flight: they sang to the sun, crying and shrilling with joy: 'Ra'!

Everything was good and joyous. There was goodness and joy in the air, pure and dry as nowhere else in the world, giving long life to the living and making the dead incorruptible, air so divinely light that one breathing it for the first time felt as though a stone which had lain on his breast all his life had suddenly been lifted and he understood for the first time what a joy it was to breathe.

Close by stood a monstrous tree, covered with thorns and prickles, with dull leaden-coloured thick joints that seemed full of poison, and a huge blood-red flower like the open mouth of a snake. But the tree, too, was good: the fragrant flowers breathed of the sweetness of paradise--the joy of Ra.

Beyond the talc-like streak of the shallow, wintry Nile the hills of Amenti, the Eternal West, yellow as lion's hair and honeycombed with innumerable tombs, lay drowsy in the rosy haze of sunshine. But even death here was good: the souls of the departed, like bees, collect the honey of death--the eternal life.

"And perhaps on our Mount Ida the wind is howling, the pines creak and the snow is falling in big flakes," thought Dio, and the blue sky seemed to her still more blue, the bright sun still brighter; she wanted to weep with joy and to kiss the sky, the sun, the earth, like the faces of loved ones after a long parting.

She was smiling at the familiar feeling: it was not for nothing that she had felt the touch of death as she lay on the pyre, a victim ready to be slain. It was as though she had died then, and now another life, a life after death had begun: a different sky, a different sun, a different earth--alien? oh no, more like home than her own native land.

"Sick with sorrow I lie on my bed Wise physicians are trying to heal me. My loved one comes to my bedside, My sister--she mocks the physicians. Well does she know what ails me."

sang in an undertone a man of thirty, with a face fine as a woman's and large sad eyes like the eyes of a sick child; his head was shaven like that of a priest and he was wearing a white linen robe and a leopard's skin thrown over his shoulder. This was Pentaur, a former priest of Amon and the master of the temple dancers, who was teaching Dio Egyptian dances.

Kneeling down, he lightly touched with the tips of his fingers the crossed strings of a tall Amon's harp that stood on a hollow resounding box, adorned with two rainbow-coloured sun discs and a four-horned head of the god Ram.

The dulcet notes of the harpstrings accompanied the voice of the singer. He finished one song and began another:

"Each time that the door In my sister's house opens My sister is displeased. I wish I were her doorkeeper, She would then be displeased with me. Each time that I heard her voice, Frightened as a child I should be."

"Is that all?" Dio asked with a smile.

"That's all," said Pentaur, flushing slightly as though ashamed of his song being too short. He flushed often and easily like a little boy; it was strange and almost absurd in a man of thirty, but Dio liked it.

"Frightened as a child I should be," she repeated, this time without a smile. "Yes, hardly anything is said and yet all is said. With you in Egypt love is wordless, just as the sky is cloudless...."

"No, we have longer songs, too, but I don't like them so well; the short ones are better."

He struck the strings and sang:

"I long for you more Than a starving man longs for bread, Than a sick one longs for health, Than a woman in travail for the baby's cry."

The strings sobbed passionately, almost brutally, as men sob with hunger, thirst, or pain. And all of a sudden came a subtle, cunning tune:

"I love truth, of flattery I scorn to think I would rather see you than eat and drink."

"Love compared to eating and drinking," she said in surprise and she pondered. "How coarse--coarse and tender at the same time! But of course that is the very subtlest flattery."

"Why flattery?"

"Why? Ah, my dear brother, that is just what is so bitter in life, that without bread and water men die, but without love they live."

"No, they die, too," he said quietly, and was going to add something, but merely gazed at her in silence and his eyes looked sadder than ever. He blushed and hastened to change the subject.

"I must send the pleater to you: the feathers don't lie properly."

He put out his hand to straighten the tiny pleats--'feathers'--on her sleeve. Dio took his hand; he tried to draw it away, but she kept it in hers almost by force, roughly and tenderly at the same time, looking into his eyes with a smile. He turned away and this time, instead of turning red, he turned slightly pale under his bronze-coloured skin, frightened as a child.

This happened at every meeting: her charm, always new, seemed to him a miracle. Oh, this body, much too slender, the narrow hips, the angular movements, the rebellious curls of bluish-black hair cut much too short, the colour in the cheeks, dark-skinned like a boy's and girlishly tender, the colour of the rosy almond blossom in the gathering dusk, and the darkish down on the upper lip--an absurd little moustache! A girl who was like a boy. This was always so; but it was new that all of a sudden the girl did not want to be a boy.

She let his hand go, blushed and spoke of something different.

"It is not the pleater's fault, it is simply that I do not know how to wear these clothes--one can see at once I am not an Egyptian."

"Yes, but it is not the dress--it's your face and hair."

Dio did not wear a wig or plait her hair in small tight plaits as was the custom in Egypt.

"And Tuta ... Tutankhaton says that the bell suits me better."

"The bell" was the Cretan women's skirt, widening towards the hem.

"Oh, no! In our dress you are still more..." he broke off; he wanted to say 'still more like a sister' and dared not: in Egyptian 'sister' also meant 'beloved.'

"Still more beautiful," he added with cold politeness. They were not speaking their thoughts; both were thinking of what was important and speaking of trifles, as often happens when one is already in love and the other does not yet know her mind.

Dio remembered the vow of the virgin priestesses of the Mount Dicte goddess:

"I would rather choose the halter Than the hateful marriage bed."

A man's love was still as hateful to her as the hot sun to the flowers under water. But it was the same with love as with everything else: she had died and another life had begun, another love--love through death, like sunlight through water, having no terrors for the flowers in the depths; or like this winter sun--the smile of a child asleep.

"When are you going?" he asked about the most important thing as though it were a trifle.

"I don't know. Tuta hurries me, but I am quite happy here." She looked at him with a smile and again the boy disappeared and only the girl remained.

"I am happy with you," she added so low that he need not have heard.

"You will go away and we shall never meet again," he said, looking down as though he had not heard.

"My timid, absurd little boy--the winter's sun!" she thought with gay tenderness and said:

"Why never? Akhetaton is not far from Thebes."

"No, _his_ city is the other world for us."

_His_--King Akhnaton's, she understood.

"And you don't want to go to the next world--not even with me?" she asked, with provocative slyness.

"Why do you talk like this, Dio? You know I cannot..."

He broke off, but she understood again: "I cannot relinquish the faith of my forefathers; step over my father's blood." She knew that his father, an old priest of Amon, was killed in a popular rising against the new god Aton.

Tears trembled in his voice when he said 'I cannot,' but he controlled himself and said calmly.

"Do not go out to-day."

"Why?"

He answered after a pause:

"Maybe there will be a riot."

"Come, come, riot in a country like yours!" she laughed. "You Egyptians are the most peaceable people on earth!"

She looked at him as though he were a little boy and said: "And you, too, will go rioting?"

"Yes, I will," he spoke as calmly as before, but there was a light in his eyes that made her think once more of his father's having been killed in a riot.

"No, don't go, dear!" she begged with sudden anxiety.

He made no answer and began singing again in a low voice, lightly touching the strings.

"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh, Death is now to me like healing, Death is now to me like refreshing rain, Death is now to me like a home to an exile,"

"Aïe-aïe-aïe! What is it?" cried a little girl who was sleeping in the shelter.

A little tame monkey was sitting at the top of the tree eating yellow pods. It threw the skins into the shelter trying to hit the little girl or the tame gazelle asleep at her feet. It missed its aim every time. At last, hanging on to a branch with one paw, it threw with another a handful of skins, hitting the gazelle. The animal jumped up, and bleating ran to the girl and licked her face.

The girl jumped up, too, and shouted in a fright.

"Aïe-aïe-aïe! What is it?"

She was about thirteen years old. Her brown bronze-coloured body, slender and supple like a snake, showed through the transparent web of her dress 'the woven air.' She was a strange mixture of woman and child; the rosy-bronzed nipples of her breasts, firm and round like a grown girl's, lifted the linen as though they would pierce it, but there was something childishly mischievous in the eyes and childishly piteous in the thick, pouting lips. Her face--ugly, charming and dangerous like a serpent's head--seemed tiny under the mass of dull-black fluffy hair, powdered with blue.

Miruit was one of Pentaur's best pupils; he was training Dio to imitate her. She threw back her arms, stretched and yawned sweetly, still failing to understand what had happened. Suddenly a handful of pods fell at her feet. She looked up and understood.

"Ah, you bare-back devil!" she cried, and seizing an earthenware jug from which she had drunk pomegranate wine at dinner--that was why she had slept so soundly--threw it at the monkey.

The animal hissed maliciously and, snapping its teeth, jumped on to another palm tree and hid itself; only a dry rustle among the leaves betrayed its presence.

"It is too bad! As soon as I begin dreaming of something nice they are sure to wake me!" Miruit grumbled.

"And what were you dreaming of?" asked Dio.

"Oh, all sorts of things. Too good to tell." Suddenly she came up to Dio, bent down and whispered in her ear:

"It was about you. I dreamt that you ... No, I can't say it before him; he will hear and pull my ears."

"I will do it anyhow, you fidget! Do you imagine I don't know where you go gadding every day?"

"Oh, thank you for reminding me. I am late! My merchant must be waiting for me and raging, and he had promised me a necklace for to-day. Mine is so shabby that I am simply ashamed to wear it."

"You nasty hussy!" Pentaur shouted at her with sudden anger. "Mixing yourself up with an unclean dog, an uncircumcised!"

"He may be an unclean dog, but he is rich and he feeds me and there is no making broth with your holiness!" the girl answered back insolently, imitating old market women. "It is four months since we have had any flour or grain or beer or oil, it's no joke! We've tightened our belts on the hunger rations, we've got as thin as locusts on the Salty Lakes. A well-fed devil is stronger than a hungry god; other people's Baal may be of avail and our own Ram is meek but not sleek!"

"Ah, you wretch! Do you want to be thrown into the pit?"

"Into the pit? No, sir, that's more than you can do! Times have changed, you can't throw innocent people into the pit nowadays. If you try to lay hands on me I'll run away and you won't catch me! I am a free bird--wherever there is food, there is my home."

"Oh, birds of Araby, Oh, myrrh anointed!"

she sang, turning the tambourine above her head as she ran towards the staircase. The gazelle followed her like a dog.

At the top of the stairs she ran into Zenra, Dio's old nurse, and nearly knocked her down.

"Plague take you, you giddy goat!" swore the old woman and going up to Dio handed her a letter. Dio opened it and read:

I am going to-morrow. If you want to go with me, make ready. I must see you to-day before sunset. I will wait for you at the White House. I will send a boat for you. May Aton keep you. Your faithful friend,

Tutankhaton.

"The messenger is waiting, what shall I tell him?" Zenra asked.

"Tell him I will come."

When Zenra had gone, Dio looked at Pentaur. Like all the priestesses of the Great Mother she was skilled in the art of healing; she had seen people die and remembered the fateful sign--the seal of death--which sometimes appears in a face when the end is near.

She suddenly fancied she saw that sign in Pentaur's face. 'He is young, healthy, there is no danger in sight. Riot? No, it is nonsense,' she thought, and as she looked at him more intently the sign disappeared.

"Are you going?" he asked quietly, but so firmly that she understood she must not deceive him.

"Tuta is going to-morrow and I do not know yet. Maybe I will not go...."

"Yes, you will. You wanted to go as soon as possible, you know."

"I did and now, all of a sudden, I am afraid."

"What of?"

"I don't know. I was not burned at the stake then, and now--it is like going from one fire to another.... You remember what you told me about the king...."

"Don't, Dio. What is the good? You will go anyway."

"No, you must tell me. Taur, my dear brother, if you love me, tell me all you know about him. I want to know all."

She took his hand and he did not draw it away this time.

"You will go anyway, you will go!" he repeated sadly. "You love him, that is why you are afraid; you know you will not escape; you fly like a moth to the flame. You were not burned in that other flame, but you will be in this...."

He paused, and then asked her:

"Will you go to see Ptamose?"

"Certainly, I will not leave without seeing him."

"Do see him. He knows everything--he will tell you better than I can."

Ptamose, the high-priest of Amon and King Akhnaton's bitterest enemy, had long asked Dio to come to him, but she had not done so yet and only now, before going away, decided to see him.

"Ptamose is nothing to me," she went on. "I want to know from you. You had loved him once, why do you hate him now?"

"It is not him I hate. Do you know, Dio, I sometimes fancy..."

He looked at her with the smile of a frightened child looking at a grown-up person.

"Well, tell me, don't be afraid, I understand!"

"I sometimes fancy that he is not quite human...."

"Not quite human?" she repeated in surprise: there was something knowing, something clairvoyant in his face and voice.

"There are dolls like that," he went on, with the same smile. "If you pull a string, they dance. That's what he is like, he does not do anything of himself, but somebody does it for him. Don't you understand? Perhaps you will when you see him."

"Have you seen much of him?"

"Yes. We were pupils of the Heliopolis priests together--he, Merira, who is now the high priest of Aton, and myself. I was thirteen then and the prince fourteen. He was very handsome, and gentle, very gentle, like the god whose name is Quiet Heart."

"Osiris?"

"Yes. I loved him as my own soul. He often went to the desert to pray or, perhaps, simply to be alone. One day he went--and disappeared. We looked and looked for him, and thought he was lost altogether. At last he was found among the shepherds in the fields of Rostia where the Pyramids are and the Sphinx--the ancient god of the sun, Aton. He was lying on the sand like one dead, probably after an epileptic fit--it was then he began having fits. And when they brought him to the town I did not know him; it was he, and not he, his double, a changeling--as I have said just now, he was not quite human. Perhaps it was there in the desert that _he_ entered into him...."

"Whom do you mean?"

"The spirit of the desert, Set."

"The Devil?"

"You call him the devil and we--another god. Well, that was the beginning of it all."

"Wait a minute," she interrupted. "You say Aton is an ancient god?"

"Yes, more ancient than Amon."

"And you worship him?"

"Yes, just as we worship all the gods: all the gods are members of the One."

"Then what is your quarrel about?"

"Why, did you think it was about this? Come, we are not such fools as not to know that Amon and Aton are one and the same god. The visible face of the Sun is Aton, its hidden face is Amon, but there is only one Sun, only one God. No, the dispute is not between Aton and Amon, but between Set and Osiris. Set has killed and dismembered Osiris and he wants to kill and dismember the holy land of Osiris, Egypt. This is why he has entered the king.... You are not listening, Dio."

"Yes, I am. But you keep telling me by whom the king is possessed and I want to know what he himself is. Simply wicked?"

"No, not wicked. It is just like the devil's cunning to possess a saint and not a man of evil. The country is perishing in a fratricidal war, the fields are empty, the granaries plundered, the people's skin is black with parching hunger, the mothers cook their own children for food--and it is all his doing, the saint's. And he has done more: he has killed God. 'There is no Son,' he said. 'I am the Son.'"

"Never, never has he said that!" cried Dio, and there was such a fire in her eyes as though she, too, were possessed by Set. "'There has been no Son, but there will be'--this is what he said. Has been or will be--the whole question is in that."

"Cursed is he who says there has been no Son, said Pentaur, turning pale.

"Cursed is he who says there will be no Son," said Dio, turning pale also.

Both were silent--they understood that they had cursed each other.

He buried his face in his hands. She went up to him and, without speaking, kissed him on the head, as a mother kisses a sick child. She looked into his face and it suddenly seemed to her again that there was the seal of death upon it:

Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh, Death is now to me like healing, Death is now to me like refreshing rain, Death is now to me like a home to an exile!

II

Khnumhotep was an honest and god-fearing man.

He welcomed Dio in his house as though she had been a member of his own family, not because she was under the patronage of Tutankhaton, who had power and influence at court, but because exiles were under the protection of the immortal gods. While he was the chief superintendent of Amon's granaries he might have taken bribes like everyone else; but he did not. When Amon's sanctuary was closed and Khnumhotep lost his post, he might have received another and a better one, had he been false to the faith of his fathers; but he remained true to it. At the time of famine he might have sold at an exorbitant price the corn from his estates in the Lake country, Miuer, which had not suffered from drought, but he sold it cheaper than usual and gave away one granary-full to the starving.

He lived in this way because he remembered the wisdom of his fathers: "a man lives after death and all his works with him"; he remembered the scales with the heart of the dead man upon one of them, and the lightest feather of the goddess Maat, Truth, upon the other,--the sharp eye of the god Tot, the Measurer, watching the pointer of the scales.

In his youth he doubted whether the short day of life was not worth more than the dark eternity and whether those who said "a man dying is like a bubble bursting on the water--nothing is left" were not right. But as he grew older he felt more and more clearly--grasped it, as it were, as a hand grasps a wrapped-up object--that there was something beyond the grave, and that since no one knew anything about it for certain, the simplest and wisest thing to do was to believe as his fathers had done.

Khnumhotep, or Khnum, was over sixty, but he did not consider himself old, hoping to live the full measure of man's life--a hundred and ten years.

Some forty years before he began building for himself 'an eternal house,' a tomb in the Hills of the West, Amenti, also according to the ancient commandment 'prepare a fine tomb for thyself and remember it every day of thy life, for thou knowest not the hour of thy death.' For forty years he had been digging in the rock a deep cave with subterranean halls and passages, adorning it like a wedding chamber and collecting in it a dowry for his soul, the bride. He did it all cheerfully according to the saying, 'coffin, thou hast been made for a feast; grave, thou hast been dug for merriment.'

On the afternoon when Dio and Pentaur were talking on the flat roof of Khnum's summer house, Khnum was sitting in a light wooden shelter, supported by four pillars, near the winter house at the other end of the pond. He sat in a carved ebony chair that had a leather cushion and a footstool; his wife Nibituia sat beside him on a small folding chair.

Both were dressed in robes of finely pleated white flaxen material, not too transparent, as became elderly people; hers was narrow and reached to the ankles and his was wider and shorter; their feet were bare. The brick floor of the shelter was covered with mats for warmth and a servant boy was holding in readiness papyrus slippers.

Khnum took the wig off his closely cropped grey hair and hung it on a wooden stand close by; men took off their wigs like caps; but Nibituia's huge black wig, shiny as though it had been lacquered, with two thick twisted cords at the sides, rose above her head, pushing the ears forward and making the old woman's wrinkled face look like a bat's.

Khnum was so tall that his wife, who was short, looked almost a dwarf beside him; straight, spare, bony, he had a face that seemed carved of hard brown wood and had a sullen, angry look; but when he smiled it grew very kind.

On week days Nibituia was busy with housekeeping from morning till night, looking after the weaving, the mat-making, the cooking and the washing, but on holidays, such as that day--the day of Khonsu, the god of the Moon, she gave herself a rest, engaging in a light and at the same time pious occupation. Two little pots and two baskets stood before her on a low round table: out of one of them she took dead beetles, scarabees, butterflies, bees, grasshoppers, ripped them open with a flint knife, and taking with a bone spoon a drop of Arabian gum out of one pot and a drop of Lebanon cedar resin out of another, embalmed the dead creatures; then she wrapped them up in tiny white linen bandages, like real little mummies, and put them into the other basket. She did all this quickly and neatly as a work she was accustomed to do. In the garden there was a sandhill of Amenti--Eternal West--a cemetery for these little mummies.

A middle aged man with a sly and merry face, Inioteph or Ini, was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Khnum; he was a clerk in the Surveying Department, managed Khnum's estates and transacted legal business for him. Bare to his waist, he wore nothing but an apron; there was an inkpot on his belt and a writing reed behind his ear, and in his hand he held a roll of papyrus with the account of sacks of grain which had just been brought down the river in barges from Miuer.

"When was the decree received?" Khnum asked.

"In the night and it must be carried out to-day, that the sun may not set on disobedience to the king," Ini answered.

"Quite, quite, quite," Khnum rapped out like a woodpecker tapping, as was his habit. "They persecuted the Father, they persecuted the Mother, and now it is the turn of the Son!"

The Son was Khonsu--the Osiris of Thebes, born of the Father Amon and the Mother Mut.

"But how is he to be destroyed? He is made of gold," Khnum said.

"They will throw him into the furnace, melt him, make coins out of the gold, buy bread and give it to the starving: eat the god and praise the king!" Inioteph explained.

"Surely this is very wrong? Uhuh have mercy upon us!" Nibituia said with a sigh.

Uhuh was a very ancient god forgotten by everyone; he had no idols, no temples, no sacrifices, no priests--nothing was left of him but a name. People remembered merely that there had been a god Uhuh, but they had long forgotten what he ruled over and what he looked like. And this was the very reason why Nibituia liked him and pitied him and at difficult moments called not upon the great Amon, but upon the obscure Uhuh. "No one prays to him, poor Uhuh, but I will pray and he will have mercy upon me," the old lady used to say.

"And what do the people say?" Khnum asked.

"They haven't much hope of the bread," said Ini, screwing up his eyes with a sly air. "'The king's clerks, Aton's hangers-on, will steal it all,' they say, 'and we shan't get a morsel!' And the priests incite them, of course: stand up for the god, do not allow the holy image to be defiled! And saying such things to the people is like setting fire to straw. You know yourself, my lord, what times these are; I shouldn't wonder if there were a mutiny."

"Quite, quite, quite! Mutiny is a dreadful thing,"

"Nothing could be worse! It is said: 'the earth will tremble, unable to endure that slaves should be masters.' But indeed what is one to expect of slaves when the king himself...."

"Don't presume to speak about the king; you will be food for fish," Khnum restrained him.

That meant: if anyone found fault with the king he would be thrown after death into the river to be eaten by fishes.

"And what is the second decree about?"

"About making burial grounds crown property. They are to be taken from the rich and given to the poor: 'it is time the dead stopped taking food out of the mouths of the living.'"

"Quite, quite, quite," Khnum repeated, and said nothing more, watching Nibituia's little hands move rapidly as she wrapped up the mummy of a grasshopper.

"Uhuh have mercy upon us!" she sighed again and, leaving the grasshopper, looked at her husband with round, frightened eyes. "How can this be, Khnum? What will the dead live by?"

"Keep quiet, old woman, that's beyond you, you mind your beetles!" he grumbled, patting her on the shoulder with a smile, and his face suddenly became very kind and curiously like his wife's face in spite of the difference in their features; they seemed to be brother and sister: happily married couples often develop a likeness in their old age.

"The dead will have enough to live on, don't you fear; we, the living, might fare worse!" he added, gloomily.

He really was not much concerned about the dead. If a decree were issued forbidding people to eat and drink they would go on eating and drinking just as before; the same thing would happen about this decree: the living would not stop feeding the dead, for the very being of Egypt rested upon this, that the living and the dead had the same food, the same drink--the body and blood of Khonsu Osiris, the Son of God.

"I expect we shall have to bribe Aton's spies after all," Inioteph went on.

He did not like Khnum's fearlessness; like all servants who are a little too forward, he had the bad habit of frightening his master in order to gain importance in his eyes.

"They have sniffed out, the dogs, that in your honour's tomb two images of Amon have not been effaced. 'We must inspect it,' they say. And if they discover it, there will be trouble; they will spoil everything and defile the tomb or prosecute you--there will be no end to it!"

"How did they find out?" Khnum asked in surprise.

"Someone must have informed against you."

"Who could it have been? No stranger has seen it."

"It must have been one of your own people, then."

"It is he, he, Yubra, the villain, the snake!" Nibituia cried in alarm. "I told you, Khnum, don't keep that plague in the house, send him to the Red Mountains to break stones or to dig canals in the Delta, so that he may get the ague, the wretch! It is not for nothing he has made friends with Aton's servants. Just think what he has done! It is dreadful to think of--raising his hand against the holy Ushebti, the godless creature! And you spare him...."

"I have thrown him into the pit, what more do you want?"

"What does the snake care about the pit? He likes being there better than working. I know, Khnum, you gave orders for him to have two loaves of bread and a pot of beer a day, though you tried to hide it from me. He is eating his fill, the swine, growing fat and laughing at you for all your kindness! He sleeps all day or sings hymns to his unclean god, fie upon him!"

"Whatever is the matter with you, little beetle?" said Khnum, looking at her in surprise.

They exchanged a deep look and he turned away from her, frowning sternly. Nibituia got up and bowed low to her husband:

"Forgive your servant, my lord, if I have said anything wrong in my foolishness. You know better. But I am uneasy--" she could not resist looking at him significantly once more, "I am very uneasy about you, Khnum! You are fond of him, you spoil him, and he is sharpening a knife against you, nursing malice in return for all your kindness--and such malice is worse than any other."

Ini was smiling to himself: he had gained his object and alarmed his masters, though he himself did not know how he had done it. Yubra was not of sufficient consequence for them to be alarmed on his account.

"Well, that's all right," said Khnum, as though coming to himself. "I have known Yubra long enough: he is as stupid as an ass but he would not do .... such a thing: he is a faithful servant."

And breaking off suddenly, he asked Ini: "Are they storing the corn?"

"Yes, master."

"Let us go and see; they are sure not to spread it evenly."

He got up and walked across the garden to the threshing yard. "Dead flies spoil a fragrant ointment, so a little folly spoils the whole life of an honourable man," Khnum had often thought of late, with a bitter smile. This was what had happened in his house.

Wise men knew that the next world, 'the second Egypt,' was exactly similar to this one, though the semblance was reversed as in a mirror: here everything was for the worse and made for death, while there everything was for the best, for everlasting life. But there, too, in the heavenly fields of Ialu, the shadows of the dead, the blessed Ka, ploughed the land, sowed, reaped, gathered in the harvest, dug canals and built houses. For all this work masters needed slaves. This was why they placed in each tomb three hundred and sixty-five clay figures--according to the number of days in the year--each with a spade in its hand, a set of tools in a bag on its back and a hieroglyphic inscription on the breast: "Thou, Ushebti, Respondent so and so, belonging to such and such a master, come up instead of me, say for me 'Here am I,' if I am called out to work." At the resurrection of the dead, when the masters came to life, the slaves came to life, too, and went to work in the fields of Ialu, for there, as here, slaves worked and masters enjoyed themselves.

Khnum had ordered a sample two dozen Ushebti of the modeller who worked at adorning tombs. He made them so cleverly that from the clay dolls' faces one could tell which of Khnum's servants they represented: this was to enable each soul to find its body.

When the modeller brought the figures Khnum's slaves ran out to meet him at the gate, by the box of old Yubra, the porter, jostling, shouting and laughing, pleased as children: each was in a hurry to find and recognize his own doll. "Which is me? Which is me?" they all kept saying.

Yubra came up, too, and also asked "Which is me?" The potter gave him his doll. Yubra took it, examined it, asked to have the inscription read to him, and, suddenly, he seemed like one possessed. Those who were present said afterwards his face turned quite dark, he trembled all over and, shotting "I don't want to, I don't want to!" flung the clay figure on the ground and broke it to bits. All stood still, spellbound with horror, while Yubra went on breaking the other dolls arranged on an ironing board from the laundry. Then they rushed at him, but could not master him at once--he fought like a fury. At last, when he had broken more than half the dolls, he was overpowered, and, with his hands bound, brought before Khnum for judgment.

It was a terrible act of sacrilege: every mummy, not only of man, but even of a beast, was the body of the dead god himself, Osiris-Amenti.

When Khnum asked Yubra why he had done it, Yubra answered firmly and quietly:

"To save my soul. Here I am a slave, but there I shall be free."

He would say nothing more.

Khnum thought that Yubra had suddenly lost his reason or was possessed by the devil. He was sorry for his old and faithful servant. He could not pardon Yubra completely, but he punished him lightly and did not even have him beaten; he merely had him put into the pit; he thought Yubra would come to his senses. But Yubra had been in the pit for four days and was as obdurate as ever.

There was a special reason why Khnum was so kind to him. In his youth Khnum liked to hunt crocodiles in the Lake country, Miuer, where he had a large estate by the town Shedet, consecrated to the crocodile-headed Sun god, Sobek. He used to spend several days there during the hunting season.

Every morning, while he was still in bed, a freshly washed and pleated white robe was brought to him by the fifteen-year old Maïta, a clever laundress--wife and sister of the young gardener Yubra: poor people often married their sisters so as not to divide the property.

At dusk Khnum used to hear in the back yard, where some planks ran out from the laundry into the pond, the loud squelching of the bat over the wet linen and Maïta's girlish voice singing:

"My sister is on the opposite bank The river flows between us, And a crocodile lies on the sand. Fearless I go into the water, Water is to me like the dry land, Love gives me courage and strength, Love--the all-powerful magic."

But one could hear from her voice that she did not yet know what love meant. "She will soon learn," Khnum thought with quiet pity.

One day she sang a different song:

"The pomegranate tree spoke and said: My round fruits are her breasts, The seeds in the fruit are her teeth, The heart of my fruits are her lips, And what the sister does with the brother, Gladdened by the sparkling wine, Is hidden by my branches thick."

And for the first time Khnum detected something not childish in Maïta's childish voice. "She will be like the rest," he thought, without any pity, and all of a sudden the flame of Set breathed into his face and lust stung his heart like a scorpion.

He knew that neither men nor gods would condemn him if he, the master, said to his slave "come into my bed," as simply as on a hot day he would say to her, "give me a drink." But Khnum was indeed a just and pious man. He remembered that besides his wife Nibituia he had twelve concubines and as many beautiful slaves as he liked, while Yubra had only Maïta. Was the master to take his servant's only lamb? "This shall not be," he decided, and he left the Lake country never to return.

But he could not forget Maïta. The flame of Set scorched his bones as the wind of the desert scorches the grass. He could not eat or drink or sleep and grew thin as a lath.

He had said nothing to Nibituia, but she guessed the truth. One early morning, while he was still asleep, Maïta came into the bedroom of his country house near Thebes, bringing freshly washed clothes. He woke up thinking he saw her in a dream or a vision, and when he understood she was real he asked:

"Where is Yubra, your brother?"

"Far away beyond the sea," she answered and burst into tears. Then she came up to him slowly, sat on the side of the bed, and with downcast eyes said, blushing and smiling through her tears:

"My mistress has sent me to my master. Here I am, your slave."

And Khnum asked her no more about Yubra.

That year was the happiest year of his life; and the best of all was that Nibituia had grown just as fond of Maïta as he was, perhaps even more so. She was jealous not of her but of other women and, strange to say, reproached him for preferring herself to Maïta. And Khnum did not know whom he loved most--the mistress or the slave: both these loves merged into one like two scents blending into one fragrance.

When he recalled it now, after thirty years, he whispered with tears of tenderness for the old companion of his life: "My poor little beetle!"

Nibituia had sent Yubra, the gardener, to Canaan to collect foreign flowers and plants for Khnum's gardens. And when, after a year's absence he returned, Maïta was no more: she had died in childbirth.

Khnum treated Yubra handsomely: he presented him with a fine plot of land, four pairs of oxen and a new wife--one of his own concubines. No one knew whether Yubra remembered Maïta or had forgotten her with a new wife, for he never spoke of her and behaved as though nothing had happened.

When Yubra had grown old and could no longer work in the fields Khnum took him into his house and gave him the honourable post of doorkeeper.

For thirty years Yubra had been an obedient slave and now all of a sudden he rebelled and said:

"I don't want to! Here I am a slave, but there I shall be free." For thirty years Khnum had not thought that he had done any evil to Yubra and now, all of a sudden, he thought: "Dead flies spoil a fragrant ointment and so a little folly spoils the whole life of an honourable man!"

III

The conical clay granaries stood by the back wall of the granary yard. Every one of them had a round opening at the top for pouring in the grain and a window with a board that lifted for pouring it out.

Slaves, brown as brick and naked but for white aprons and caps, were climbing up the ladders to the upper windows of the granaries, pouring into them grain that glided down with a gentle rustle like liquid gold.

This was the new corn from the Miuer Lakes. Looking at it Khnum remembered the starving and gave orders that a whole granary-full should be given to them.

Then he walked to the cattle-yard where the prison-pit was. It was a square hole dug in the ground, with brick walls and a brick bridge-like roof with a grated window in it.

Khnum went up to the pit, bent down to the window and heard quiet singing.

"Glory be to thee, Aton, the living and only God, Who hast created the heavens and the secrets thereof! Thou art in heaven and here upon earth is thy son Akhnaton, the joy of the Sun!"

The man in the pit must have caught sight of Khnum, for he suddenly sang aloud and, it seemed to Khnum, with insolent defiance:

"When thou descendest beyond the sky The dead come to life in thy life; Thou givest their nostrils the breath of life, And the air to their stifled throats, Glorifying thee from their narrow tombs The dead stretch forth their hands, And they who are at rest rejoice."

Khnum walked away and, returning to the shelter by the big pond, sat down in his old place beside Nibituia who was still wrapping up her beetles. Inioteph began reading a new endless account of sacks of corn. Khnum felt dreary. He was conscious of the ominous weight in his right side, under the last rib; he suffered from his liver. His father had died of the same complaint at the age of eighty--"Perhaps I, too, will die before I have fulfilled my span of days," thought Khnum.

He liked to have something of his tomb dowry brought to him every day. To-day they brought him the sacred Beetle, Kheper, made of lapis-lazuli.

The great beetle of the Sun, Ra-Kheper, rolls along the sky its great ball as the dung beetle rolls its small ball along the earth. The Sun is the great heart of the world; the human heart is a small sun. This was why they put inside the mummy, in the place of the heart which was taken out, the Sun beetle Kheper with a hieroglyphic inscription--the prayer of the dead at the Last Judgment: "Heart of my birth, heart of my mother, my earthly heart, do not rise against me, do not bear witness against me!"

"I shouldn't wonder if mine did rise against me," thought Khnum, recalling Yubra, and he smiled: "Extraordinary! Fancy comparing the sun to a dung beetle!"

He recalled another prayer of the dead: "May my soul walk every day in the garden beside my pond; may it flutter like a bird among the branches of my trees; may it rest in the shade of my sycamore; may it rise up to heaven and come down to earth unhindered."

"And perhaps it is all nonsense," he thought as he used to think in his youth. "A man dies--like a water bubble bursting--and nothing is left of him. And, indeed, it may be as well, for what if one grew bored there also?"

He had once seen an eclipse of the sun: the day had been fine and bright and suddenly everything grew dim and grey, as though covered with a layer of ash, and all was dull, numb and dead. It was the same now. "It's my liver," he thought, "and Yubra, too."

"I must put an end to it," he said aloud. "Go and fetch him!"

"Whom, master?" Inioteph asked, looking at him in surprise.

Nibituia too raised her eyes in alarm.

At that moment Dio and Pentaur came into the garden from the roof of the summer house: Zenra had told her mistress that Tuta had sent a boat for her.

As they were passing the shelter by the big pond, Khnum called to them:

"I am just going to judge Yubra, my slave. You be judges, too."

He made Pentaur sit down beside him and Dio sat on the mat by Nibituia.

Yubra, with his arms tied behind his back, was brought in and made to kneel before Khnum. He was a little old man with a dark wrinkled face that looked like a stone or a lump of earth.

"Well, Yubra, how much longer are you going to sit in the pit?" Khnum asked.

"As long as it is your pleasure," Yubra answered, with downcast eyes and, Khnum fancied, with the same defiance with which he sang Aton's hymn in the pit.

"Look here, old man; I have spared you and not handed you over to the magistrates, but do you know what the lawful penalty is for what you have done? To be buried alive or thrown into the water with a stone round your neck."

"Well, let them put me to death for truth's sake."

"For what truth? Say plainly what possessed you to raise your hand against the holy Ushebti?"

"I have told you already."

"Surely you can take the trouble to say it again."

"I did it for my soul's sake. To save my soul. Here I am a slave, but there I shall be free."

He paused and then said in a changed voice: "There the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest; the prisoners are at peace and do not hear the gaoler's voice; there the great and the small are equal and the slave is free from his master."

He paused again and asked:

"Do you know the parable of the rich and the poor?"

"What parable?"

"Shall I tell it you?"

"Do."

"There were two men in the world, a rich one and a poor one. The rich lived in luxury and the poor was wretched. They both died and the rich received an honourable burial and the poor was thrown away like a dead dog. And they both appeared before the judgment seat of Osiris. The works of the rich man were weighed and, behold, his evil deeds outweighed his good deeds. And they put him under a door so that the door hinge entered his eye and turned in it each time that the door opened or shut. The poor man's deeds were weighed, too, and, behold, his good deeds outweighed his evil deeds. And he was clothed in a robe of white linen, called in to the feast and placed at the right hand of the god."

"Quite, quite, quite. And to whom does the parable refer? To you and me?"

"No, to everyone. I have seen all the oppressions that are done under the sun and, behold, the tears of such as were oppressed and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no one to defend them. The poor are pushed off the roads, the sufferers are forced into hiding, the orphan is torn away from its mother's breast and the beggar is made to pay a pledge. Moans are heard from the city and the souls of the victims cry unto the Lord...."

He raised his eyes to heaven and his face seemed to light up.

"Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord! He shall come down like rain on the freshly cut meadow, like dew upon the withered fields. He shall save the souls of the humble and the oppressors he shall lay low. All the peoples shall worship him. Behold He comes quickly!"

Khnum felt dreary; everything was as grey and dull as when the sun was eclipsed. And it was all Yubra's doing. He had called him to be judged and now it was as though Yubra were judging him, his master.

"Who comes? Who comes?" he cried with sudden anger.

Yubra did not answer at once. He looked at Khnum from under his brows as though again with mocking defiance.

"Second Osiris," he said quietly at last.

"What are you talking about, you fool? There is only one Osiris, there will be no second."

"Yes, there will."

"He must have heard from the Jews about their Messiah," Inioteph remarked, with a jeer.

Yubra glanced at him in silence and then said, lower still: "There has been no Son yet; the Son is to come."

"What? There has been no Son? Ah, you infidel! So it's against Him you have rebelled?" Khnum shouted furiously.

"The liver rushes to his head," his doctor used to say about these sudden fits of fury.

Turning purple he got up from his chair heavily, walked up f o Yubra and, seizing him by the shoulder, shook him so that the old man staggered.

"I see through you, you rebel! Take care, I will have no nonsense."

"A slave's ear is on his back; a good whipping would soon make him drop this folly," Inioteph incited him.

Yubra said nothing.

"Oh, the snake, he holds his tongue and lies low," Khnum went on, and bending still lower over him looked into his face, "What have I done to you? What have I done to you? Why do you hate me?"

Had Yubra answered simply "because you robbed me of Maïta," Khnum's anger might have died down at once: his heart would have risen against him and denounced him as at the Last Judgment. But Yubra answered slyly:

"I bear you no evil."

And he added so low that only Khnum heard him: "God shall judge between us."

"What do you mean? What are you thinking of?" Khnum began and broke off, unable to look his slave in the face; he understood it was not easy to take dead flies out of the fragrant ointment.

"Ah, you stinking dog!" he shouted, beside himself with fury: the liver rushed to his head. "You bear me no evil, but who is it informed against me, who told the king's spies that two images of Amon in my tomb have not been effaced? Tell me, who?"

"I have not told, but even if I had I would not have been to blame: it is the king's command that images of Amon should be destroyed," Yubra answered, it seemed to Khnum, with insolent defiance.

"So you try to threaten me, you dog! Wait a bit, I'll give it you!"

He raised his stick. It was a thick, heavy stick of acacia wood, hard as iron: had he brought it down on Yubra's head he would have killed him. But God saved them both. Their eyes met and it was as though Maïta had looked at Khnum.

He slowly lowered the stick without touching Yubra's head, staggered and fell into his chair, burying his face in his hands. He was motionless for a few minutes, then he uncovered his face and said, without looking at Yubra:

"Away with you! Begone! You are not a slave to me any more. Untie his hands and let him go, no one is to interfere with him. I have pardoned him."

"Perhaps I was wrong," said Dio to Pentaur, as she walked with him across the garden to Tuta's boat in the canal. "Perhaps you Egyptians can rebel after all...."

"You judge by Yubra?" Pentaur asked.

"Yes. Have you many such?"

"Yes, we have."

"Well, then, there is sure to be rebellion. How strange it is, Taur: you and I have just been disputing whether the Son had come already or is to come, and here is the same thing over again..."

"It is the same thing everywhere."

"And the rebellion is about this, too?" Dio asked.

"Yes, it is. You are glad?"

Dio did not answer, she seemed lost in thought. Pentaur paused, too, and then said:

"Perhaps the world will perish through this...."

"Let it!" she answered, and it seemed to him that the fire of rebellion was already burning in her eyes. "Let the world perish if only He will come!"

IV

The boat was brought to the gates of Khnum's garden by the Big Canal which united the southern part of the city with the north--Apet-Oisit, where the throne of the world, the Temple of Amon, stood.

Hearing that Tuta had put off his meeting with her for a few hours, Dio decided to pass these hours--perhaps the last--with Pentaur: she had not made up her mind yet whether she was going away the next day. She wanted, too, to say good-bye to Amon's Temple; she had grown to love this house of God, the largest and most beautiful in the world, because it was through it she had entered Egypt.

Surrounded by walls, three enormous sanctuaries of Amon, Khonsu, and Mut--the Father, the Son, and the Mother--towered above the endless multitude of low, grey, flat houses made of river mud, like swallows' nests. Within the walls there were copses, gardens, ponds, cattle-yards, cellars, granaries, breweries, perfumeries and other buildings, a town within the town, the City of God in the city of men.

During King Akhnaton's reign the place fell into decay: the holy enclosures had been destroyed, the treasuries robbed, the sanctuaries closed, the priests driven away and the gods desecrated.

Having reached by boat the holy Road of the Rams, Dio and her nurse Zenra, stepped into a litter and Pentaur walked by their side.

Turning to the right into a by-road to the sanctuary of Mut, they entered it through the northern gates.

The sacred lake of the god Khonsu, Osiris the Moon, shone, crescent-shaped, with a silvery brilliance. The rosy granite of the obelisks, the black basalt of the colossi, the yellow sandstone of the pylons, the green tops of the palms, bathed in the molten gold of the afternoon sun, were mirrored in the water with such clearness that one could see every feather in the rainbow-coloured Falcons of the sun at the top of the pylons and every hieroglyphic in the multi-coloured inscriptions on the yellow sandstone; it was as though there were another world down there, the reverse of this one, exactly like it and yet quite different.

By the shores of the lake some sandpits had been dug, probably in order to defile the holy waters, and bricklayers were getting clay from them. The lake in those places was shallow, its slimy bottom could be seen and the stagnant water in the pools had a dull rainbow glitter on the surface. A huge statue of the god Amon, of dark-red sandstone, had been thrown near by, face downwards, and an ox, standing knee-deep in water, was scratching its mud-coated side against the sharp end of one of the two feathers in the god's tiara; the smell of the pig-sty came from the animal.

Next to the pits was a sanctuary of immemorial antiquity consecrated to two goddess-mothers, Hekit the Frog, and Tuart the Hippopotamus.

At the beginning of the world the divine Frog, the midwife, crawled out of the primaeval slime and at once began to help all women labouring of child; she helped the birth of Khonsu-Osiris, the son of God; she helped every dead man to rise again and be born into eternal life. Tuart, the Hippopotamus, was as efficient a help in labour.

The copper doors of the sanctuary were locked and sealed, but in the entry the two goddesses were hidden from the king's spies in two vaulted niches in the wall, behind torn curtains. The huge frog made of green jade with kind and intelligent round eyes of yellow glass, was sitting on its cubical throne. The pig-faced Hippopotamus, in a woman's wig, was ferociously showing its teeth; made of grey obsidian, with hanging breasts and monstrous belly, it was standing on its hind legs, holding in its forepaws the sign of eternal life--the looped cross Ankh.

A little girl of twelve, an Ethiopian, in the last stage of pregnancy, had placed a wreath of lotus flowers round the neck of the goddess and, kneeling before her, was ardently praying with childish tears for easy travail.

Zenra wanted to sacrifice to the mother-goddesses two turtle doves for Dio, that the virgin might at last become a mother.

They went into the portico. An old priestess, who looked rather like her goddess, the Frog, was bathing in a copper basin of warm water two sacred ichneumons, water animals something between a cat and a rat, beloved by the god of the floods, Khnum-Ra. After the bath the creatures ran away, playing; the male chased the female.

"Pew-pew-pew!" the priestess called them quietly and began feeding them out of her hands with bread soaked in milk, muttering a prayer about a propitious flood.

Then she went down to the lake and called:

"Sob! Sob! Sob!"

There was a splash at the other end of the lake and, thrusting out its shining, slimy black head, a huge crocodile, some nine feet long, sacred to Sobek, the god of the Midnight Sun, rapidly swam across in answer to the call. Brass rings with bells glittered on its front paws, there were rings in its ears and a piece of red glass was stuck into the thick skin of the head in the place of the ruby that had been stripped from it. The crocodile was so tame that it allowed its attendant to clean its teeth with acacia charcoal.

It crawled out of the water and stretched itself at the feet of the priestess. Squatting before it she fed it with the meat and the honey cakes brought by Zenra, fearlessly thrusting her left hand into the open jaws of the beast; her right hand had been bitten off by the crocodile while she was still a child.

"I wish it had eaten me altogether," the old lady used to say, "I then wouldn't have to see what is going on now."

She did not go on to say "under the apostate king."

To be devoured by a sacred crocodile was regarded as a most happy death: there was no need to embalm or bury the body--one went straight from the holy belly into paradise.

With motherly tenderness the old priestess stroked the monster on its scaly back, calling it 'Sobby,' 'little one,' 'ducky.' And it was strange to see the beast's pig-like eyes gleam with responsive affection.

"Well, how did you like our crocodile mother?" Pentaur asked Dio with a smile when they came out of the portico, leaving Zenra behind and telling the litter to go on.

"I liked her very much," Dio answered, smiling also.

"Does it make you laugh?"

"No. Your Mut and our Ma is the same Heavenly Mother who blesses all the creatures of the earth."

"How then could you...." he began and broke off. But she understood 'how then could you have killed the god Beast?'

"Our secret wisdom teaches," he said hurriedly, in order to hide her confusion and his own, "that animals are nearer to God than men, plants are nearer to God than animals and the dust of the ground--Mother Earth--is nearer to God than plants; a mass of flaming dust, the sun, is the heart of the world--God."

"Doesn't he know this?" Dio asked.

"No," Pentaur answered, guessing that she was speaking of King Akhnaton, "if he knew he would not desecrate the Mother."

"Perhaps there is something that I, a childless virgin, don't know either," Dio thought.

From the sanctuary of Mut they walked towards the Temple of Amon, along the sacred road of the Rams, huge creatures of black granite placed in a row on either side of the pathway. On the top of the head between the horns that curled downwards, each ram had the sun disc of Amon Ra, and between the doubled up front legs a tiny mummy of King Amenhotep, Akhnaton's father: the god-beast was embracing the dead king, carrying him, as it were, into eternal life.

It seemed to Dio they all looked at her as though they would say "Decide!"

They came up to the pylon--the huge gates shaped like a pyramid cut off at the top, with a rainbow-coloured sun disc with rays and high posts for flags; it stood at some distance from the Temple. On either side of it were two granite giants, exactly alike, representing King Tutmose the Third, Akhnaton's great-great-grandfather, the first world-conqueror. Wearing gods' tiaras, they were sitting on their thrones with their arms folded in everlasting rest, with an everlasting smile on the flat lips. Above them the wretched tatters of old flags fluttered on the broken posts. The birds nesting in the tiaras chirruped loudly, as though laughing, and the black faces of the giants were streaked with white.

Pentaur read aloud the hieroglyphic inscription on the gates--the words of the god to the king:

"Rejoice, my son, who hast honoured me. I give thee the earth in length and breadth. With a joyful heart pass through it as a conqueror."

And the king's answer to the god:

"I have made Egypt the head of all nations, for together with me it has honoured thee, god Amon on high."

From the way Pentaur read the inscription Dio understood that he was comparing the great ancestor with the insignificant descendant.

Passing through the gate, and leaving the road ta the Khonsu sanctuary on their left, they came out into the square. Men of all classes--beggars, slaves and grand gentlemen--were standing there in separate groups without speaking, as though waiting for something, and when the town guards on duty went past looked at them sullenly from a distance. All was quiet, but Dio suddenly remembered: "Rebellion!"

Someone came up to Pentaur stealthily from behind. The man's woollen striped Canaan cloak, worn over the Egyptian white robe, his reddish goat's beard, the curly hair hanging down his cheeks, the prominent ears, hooked nose, thick lips and the hot glitter in his eyes, made Dio recognize him at once for a Jew.

Pentaur whispered something in his ear; the man nodded silently, glanced at Dio and disappeared in the crowd.

"Who is this?" Dio asked.

"Issachar, son of Hamuel, a Jewish priest of Amon."

"But how can an unclean Jew be a priest?"

"He is a Jew on his father's side, but an Egyptian on his mother's. Their prophet, Moses, was also a priest in Heliopolis."

"But why is he not shaven?"

Dio knew that all Egyptian priests shaved their heads.

"He is hiding from the king's spies," Pentaur answered.

"What did you speak to him about?"

"About your meeting Ptamose."

They came to the western gates of Amon's temple; the leaf gold that covered them glowed like fire in the light of the setting sun. Three words had been inscribed on them in hieroglyphics of dark bronze: "Amon, great spirit." The word Amon was effaced, but that made the other two words glorify the Unutterable the more.

Guards were standing by the closed and sealed gates. People going past knelt down and kissed the dust of the holy flagstones, praying in a whisper; they would be thrown into prison for calling on the name of Amon aloud.

Dio showed the chief of the guards the ring with Tutankhaton's seal and he let her and Pentaur through the side door of the gates.

They entered the inner court that had rows of such gigantic columns, shaped like sheaves of papyrus, that it was hard to believe they were the work of human hands: it seemed as though the Great Spirit had piled up these everlasting stones as a mute praise to himself, the Unutterable.

From the yard they came into a covered antechamber, where the daylight came sparsely from narrow windows right under the ceiling. There was sunshine in the yard, but here it was half dark already and the thick forest of columns, saturated with the fragrance of incense like a real forest smelling of resin, seemed all the more huge in the twilight. And it was quiet as in a forest; only up at the top one could hear a faint tapping that sounded like woodpeckers. "Knock-Knock-Knock!"--and there was stillness, and then again: "Knock-knock-knock!"

Dio raised her eyes and saw masons hung up in hammocks on long strings, like spiders on cobwebs, hammering on the walls and the pillars up above.

"What are they doing?" she asked.

"Effacing Amon's name," Pentaur answered with a smile. Dio smiled, too; the knocking seemed to her absurd: how could one efface the name of the Unutterable?

As they went further into the temple the walls narrowed down, the ceilings grew lower, darker and more menacing, and at last an almost complete darkness enveloped them; only somewhere in the far distance a lamp was burning dimly. That was the Holy of Holies--Sehem, the tabernacle, cut out in a block of red granite, where in the old days a golden statuette of god Amon, a foot high, had been kept behind linen draperies--the sails of the holy boat. Now Sehem was empty.

A narrow passage led from it to another tabernacle where in the past Amon's great Ram, the sacred Animal--the living heart of the temple--lay on a couch of purple in clouds of the ever-burning incense. But now this tabernacle too was empty; people said that a dead dog's bones had been thrown into it to defile the holy place.

"He does not know God's darkness either?" Dio asked.

"No," Pentaur answered, understanding again that '_he_' meant the king. "He knows that God is light, but he does not know that darkness and light go together...."

He knelt down and Dio knelt beside him; he began to pray and she repeated after him:

"Glory to thee, who dwellest in darkness, Amon, the Hidden, Lord of the silent, Help of the humble, Saviour of those in hell! When they cry aloud to thee, Thou comest to them from afar, Thou sayest to them 'I am here!'"

They bowed down to the ground and Dio felt that the hair on her head moved with awe: 'He is here!'

They left the temple through the eastern gates where the litter was waiting for them. They got into it and were carried to the small temple Gem-Aton--Sun's Radiance--which had only just been built by King Akhnaton.

It had taken a thousand years to build Amon's temple of huge blocks of rock, and this one had been built quickly of small stones; Amon's temple was dark and mysterious, and this one was all open and sunny. There were no divine images in it except Aton's disc, with rays like hands descending from it.

They entered one of the porticos, on the wall of which there was a bas-relief of King Akhnaton making a sacrifice to the Sun god.

Dio looked at it dumb foundered. Who was it? What was it? A human being? No, it was some unearthly creature in human form. Neither a man nor a woman, neither an old man nor a child; a eunuch, a decrepit still-born baby. The arms and legs were so thin that they seemed to be nothing but bone; narrow childish shoulders and wide, well-covered hips; a big belly; a huge head shaped like a vegetable-marrow, bent down under its own weight on a long thin neck, flexible like the stem of a flower; a receding forehead, a drooping chin, a fixed stare and the smile of a madman.

Dio gazed at this face, trying in vain to recall something. All of a sudden she remembered.

In the Charuk Palace near Thebes, where Akhnaton was born and spent his childhood, she had seen his sculptured head: a boy looking like a girl; an oval, egg-shaped face, childishly, girlishly charming, quiet and gentle as that of the god whose name is Quiet-Heart.

A man dreams sometimes a dream of paradise, as though his soul returned to its heavenly home; and long after waking he refuses to believe that it had only been a dream and is full of sadness and yearning. Such was the sadness in that face. The drooping eyelids were heavy as though with sleep, the long eye-lashes seemed wet with tears and the lips wore a smile--a trace of paradise--heavenly joy through earthly sadness, like sunshine through a cloud.

"Can it be the same face?" Dio wondered. As in delirium the beautiful face was distorted, grown decrepit and monstrous, and, most awful of all, one could still see that young face in this changed one.

"Well, don't you know him?" Pentaur whispered. There was horror in his voice and mockery, too--triumph over an enemy. "No, he is not easy to recognize. But it is he, Joy of the Sun, Akhnaton!"

"How did they dare insult him like this!" Dio cried out.

"No one would have dared if he had not asked for it himself. It is he who teaches painters not to lie, not to flatter. 'Living in Truth'--Ankh-em-Maat--so he calls himself, and this is what truth is; he did not want to be a man, so this is what he has become!"

"No, that's not it, that's not it!" a voice said behind Dio.

She turned round and recognized Issachar, son of Hamuel. "No, that's not it. The deception is worse and more subtle!" he said looking at the face of the bas-relief.

"What deception?" Dio asked.

"Why, this: listen to the prophecy. 'As many were astonied at Him: His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. And we hid our faces from Him. But He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him: and with His stripes we are healed.' Do you know of whom this has been said? ... And who is this man? Accursed, accursed, accursed is the deceiver who said 'I am the Son'!"

Slowly, as though with an effort, he averted his eyes from the bas-relief and looking at Dio bent down to whisper in her ear:

"The high priest of Amon expects you to-day at the third hour after sunset." And covering his head with his cloak he walked out of the temple.

For a few minutes Dio stood as though spellbound. She was so lost in thought that she did not hear Pentaur call her twice and when he gently touched her hand, she started.

"What is it? What are you thinking of?" he asked.

"I hardly know myself..." she answered, with a shy, as it were, guilty smile, and then added, after a pause:

"Perhaps we don't any of us know the most important thing about him...."

She paused again and then cried with such agony that Pentaur thought she was like one dying of thirst and asking for water:

"Oh, if I only knew, if I only knew who he is!"

V

Tutankhaton had spread a rumour that he was the son of King Amenhotep IV, Akhnaton's father. Tuta's mother, Meritra, was one of the king's concubines for a day--he had numbers of such. Gossips said, however, that Tuta's father was not the king, but the king's namesake, Amenhotep, the chief of the Surveying Office. Thanks to his mother, Tuta had obtained, as a child, the rank of the prince's play-fellow, and he rapidly made a career: royal chamberlain, chief fan-bearer on the right hand of the divine and gracious king, treasurer of the king's household, bread-giver of the Two Kingdoms, defender of Aton's faith and, finally, the king's son-in-law, husband of Ankhsenbatona, Akhnaton's twelve-year-old daughter.

No one could look up to heaven as devoutly as he did, whispering in a honeyed voice:

"Oh, how salutary is your teaching, kind Uaenra, the only Son of the Sun!"

Or compose such pious inscriptions for tombs: "Akhnaton, the Son of the Sun, rose early in the morning to lighten me with his light for I was zealous in carrying out his words," said one of those inscriptions. "I have followed thee, O Lord Aton--Akhnaton!" said another.

This identification of the king with God seemed absurd and blasphemous, since everyone knew that Aton was the Father and the king the son. But when it was known that these words expressed the king's secret doctrine about the perfect unity of the Father and the Son, people marvelled at Tuta's cunning.

The courtiers vied with one another in trying to revile the old god Amon. But Tuta surpassed them all: he ordered for himself a pair of plaited sandals made of golden straps, with Amon's face on the soles so as to tread on the unholy one with every step he took. And everyone marvelled again--they understood that he would go far in those sandals.

Tuta had been sent to Thebes with the title of Viceroy to carry out the decrees about taking away burial grounds from the priests and desecrating the god Khonsu, Amon's Son.

When Dio came to the Viceroy's white house the old servant, who knew her, met her with low bows and wanted to tell His Highness at once about her. But hearing that Tuta was having lunch with the chief of the Lybian mercenaries, Menheperra, a man whom she disliked, she said she would wait and going into an inner room, lay down on a low day-couch. Watching the slanting pink oblongs cast by the setting sun on the white ceiling through the long narrow slits of windows high up on the wall she sank into deep thought, as in the antechamber of Gem-Aton's temple: was she to go or not to go?

She grew tired of thinking and dozed. Two big flies were buzzing by her very ear as though disputing "to go or not to go?"

She woke up suddenly and grasped that it was not the buzzing of flies but a whisper, somewhere quite close to her ear. She looked round, but there was no one there. The whisper came from the next room, which was divided off by a latticed partition covered with a carpet; Egyptian rooms were sometimes arranged in this way for the sake of coolness. The speakers were probably sitting on the matting-covered floor just by the side of Dio's couch.

"This heartburn will be the death of me," whispered one of the voices, dignified and elderly.

"It's the goose's liver, father," answered the other voice, high-pitched and respectful. "Would you like some telek? There is nothing like it for indigestion; with lemon and cardamon it is most refreshing."

There was a sound of liquid being poured out

"Have a drink too, Sparrow?"

"Your health, father!"

"Why do you call me 'father'?"

"Out of respect: you're my benefactor and that's as good as a father."

"It is a good thing you respect old people. And why do they call you 'Sparrow'?"

"Because I pick up a grain out of every bit of business like a sparrow out of a manure heap."

"Come now, don't be so modest about it: you must have grabbed 'the man with the pig' from the cemetery thieves the other day...."

Dio remembered that a man holding a pig by the tail was the hieroglyphic of lapis-lazuli, the Egyptian officials' favourite bribe--Hez-Bet: hez--to hold and bet--a pig, and that the tomb of the ancient King Saakerra had been robbed recently.

"And so I was saying, Ahmez, son of Aban, is a foolish man and no good will come of him," the old man's voice went on. "You may pound a foolish man in the mortar, but his foolishness will not leave him, and it is better to meet a savage bear in a field than a foolish man in the house!"

"But in what way is he foolish, father?"

"Why, because he never knows which way the wind is blowing. There is trouble brewing up in the town and the Lybian soldiers are mutinous because they haven't had their pay for the last six months. And he, the fool, is afraid of a rising, so he was delighted when the pay-money was sent the other day from the king's treasury and ordered it to be distributed straight away. But I was too sharp for him--I said nothing to him but kept back the money and at once reported the whole thing to His Highness the Viceroy. And what do you think? He thanked me, said 'well done,' patted me on the cheek and promised to get me a job in his service. What do you think of that now?"

"Splendid, father! There is no one like you for giving one a hint! ... But if there really is a rising, it will be bad, won't it?"

"Bad for some and good for others. A fool burns in the fire and a clever man warms his hands at it...."

The whisper became so low that Dio could not hear. Then it grew louder again:

"Impossible, impossible, father! Who could presume to do such a thing?"

"Do you know Issachar, son of Hamuel?"

"But he is a coward, it isn't for a dirty Jew like him to do it!"

"He is a coward, but he can work himself up to a frenzy. They are all like that, the Jews: they are cowards, but if it is anything to do with their God they are frantic. And it is not only he--he is merely the knife, and the hand that holds the knife is strong. Soon there will be things happening to make one dizzy, my lad."

"It is dreadful to think of, father."

"Don't be uneasy, Sparrow--you may be a falcon yet."

Dio listened with her heart beating so violently that she was afraid they would hear it behind the partition. She understood that a vile and evil plot was being hatched against the king--and she seemed to have a share in it; perhaps that was why she suffered so, unable to decide whether to go or to stay.

Suddenly there was a sound of footsteps in the next room--not in the one where they were whispering. Both halves of the door were flung open and a huge hunting-cat, half panther, glided in noiselessly like a shadow; behind it, as its guard of honour, came the runners, the fan bearers, the bodyguards, and, last of all, walking barefoot as noiselessly as the cat--shoes were taken off indoors--a slender and graceful young man of medium height, with an ordinary pleasant face. He was wearing a plain white robe, a smooth black wig, a broad necklace that came half way down to his waist, and he held in his hand a long gilded wooden staff adorned with a golden figure of the goddess Maat--Truth. This was the King's son-in-law, the Viceroy of Thebes, the real or supposed son of King Amenhotep--Tutankhaton.

He walked up to a carved ivory and ebony chair that stood on a platform in between four pillars in the middle of the room, and sat down. Approaching him Dio knelt before him. He kissed her on the forehead and said:

"Rejoice, my daughter! The grace of the god Aton be with you! Leave us," he added, addressing his suite.

When all had gone out of the room he moved to the day couch and, half reclining on it, motioned to Dio to sit down beside him; but he did it unobtrusively so that there was no need for her to notice the gesture unless she chose to do so. She did not notice it and sat down opposite him on a folding chair with a seat of plaited leather straps.

The cat walked up to her and rubbed itself against her legs, thrusting its head between her knees and mewing loudly, unlike a cat. Dio disliked cats and especially this one: she fancied it was a huge, black, slimy reptile. The cat never left Tuta's side and followed him about like a shadow.

"Why are you sitting here alone? Why didn't you send in your name?" he asked in a low caressing voice that sounded like a cat purring.

"You had a visitor."

"It was only your admirer Menheperra. Was that why you did not come in?"

"Yes, it was."

"Ah, you wild creature! ... Come here, Ruru," he called to the cat, "You have had enough of it?" he asked Dio.

"No, I don't mind," Dio said politely, but she would gladly have thrust the clinging creature away.

"It is marvellous," he said, smiling and looking at her in the peculiar masculine way she hated: 'just like spiders crawling about one's naked body,' she used to say about these looks. "One cannot get used to you, Dio! Each time I see you I cannot help marvelling at your beauty.... There, forgive me, I know you don't like it!"

The cat lifted its face and looked straight into Dio's eyes with its fiery pupils. She pushed it slightly away with her foot, afraid that the cat might jump on to her lap.

"Come now, you are being a nuisance!" Tuta laughed, seized the cat by its collar and, dragging it on to the couch, made it lie down, spanked it and said "Sleep!"

"Well, how do matters stand? Are you coming?" he began in a different and business-like voice. "Stop, wait, don't answer at once. I am not hurrying you, but just think: what are you doing here, what are you waiting for? Learning our dances? What for? Dance in your own way--they will like it all the better. Foreign things are more fashionable with us nowadays than our own...."

"I have decided..."

"Wait a minute, let me finish. I shall go away and you will remain alone here and in these times you don't know from day to day what might happen...."

"But I am coming!"

"Are you? Really? You won't play me false again?"

"No, now I want to go as soon as possible."

"Why so suddenly?"

She made no answer and asked:

"Are you going to-morrow for certain?"

"Yes. Why?"

"They say there may be trouble in the city."

"Oh, it's nothing. All will be over to-morrow. Of course it is a big town and there are many fools about; they may want to die for their puppet and then there is bound to be bloodshed, there is nothing for it...."

Dio understood that puppet meant the image of the god Khonsu.

"And does the king know it?" she asked.

"Know what?"

"That there may be bloodshed."

"No, he does not know. Why should he know? That he might revoke the decree? If he revoked this one, others would still be in force. And what is one to do? There is no teaching the fools without bloodshed!"

He sat up suddenly, put his feet on the floor, moved up to her, took her by the hand and smiled in the ambiguous way, with a sort of wink, which, again, there was no need for her to notice unless she chose to.

"You know, Dio, I have long wanted to ask you, why do you dislike me? I have always been a friend to you. Tammuzadad saved you, but I, too, have done something..."

Dio started and drew her hand away. Tuta pretended not to notice it and continued to smile.

"Why do you think?...." she began, and broke off, blushing and looking down. As always when she was alone with him she felt stiff, awkward--as though she had done some wrong and been caught unawares.

"What do you want me for?" she asked suddenly, almost rudely.

"There, you treat me as you do Ruru: I am being nice to you and you push me away," he laughed good-humouredly. "What do I want you for? Feminine charm is a great power..."

"You want to get power through me?"

"Not through you, but with you!" he said quietly with deep emotion, looking straight into her eyes.

"And I want you because of him," he went on, after a pause. "He is very difficult to get on with; you will help me: you love him and so do I--we shall love him together...."

She understood that he was speaking of King Akhnaton and her heart began to beat as violently as when she was listening to the whisper behind the partition. She felt that she ought to say something, but she was spell-bound as in a nightmare: she wanted to push away the clinging reptile and could not.

"You haven't been to see Ptamose yet, have you?" he asked suddenly, as though they had often spoken about it, while, as a matter of fact, they had never exchanged a word on the subject. Once more he caught her unawares like a naughty little girl.

"What Ptamose?" she pretended not to understand, but did it so badly that she was ashamed of herself.

"Come, come!" he said, with the same winking smile. "I won't betray you, no one shall know of it. And even if they did know, what of it? I would send you to him myself. He is a wise old man, a sage. He will tell you everything; you will know what the war is about. Only babblers and court flatterers imagine that we have won already. No, it is not so easy to conquer the old faith. Our forefathers were not any stupider than we are. Amon--Aton: is the dispute about a letter only? No, about the spirit. And indeed Amon is the Great Spirit!"

When he had moved from the armchair to the couch he had taken with him the staff with the gold sandals strapped to it. All of a sudden Dio bent down, took up one of them, turned it sole upwards and pointed with her finger to the image of Amon.

"And what have you here, prince? 'Amon the Great Spirit'?" she asked, smiling with almost undisguised contempt, as though she were really talking to a 'reptile.'

"There, you have caught me!" he laughed, good-naturedly, again. "Ah, Dio, priestess of the Great Mother, you are still living on your Mountain and refuse to come down to the earth to us poor men. And yet one day you will come down, will get your feet muddy and bruise them against the stones and be glad even of such sandals as these. One must have mercy, my friend. Be sober and fast by yourself, but eat with the glutton and drink with the drunkard. And as for the Great Spirit, I hope he will forgive me: my sandals won't hurt him!"

He went on speaking at great length of the secret wisdom of the chosen and the folly of the mob, of the greatness of King Akhnaton and of his loneliness--"he, too, does not come down to earth from the Mountain"--of their future triple alliance and of how he, Tuta, will help them both "to come down."

Dio listened and the same spell came over her--she could not awake or cry out.

"No, he is not stupid," she thought. "Or he is both stupid and clever, crude and subtle. Very strong--not he, though, but the one who is behind him. 'He is only a knife in the hand and the hand is strong.' He talks to me as to a child, and I expect he talks to the king in the same way; and perhaps he is right: we are children and he is grown up; we are 'not quite human' and he--quite. He is all for the world and all the world is for him. A man like that is certain to reign. You will be king over the mice, you cat! Akhnaton will disappear, Tutankhaton will remain. He will go through the ages in his Amon's sandals, trampling on the Great Spirit. And the kingdom of this world will be Tuta's kingdom!"

There was a knock at the door.

"Come in," Tuta said.

The centurion of the palace guards came in and, kneeling down, handed Tuta a letter. He opened it and, after reading it, said:

"A chariot!"

When the centurion went out, he got up, walked across the room in silence, then sat down in his chair, and resting his head on his hand, heaved a deep sigh.

"Ah, the fools, the fools! I knew there was bound to be bloodshed...."

"Rebellion?" Dio asked.

"Yes, there's a rising on the other side of the river. It seems the Lybian mercenaries have joined the rebels." His face was sad, but joy was shining through the sadness.

Dio understood: the rising was the beginning and the end was the throne.

He got up and turning to the couch took up his staff, untied the sandals from it, put them on and said:

"Well, there is nothing for it, let us go and put down the rising!"

VI

There will be a great rebellion and the earth will be turned upside down like the potter's wheel." Recalling these words of the ancient prophet Ipuver, Yubra eagerly awaited the fulfilment of the prophecy. "What if it begins without me!" he thought, sitting in the pit. And when Khnum turned him out of the house he took a staff, slung a wallet behind his back and set off at random, looking as though he had been a homeless wanderer all his life.

He remembered his old friend Nebra, the boatman, and decided to go and see him at the Risit Harbour. But at the harbour he was told that Nebra had finished work and was having supper in a tavern next door, in the Hittite Square.

Yubra was tired; his legs ached with the stocks that he had been wearing. He sat down to rest on a heap of stones on the quay.

The sun was setting behind the bare yellow rocks of the Lybian Mountains, honeycombed with tombs. The low-lying meadows beyond the river and the City of the Dead, where the embalmers' cauldrons were perpetually boiling and black clouds of asphalt smoke rose in the air, were already in shadow; only by the funeral temple of Amenhotep, at the end of the sacred Road of the Jackals, the golden points of two obelisks shone with a dull glow like smouldering candles.

The left bank was in shadow, but the right still lay in the evening sun, which threw a coppery red glow on the dark-skinned, naked bargemen who carried from the boats down the planks earthenware pots and sacks of styrax and balm from Gilead, Arabian sandal and myrrh, fragrant incense from Punt, and cloves--burnt offerings to the gods and ointments for the dead. The quay was saturated with the fragrant odours, but through the fragrance came the smell of a carcass thrown up by the river and lying on the bank. An emaciated dog, with ribs that stood out under the skin, was devouring it.

Suddenly two white eagles pounced on the carcass with loud flapping of wings and greedy cries. The dog, frightened, jumped away with a squeal, and watched them from a distance, its tail between its legs, its teeth bared in an angry growl, its body shaking with hungry envy.

But a still greater envy glittered in the eyes of a starving beggar woman, who had come in search of food from the province of the Black Heifer, where men were devouring each other in their hunger.

She put her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breast to the lips of the baby perched in a wicker basket behind her. It was biting and chewing it furiously with its toothless gums but could not suck out a single drop of milk, and, no longer able to cry, it only moaned.

"Bread, please, sir; I have had no food for three days!" the beggar woman moaned in a voice as small as her baby's, stretching out her hand to Yubra.

"I have none, my poor woman, forgive me," he said, and he thought 'soon the hungry will be filled.'

He got up and walked on. The woman followed him at a distance as a stray dog follows a passer-by with a kind face.

Alongside of them on the smooth road, specially made for carrying heavy weights from the harbour to the town, some fifteen hundred convicts and prisoners of war were dragging, by four thick cables, something like an enormous sledge with a huge granite statue of King Akhnaton that had just been brought down the river. The superintendent of works, an old man with a stern and intelligent face, looked like a dwarf as he stood on the knees of the giant statue seated on its throne; he clapped his hands, beating the measure of the song the men were singing and sometimes he shouted at them and waved his stick, driving all this mass of men as a ploughman drives a pair of oxen. In front of them a man was watering the road with a watering can so that the runners should not be set on fire by the friction.

The cable, taut like a string, cut into men's shoulders even through the felt pads; perspiration dropped from their faces bent low over the ground; their muscles were strained; the veins on their foreheads were ready to burst; their bones seemed to crack with the incredible effort. And the giant, at rest for ever with a gentle smile on the flat lips, was only slightly moved from time to time. A doleful song, accompanied by laboured breathing, broke out like a moan from a thousand breasts:

Heigh-ho, pull and drag, pull and drag! Heigh-ho, step along, step along! When we've pulled an inch or two We'll have earned a drink of beer, We'll have earned a loaf of bread. On and on with steady tread! Make the heavy burden fly. Now, brothers, here we go! Have another try-- Oho!

"These, too, will not have long to suffer: the slaves shall be set free," Yubra thought.

From the road he turned into Teshub Street. This part of Thebes, by the Apet Risit harbour, was populated by the worshippers of the god Teshub--boatmen, carpenters, rope-makers and other working people, as well as by tradesmen and inn-keepers.

The dark grey huts, looking like wasps' nests, made of the river mud and reeds, were so flimsy that they came to pieces after a good rain. But it only rained once in two or three years and, besides, it cost next to nothing to build such a hut afresh. Not only the poor, but people of moderate means, lived in them, in accordance with the Egyptian wisdom: our temporal home is a hut, our eternal home is the tomb.

The walls giving on to the street had no windows, except a little one with a movable shutter in the front door for the porter; the name of the owner was written over it in coloured hieroglyphics. All the other windows were at the back. On the flat roofs could be seen the conical clay granaries and the wooden frames over the skylights, facing north, "wind-catchers" for catching the north wind--"the sweetest breath of the north."

The inn of Itacama the Hittite, where Nebra was having his supper, stood at the very end of Teshub street, not far from the Hittite Square.

Instead of a signpost there was over the door a clay bas-relief representing a Canaan labourer sucking beer through a reed from a jug, and an Egyptian woman, probably a harlot or a tavern keeper, sitting opposite him; the hieroglyphic inscription said: "He comforts his heart with the beer Haket, Heart's seduction."

As he was going into the tavern Yubra turned round to the beggar woman and called to her:

"Wait a minute, my dear; I will bring you some bread!"

But she did not hear: his voice was drowned by the song of two tipsy scholars. Thinking that he was driving her away she walked off. And the two scholars--one long and thin, nicknamed the Decanter, and another short and fat, the Beer-Pot, tumbled into the tavern nearly knocking Yubra down. Both were bawling with all their might:

"Little geese are fond of water But to us wine is better. We are a merry crew Drunken scholars bold and true. Sages may grow old with study Our wisdom is to drink. Give us beer, pale or ruddy Then we have no need to think."

Yubra walked into the dark, low-pitched room full of smoke and the smell of cooking: Itacama was roasting a goose on a spit. All sorts of men of different races sat on the matting on the floor listening to two girls playing the kinnar and the flute; some were throwing dice, playing chess and 'fingers'--guessing the number of fingers opened and closed very rapidly; others were eating out of earthenware pots with their fingers--each had a washing bowl by him--and sucking wine and beer through reeds.

When Nebra saw his friend Yubra, he came forward to embrace him--the old men were very fond of each other--and ordered a luxurious supper for him: lentil broth with garlic, fried fish, sheep's cheese, a pot of beer and a cup of pomegranate wine--_shedu_. As often happens in times of famine even poor people--as though to give themselves courage--liked being extravagant with their last farthings.

Before sitting down to supper Yubra thought of the beggar woman; he broke off part of a loaf and went outside. But she was no longer there and he returned to Nebra disappointed.

The beggar had walked down the street and turned the corner; she stopped there smelling newly baked bread. A middle-aged woman with a wrinkled, sickly and cruel face was squatting on the ground baking barley cakes: she did it by sticking thinly rolled-out paste on the outside of an earthenware pot filled with charcoal embers.

"Give me some bread, dear, I have had no food for three days!" the beggar moaned.

The woman raised her hard eyes to her:

"Go along! There is no end of you beggars tramping about; one can't feed you all."

But the beggar stood still, looking at the bread greedily. "Give me some, please, please!" she repeated, with frenzied, almost menacing entreaty, and when the woman turned away to take some dough from another pot, she suddenly bent down and stretched out her hand.

"Ah, you plague of Canaan, you scorpion's sting, you snake, thief, robber, may you have no coffin for your body!" yelled the woman, striking her on the hand.

The beggar answered back, showing her teeth as the dog had done and retreating slowly, her eyes still fixed greedily on the bread.

The woman picked up a stone and threw it at her. The stone hit the beggar on the shoulder. She gave a dreadful dog-like howl and ran. The baby in the basket began to cry, but stopped at once as though realising that tears were of no avail now.

Running to Hittite Square, where there was the god Teshub's old timber chapel that looked like a log hut, she fell exhausted by a heap of sun-dried manure bricks for fuel. She leaned against them sideways uncomfortably: the basket was in the way but she had not the strength to take it off. The baby was so quiet that it did not seem to breathe; she had not the courage to see whether it was asleep or dead.

She suddenly remembered her neighbour in the province of the Black Heifer, a twelve-year-old child-mother who had stolen somebody else's baby, calmly cut its throat as though it had been a lamb, fed her own child with it and had some herself. "That's what I ought to have done," thought the beggar woman.

The pain in her stomach was gnawing her like a wild beast. She suddenly felt weak all over, melting with weakness as it were. "I shall soon die," she thought, and remembered: "may you have no coffin for your body." She smiled: "no coffin--no resurrection.... Well, so be it! Eternal death--eternal rest..."

She, too, though in a different way than Yubra, felt that the world had turned upside down.

And in the tavern Yubra was whispering with his friend:

"Has it begun?"

"Yes. The other side of the River people are assembling already and walking about with the holy tabernacle, singing glory to Amon. And I expect it won't be long before they start here," Nebra answered, and added, after a pause: "But what is it to us? The rebellion is about their god--not ours."

"Never mind," Yubra said. "Whichever way it begins, the end will be the same: the earth will turn upside down--and glory be to Aton!"

"Don't talk so loud, brother--if they heard you they would give you a beating."

"No danger of that!" a stupid looking youth said, with a grin, lisping as though his tongue were too big for his mouth; he was Zia, the Carpenter, nicknamed the Flea. "It is all one to us--Amon or Aton. So long as bread is cheaper than fish let the rest go hang!"

"You are a stupid man, Flea!" said the cauldron maker, Min, a sullen and pompous old man, with colorless eyes that looked very light in his face black with soot. "Who is Amon's son, Khonsu? Why, Osiris-Bata--the Spirit of Bread. If the Spirit leaves the earth, there will be no more bread and we will all perish like midges!"

"And is it true, mates," the Flea lisped, "that our dear golden Khonsu is to be melted into money to buy bread for the poor?"

"What is heavier than lead and what name has it, other than foolishness?" said Decanter, the scholar, looking at him with the self importance of a learned man.

"And are you going to eat that bread?" Min asked, also looking at Flea with contempt.

"I? It's all one to me! I will do what everybody else does," he answered, smiling cautiously and shrugging his shoulders.

"Everybody will eat it, everybody!" the consumptive little cobbler Mar said hurriedly, waving his hands and coughing. "The pig gulps down a baby and doesn't care--it goes on grunting just the same; and so the people will eat the god and say 'that's not enough, give us some more'!"

"Well, we shall indeed be scoundrels if we give away the holy image of god to be defiled!" cried a giant with the face of a child--Hafra, the blacksmith, striking his right fist on his left palm.

"There is one thing I can't make out," Min, the cauldron-maker said, sighing heavily. "We are told that the king is a god. How can one god rise against another?"

"It's not the king, but the high and mighty gentry, greedy bloodsuckers!" the cobbler again put in hurriedly, going off into a fit of coughing. He brought up some blood and went on:

"They ought to be hanged, the lot of them, like salt fish, on one string. And the chief mischief maker is Tuta, the purring cat--he ought to be the first to be hanged!"

"Mice burying the cat," said Min, smiling bitterly. "No, my man, there's no way of doing it. The gentry talk and the people are mute; he who has the sword has the word."

"A knife may be as good, but the trouble is that the hare has the knife in its paw but cannot move for awe! That's why the fat-bellied ride rough-shod over us. And if we weren't a set of fools we might do great things at a time like this!" said a short, thick-set, broad-shouldered man of forty, with a terribly disfigured but calm and intelligent face, who had been playing dice without taking part in the conversation. He was Kiki the Noseless, the thief who had lately plundered the tomb of the ancient King Saakerra and obtained thousands of pounds worth of leaf gold and precious stones off the king's mummy. He had been seized and brought to trial, but acquitted for a large bribe.

Kiki was an assumed name and no one knew what his real name was. It was rumored that in his youth he had committed an awful crime; he was punished by being buried up to his neck in the ground, but by a miracle he escaped and ran away; then he became the chief of a robber band in the marshes of the Delta, was caught, had his nose cut off by the hangman and was deported to the gold mines in Nubia; he escaped and became a brigand once more; was seized again and sent to the copper mines of Sinai, escaped again and, after hiding for some time, appeared in Thebes just before the mutiny under the name of Noseless Kiki.

As soon as he spoke everyone was silent and turned to him. But he went on playing dice, looking as though all that was being said here were empty babble.

The musicians who had stopped for a moment began strumming the kinnar and playing the pipe again. The scholars struck up a drunken song. It had grown dark. They lighted a copper lamp suspended from the ceiling and filled with evil smelling vegetable oil, and on the floor earthenware lamps with mutton fat.

"Zen is speaking, Zen is speaking! Listen!" voices were heard suddenly.

Zen--or Zennofer--a man of thirty with a sad, gentle and sickly face and dreadful cataract on his blind eyes, was a junior priest 'uab' in the sanctuary of the god Khonsu-Osiris. He was reputed to be a seer because he knew by heart the writings of the ancient prophets and himself had visions and heard voices.

The musicians were told to stop, the drunken scholars were pushed out into the street and in the stillness that followed the gentle voice of the prophet sounded as though coming from a distance.

"To whom shall I tell of my sorrow? Whom shall I call to weep?" he spoke as though crying in his sleep. "They do not hear, they do not see, they walk in darkness; the foundations of the earth are shaking and there is no wise man to understand and no foolish man to bewail it!"

Suddenly he stretched out his arms and cried in a loud voice: "So it has been and so it shall be, so it has been and so it shall be! There shall be endless evil. The gods will grow weary of men; the gods will forsake the earth and go to heaven. The sun will be darkened, the earth will be waste. The flowers of the fields will set up a moan, the heart of the beasts will weep for men; but men will not weep--they will laugh with sorrow. An old man will say 'I would I were dead,' and the child 'That I had not been born!' There will be a great mutiny throughout the earth. The towns will say 'let us drive out the rulers!' The mob will rush into the courts of judgment; the scrolls of the law will be torn, records of estates scattered, the boundaries between fields wiped out, the frontier posts knocked down. Men will say 'nothing is private, all things are in common; other people's things are mine; I take what I like!' The poor will say to the rich, 'Thief, give me back what you have stolen from me.' The small will say to the great 'all are equal!' Those who have not built the houses will live in them; those who have not tilled the land will fill the granaries; those who have not woven will be clothed in fine raiment, and she who looked at her own reflection in water will now gaze at herself in a mirror. Slaves will wear gold, pearls and lapis-lazuli, and the mistress will go in rags, begging for bread. The beggars will be as gods and the earth will turn upside down as does a potter's wheel!"

Suddenly he stood up and fell on his knees, raising his blind eyes to the sky as though he already saw the things of which he was speaking.

"So it has been and so it shall be--there shall be a new heaven and a new earth. There the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp and the weaned child put his hand on the cockatrice's den. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord! He will come down like rain on a freshly mown meadow, like dew upon the parched fields. Lo, He cometh!"

He stopped and all were silent. "That's all nonsense," the Noseless Kiki's voice was suddenly heard in the stillness. "Why do you listen to a fool's talk?"

"And why do you revile God's prophet, you dog?" said Hafra the blacksmith, laying his hand on Kiki's shoulder so heavily that Kiki staggered. Freeing himself with an agile movement, he seized the knife that hung at his waist; but glancing at the giant's childish face he evidently changed his mind and said calmly, with a twinkle in his eye,

"Very well, if he is a prophet, let him tell us when this is to be?"

"For such as you--never; but for the saints--soon!" Zen answered.

"Soon? You are wrong there. No, brother, it will take a good long time for fools to grow wise."

"But do you know when it shall be?" Hafra asked.

"Yes, I do."

"Tell us then, don't beat about the bush!"

"Do you remember the inscription on King Una's tomb?" asked Kiki, the same mocking smile in his eyes.

Zen said nothing, as though he had not heard the question, but his face quivered like the face of a child in a fit of terror.

Yubra, too, was trembling: he felt that the fate of the world were being decided by this argument between the saint and the criminal. The blacksmith scowled more and more menacingly.

"You have forgotten? Well, I'll remind you," Kiki went on. "Once upon a time, very long ago, there lived a king called Una. He was a clever man, cleverer than anybody in the world, but he was a brigand, a thief, a scoundrel, no better than we are. He died and was buried and they put over his tomb the inscription he told them to write: The bones of the earth are cracking, the sky is shaking, the stars are falling, the gods are trembling: King Una, the devourer of gods comes forth from his tomb and goes hunting; he sets traps and catches the gods; he kills them; stews them, roasts them, and eats them; big ones for breakfast, middle-sized for dinner, little ones for supper, and old gods and goddesses he uses to make fragrant incense. He devoured them all and became the god of gods.'"

"What rubbish is this, you fool? Speak straight, don't wriggle!" cried Hafra, clenching his fists in a fury.

"Have it straight, then: it won't be soon, but the hour will come when the poor and wretched will say 'we are no worse than King Una, the devourer of the gods.' Scoundrels, pickpockets, brigands, dirty Jews, men with torn nostrils, the flogged, the branded, the cursed will say 'we are nothing--let us be everything! Then the earth will turn upside down and he will come..."

"Who is he?" Hafra asked.

"God and devil, the Blacky-whity, two gods in one!"

"Stop or I'll kill you!" the blacksmith shouted, raising his fist.

Kiki jumped back and pulled out his knife. There would have been a fight but shouts came from the street:

"They are coming! They are coming! They are coming!"

"Rebellion!" the cobbler was the first to guess what had happened and rushed to the door. All the others followed him.

There was a crush. The Flea was pressed to the wall and nearly suffocated. Min was knocked down. Hafra stumbled against him and fell down, too. Kiki jumped over both and, whistling like a brigand, shouted: "Have you got any knives?"

"Yes," someone in the street shouted back. Everyone was running in one direction--from the Risit Harbour to the Hittite Square.

It was dark; the moon had not yet risen; the stars twinkled in the sky and there was the red glow of a fire on the horizon.

VII

People were crowded in the Square. In the vague hubbub of voices one could distinguish at times the phrases:

"Glory be to Amon on High! Glory be to Khonsu, Amon's Son!" Suddenly there came the sound of melodious singing, far off at first and then nearer and nearer. The Square was lit up with the red glow of the torches and a solemn procession appeared.

The Lybian mercenaries walked in front followed by fan-bearers and censer-bearers; then came the _horemhebs_--officiating priests, and finally twenty-four senior priests--_neteratephs_, with shaven heads, leopard skins across the shoulder and wide, stiffly starched white skirts. Walking twelve in a row they carried on two poles the holy tabernacle--Userhet--a boat of acacia wood with linen curtains like sails, that hid a figure of Amon a foot high. Its shadow could be seen through the fine material in the flickering light of the torches: but people did not dare to look even at the shadow of the god: to see him was to die.

A crowd followed the tabernacle, singing in a chorus:

"Glory be to Amon on High Glory to Khonsu, Amon's son! Exalt ye them above the heavens, Exalt ye them above the earth. Proclaim to all their glory! Tell men to fear the Lord Throughout all generations, Tell it to the great and small, To every creature that draws breath. To fishes and fowls of the air; Tell those who know not and who know: 'Fear ye the Lord!'"

Yubra sang, too, saying 'Aton' instead of 'Amon'; no one heard him in the general chorus. And sometimes he made a mistake, glorifying the god of his enemies and rejoiced: he knew that where they were going there would be no more enemies; the lion and the lamb would lie down together and the child would play on the hole of the asp.

The beggar woman from the province of the Black Heifer walked by Yubra's side. He had found her half-dead with hunger by the heap of manure-bricks in the Square, restored her to life and given her some food: Nebra procured bread for her and milk for the baby from a boatman friend of his. When she had eaten and seen that the baby was alive and sucking a comforter that Yubra cleverly made for it, she revived and followed him as a dog follows the man who has given it food. She followed him in the procession, too.

He was holding her firmly and kindly by the hand, as though he were leading this sorrowful and perishing daughter of the earth to the new earth, to the Comforter. She understood but vaguely what was going on, and not daring to look at the shadow of the god behind the veil, simply repeated with the rest of the crowd:

"Glory be to thee, god of mercy, The Lord of the silent, The help of the humble, The saviour of those in hell! When they call unto thee Thou comest to them from afar Thou sayest to them 'I am here.'"

She, too, was in hell; perhaps He would come to her, too, and say 'I am here,' she thought joyfully, as though knowing that in the place where they were going there would be no famine and the mothers would not have to steal other people's children and kill them like lambs in order to feed their own.

Pentaur was walking on the left in the first row of the twelve priests, neteratephs, who carried the tabernacle. Yubra saw him and they looked at one another. "How did you come here, servant of Aton? Are you a spy?" Yubra read the question in Pentaur's eyes. "Come, there can be no spies now! We are all brothers," was the answer in Yubra's eyes, and Pentaur seemed to understand--he smiled at him like a brother.

Zen, the prophet, was also with the crowd; a little boy was leading him by the hand. His face was sorrowful unto death: maybe he knew that Kiki was right and that the earth would turn upside down only in order that the worst might come.

After passing Coppersmiths' Street they came into the sacred Road of the Rams. At the very end of it the dull red disc of the moon, cut across by the black needle of the obelisk, like a cat's eye by the narrowed pupil, was slowly rising behind the sanctuary of Mut.

Suddenly the procession stopped. The blast of trumpets and the rattle of drums was heard in front; arrows and stones from slings flew about with a hissing sound: it was an ambush of the Nubian soldiers sent against the rebels.

One arrow struck the foot of the tabernacle. The priests lowered it to the ground; men crowded round it, defending the body of the god with their own bodies.

The attack of the Nubians was so violent that the Lybian mercenaries flinched and would have run away had not help arrived just in time.

Kiki, with a few desperadoes like himself, had gone from the Hittite Square to the raised road where the workmen, who had been dragging the giant statue of King Akhnaton during the day, had gone to sleep, some on straw and others on the bare earth. Kiki could not wake many of them: they slept so heavily that if the very earth under them had caught fire they would hardly have wakened. But he did rouse some three hundred by the mere cry of 'Plunder!'; leading them against the Nubians' ambush he attacked it from behind and so won the battle for the rebels.

The procession moved on with a song of victory:

"Woe to be to thine enemies, Lord! Their dwelling place is in darkness, But the rest of the earth in thy light. The sun of them that hate thee is darkened, The sun of them that love thee is rising!"

Reaching Amon's temple they walked past it and turned to the right, to Khonsu's sanctuary, easily scattering a small detachment of Midian archers on the way. But at the sanctuary they learned that at the first news of mutiny the golden figure of Khonsu had been removed and hidden in the treasury of Amon's temple.

"Come, good people, you have been saving the god long enough, it is time you thought about yourselves!" Kiki the Noseless shouted to the crowd, jumping on the empty pedestal of Khonsu's statue. "There is nothing to be got here, Aton's rabble have cleared the place, but on the other side of the river in the Chanik Palace there is still plenty of stuff left. Let's make for the river, mates!"

There arose a dispute, almost a fight, as to what they were to do--save the god or plunder.

As Yubra listened, he grew uneasy: was this what he had been hoping for or something utterly different?

After much wrangling the crowd divided into two: the bigger part went to the other side of the river with Kiki and the smaller set out towards Amon's temple.

Pentaur led them. Expecting another ambush they put out the torches. Men walked in silence, with stern faces; they knew that perhaps they were going to their death. "We shall all die for Him!" Yubra thought, with quiet joy.

When they reached the temple they saw there were no guards there. Two granite colossi and two obelisks, as though keeping watch, threw black, menacing shadows on to the square of white stone bathed in moonlight.

Pentaur and Hafra, the blacksmith, walked up to the temple gates; the gold, with the hieroglyphics of dark bronze upon it, the two words 'Great Spirit,' dimly glistened in the moonlight.

"Hack them!" Pentaur said.

Hafra raised the axe, but let it down again, not daring to strike. Pentaur seized the axe from him and cried:

"Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!"

He lifted the axe and struck; the ponderous echo rolled through the empty, resonant air behind the gates, as though the Great Spirit himself had answered him.

"Achaeans, Achaeans, the devils!" was heard in the crowd.

Achaeans, the half-savage mercenaries from the North, had just arrived in Egypt to serve the king. They had come straight to the City of the Sun, and were hardly known at Thebes, but there were terrible rumours about their ferocity and mad courage.

Rushing out from three ambushes at once they surrounded the crowd on all sides, pressing it to the walls of the temple so that escape was impossible. And above the gates on the flat roof of the temple copper helmets and spears were glistening, too. Ethiopian slingers were ambushed there. Arrows, stones and lead fell from there like hail.

Pentaur raised his eyes and saw just above him, in a narrow window of the temple wall, a boy of fifteen, with a black monkey-like face, white teeth bared like those of a beast of prey, and two feathers, a green and a red one, stuck aslant in the black frizzy hair. Placing an arrow on the bowstring, he aimed at Pentaur slowly bending a huge bow made of rhinoceros bone.

Pentaur remembered the tame monkey on the top of the palm tree over Khnum's house, throwing the shells of the pods at the sleeping dancer, Miruit, and he smiled. He might have jumped behind the projecting wall, but he thought "what for? I shall be killed anyway, and it is good to die for Him Who has been!"

The bowstring sounded.

"Has been or will be?" he had time to ask and to answer: "Has been, is and will be," while the arrow whistled through the air. Its copper sting pierced him just under the left breast. He fell on the threshold of the closed gates. For him the gates lifted their heads, the everlasting doors were lifted up and the King of Glory came in.

Standing by the tabernacle Yubra was watching the last batch of the Lybians fighting. Suddenly the leaden bullet from a sling struck him on the temple. He fell and thought he was dying. But a minute later he propped himself up on his elbow and saw that the Achaean devils were hacking the tabernacle.

The white curtains flapped like broken wings laying bare the small, worm-eaten, wooden figure of the god, blackened with the smoke of incense, polished with the kisses of the worshippers. A soldier seized it, and lifting it up, flung it upon the ground and trampled it underfoot. The god's body cracked like a crushed insect.

Yubra fell upon his face so as not to see.

Pentaur was dying happily. Some one gentle as the god whose name is Quiet-Heart was bending over him--he could not tell whether it was a boy who looked like a girl or a girl who looked like a boy. He wanted to ask 'Who are you?' when the kiss of eternity sealed his lips. And the dulcet chords played on:

"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh, Death is now to me like healing, Death is now to me like refreshing rain, Death is now to me like a home to an exile!"

VIII

When Dio had set out to see Ptamose the mutiny was just beginning beyond the river and all was quiet on this side.

Issachar was waiting for her by the Eastern Gates of the Apet-Oisit wall, where the deserted tomb-sanctuary of King Tutmose the Third lay in ruins. Stepping out of the litter and telling the bearers to wait for her at the gate, she went with Issachar into the half-destroyed porch of the sanctuary. Walking up to the wall, which was completely covered with bas-reliefs and mural paintings, he leaned his shoulder against it. A movable stone turned on its axis, revealing a dark narrow opening. They both squeezed themselves sideways through it and descended some steep steps cut in the thickness of the rock. Issachar walked in front of Dio down a slanting underground passage, carrying a torch.

It was close: the depths of the earth warmed through by the eternal Egyptian sun, never cooled; the darkness was filled with warmth. "Glory be to thee who dwelleth in darkness, O Lord!" Dio remembered. It seemed to her that here the dead were as warm lying in their tombs in the bosom of the earth as a child in its mother's womb.

The endless mural paintings represented the journey of the Sun-god down the subterranean Nile: the sail of the boat hung limply in the breathless stillness and the dead oarsmen were dragging it over dry land through the twelve caves--the twelve hours of the night, from the eternal night to the eternal morn.

The hieroglyphic inscriptions glorified the Midnight Sun, Amon the Hidden.

"When thou descendest beyond the sky The most secret of secret Gods, Thou bringest light to them who are in death. Glorifying thee from within their tombs, The dead lift up their arms And those under the earth rejoice."

The main passage was intersected by side passages. Suddenly the red flame of torches and the black shadows of men carrying spears, swords, bows and arrows flitted across them.

"Where are they carrying the arms?" Dio asked.

"I don't know," Issachar answered reluctantly.

"It must be the rebels in the town," she guessed.

Supplies of arms and also of gold, silver and lapis-lazuli--remnants of the temple treasuries concealed from the king's spies were hidden in these subterranean recesses of Amon's temple. It was all kept there for the day of rebellion against the apostate king.

Turning into one of the side passages and walking to the end of it, they stopped at a closed door in the wall. Opening it, Issachar walked in, lit a lamp with his torch and said, putting the lamp on the floor:

"Wait here, they will come for you."

"And where are you going?" Dio asked.

"To fetch Pentaur."

"Good, bring him here!" she said joyfully: she had been thinking about him all the time.

Issachar went out, closing the door after him.

Dio looked round the empty vaulted cell, long and narrow like the tomb--and perhaps indeed it was one. The walls were covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphic script and pictures.

She sat on the floor and waited. Tired of sitting still she got up and, taking the lamp, began looking at the mural paintings and reading the hieroglyphics. She was so absorbed in this that she did not notice the passage of time.

Suddenly the flame grew dim, gave a last flicker and went out. Walls of stifling, black, and, as it were, tangible darkness, closed in upon her. She was afraid of being left and forgotten in this coffin.

She fumbled her way to the door and began knocking and calling. She listened: a deadly stillness. She felt more frightened than ever. All of a sudden she recalled Pentaur and the fear left her: if he was alive he would come.

She sat down again, leaning her back against the wall and remained so. A strange stillness came over her; she did not know whether it was dream or waking. She was filled with the black, warm, sunny darkness as a vessel is with water. With quiet ecstasy she whispered the words she had just read in the hieroglyphic inscriptions, spoken by the dead man to the Midnight Sun, the hidden god:

"He is--I am; I am--He is."

And it seemed to her that she herself were dead and lying in the bosom of the earth like a child in its mother's womb, waiting for resurrection--birth into eternal life. And the dulcet harpstrings sang

"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh...."

All of a sudden a light flashed into her eyes. A bent, decrepit old man with a torch--a priest, to judge by his shaven head and the leopard skin thrown over his shoulder--stooping over her, took her by the hand, helped her up and led her out of the room.

"Who are you? Where are you taking me?" she asked. He said nothing and was about to lead her down some more steep narrow stairs.

"No, I don't want to go down," she said. "Take me up. Where is Pentaur? .... Why do you say nothing? Speak."

The old man made an inarticulate sound and, opening his mouth, showed her a stump in place of a tongue; he explained by signs that Pentaur would come down too and that somebody was expecting her. She understood that he meant Ptamose.

They walked further down. Again Dio did not know whether she was asleep or awake. The dumb man had such a dead face that it seemed to her Death itself was leading her to the kingdom of death.

They stopped at a closed door. The dumb man knocked. Someone from within asked "Who is there?" and when Dio said her name the door was opened.

In a low sepulchral chamber or sanctuary, supported by four quadrangular columns, cut out in the thickness of the rock, stood a sepulchral couch, with a mummy in a white shroud lying on it. There was, Dio thought, something terrible in its face--more terrible than death.

Her dumb guide took her past the couch into the depths of the chamber, where a vaulted niche, lined with leaf-copper, glowed, like sunset, in the light of innumerable lamps. There, in the smoke of fragrant incense, a huge black lop-eared Lybian ram--probably transferred from the upper temple--lay asleep on a couch of purple. This was the sacred animal, "the bleating prophet," the living heart of the temple.

A girl of thirteen--not an Egyptian to judge by her fair hair and skin--lay beside it, with her head on the animal's back and her eyes half-closed, like a bride on the bed of love. Completely naked, but for a narrow girdle of precious stones below the navel, shameless and innocent, she stretched herself out, pale and white on the black fleece, like a narcissus, the flower of death. She was one of the twelve priestesses of the god Ram--Amon-Ra.

At the approach of Dio, the little girl opened her eyes and looked at her intently. There was something so mournful in that look that Dio's heart was wrung; she remembered another victim of the god Beast--Pasiphae-Eoia.

Her dumb guide prostrated himself before the Ram. A young priest, with an austere meagre face, kneeling next to Dio, was burning fragrant incense in a censer.

"Bow down to the god!" he whispered, looking at her severely.

Dio looked at him, too, but said nothing and did not bow to the beast, though she knew it was dangerous--they might kill her for impiety.

When the girl opened her eyes and moved the Ram woke up and also moved slowly and heavily: one could see it was very old, almost at its last gasp. It opened one eye: the pupil, fiery-yellow like a carbuncle, glowed menacingly from under a dark heavy eyelid, with grey lashes, and looked into her eyes with an almost human look.

"The god opens his eye, the sun, and there is light in the world," the priest whispered the prayer.

When he had finished he got up, and taking Dio by the hand led her to the couch with the mummy. He bent down to the dead man and whispered something in his ear. Dio drew back horrified: the dead man opened his eyes.

His deathly, skeleton-like body, brown as a withered tree, showed through the transparent white of the winding sheet. The veins on the shrunken temples stood out as though stripped of flesh; the thin, thread-like lips of the sunk-in mouth and the gristle of the hooked nose--a vulture's beak--looked deathly under the tightly drawn shiny skin. But living, young, immortal eyes seemed to have been set in that mask of death.

The priest reverently lifted the mummy and raised its head on the couch. The dead lips opened and whispered, rustling like dry leaves.

"Listen, the Urma is speaking to you."

It was only then Dio grasped that this was the great seer--_urma_, watcher of the secrets of heaven and the prophet of all the gods of north and south, the high priest of Amon, Ptamose.

He was over a hundred years old--an age not infrequent in Egypt. Many people thought that he had long been dead, for during the last ten years, ever since the apostate king began to persecute the faith of his fathers, Ptamose had been hiding in subterranean hiding-places and tombs; some of those who knew him to be alive said that he would never die, while others asserted that he had died and risen again.

Dio knelt down and bending over the low couch put her ear close to the whispering lips.

"You have come at last, my dear daughter! Why have you delayed so long?"

There was an insidious caress in his voice, a magnetic power in his eyes.

"Pentaur has told me much about you, but one cannot tell all about others. Tell me yourself now."

He began asking her questions, but he seemed to know all before she had answered him and to read her heart as an open scroll.

"You poor, poor child!" he whispered when she told him how Eoia and Tammuzadad had perished through her. "To destroy those whom you love--that's your misery. Do you know this?"

"Yes, I do."

"Mind then that you don't destroy him also."

"Whom?"

"King Akhnaton."

"Well, if I do destroy him so much the better for you!" she said with a forced smile.

The shadow of a smile flitted in the eyes of the old man, too. "Do you think I am his enemy? No; God knows I am not lying--why should a dead man lie?--I love him as my own soul!"

"Why then did you rise against him?"

"I rose not against him but against Him who comes after him."

"The Son?"

"God has no Son."

"How can the Father be without the Son?"

"All are the Father's sons. Great in His love he gives birth to the gods and gives breath to the baby bird inside the egg, preserves the son of a worm, feeds the mouse in its hole and the midge in the air. The son of a worm is God's son, too. Stones, plants, animals, men, gods--all are his sons; He has no only Son. He who has said 'I am the Son' has killed the Father. _Ua-en-ua_, one and only is He and there is none other beside. He who says 'there are two gods' kills God. This is whom I have risen against--the deicide. He will save the world, you think? No, He will destroy it. He will sacrifice himself for the world? No, He will sacrifice the world to himself. Men will love Him and hate the world. Honey will be as wormwood to them, light as darkness, life as death. And they will perish. Then they will come to us and say 'Save us!' And we will save them again."

"Again? Has it all happened before?"

"Yes. It has been and it will be. Do you know the meaning of _Nem-ankh_, eternal recurrence? Eternity spins round and round and repeats its cycles. All that has been in time shall be in eternity. _He_ has been, too. His first name was Osiris. He came to us but we killed Him and destroyed His work. He wanted to make His kingdom in the land of the living but we drove Him to the Kingdom of the dead, Amenti, the eternal West: we gave Him that world and kept this one for ourselves. He will come again and we will kill Him once more and destroy His work. We have conquered the world and not He."

"There is no Son and perhaps there is no Father either?" Dio asked, looking at him defiantly. "Tell me the truth, don't lie: is there a God or no?"

"God is--there is no God; say what you like--it all comes to nothing; all men's words about God are vain."

"There now! I have caught the thief!" Dio cried, laughing into his face. "I knew all along you did not believe in God."

"Silly girl!" he said, as gently and kindly as before, "I am dead: the dead see God. I adjure you by the living God, consider before you go to Him whether there isn't truth in my words!"

"And if there is, what then?"

"Leave Him and stay with us!"

"No, even then I shall remain with Him!"

"You love Him more than the truth?"

"More."

"Go to Him, then, to the tempter, the son of perdition, the devil!"

"It's you who are the devil!" she cried, raising her hand as though she would strike him.

The dumb man rushed up to her, seized her by the arm and raised a knife over her.

"Leave her alone!" Ptamose said, and the old man drew back.

Suddenly there was a sound of bleating, low as the weeping of a child but old and feeble: it was the Ram. Ptamose looked at the animal and the animal at him and they seemed to understand each other.

"The Great One foretells woe, woe to the earth with its bleating!" the old man exclaimed, raising his eyes to Dio. "Go up--you will see what He is doing. It has begun already and will not end until He comes!"

Then he glanced at the dumb priest and said:

"Take her upstairs and don't molest her, you answer for her with your life!"

He shut his eyes and again looked like one dead.

Dio was running upstairs, with one thought only in her mind: "Where is Pentaur, what has happened to him?"

Going out of the catacomb by the same door as she had entered, she went past the ruins of Tutmose's tomb and walked along the south wall of Amon's temple. On the white stones of the temple square, bathed in moonlight, dead bodies lay about as on a battlefield. Half-savage, hyena-like dogs were worrying them. An emaciated looking dog, with a blood-stained mouth, was sitting on its hind legs howling at the moon.

Dio stopped suddenly. The needle of the obelisk showed black against the moonlit sky: the hieroglyphics on the mirror-like polished surface of its granite glorified King Akhnaton, the Joy of the Sun, and someone was sitting hunched up against the base of it---dead or alive Dio could not make out. She came nearer and, bending down, saw a dead woman, thin as a skeleton, stiffly pressing a dead baby to her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breasts, as she gazed at it with glassy eyes; her white teeth were bared as though she were laughing. It was the beggar woman from the province of the Black Heifer.

Dio recalled a black granite figure she had once seen of the goddess Isis, the Mother with her son Horus, and it suddenly seemed to her that this dead woman was Mother Isis herself, accursed and killed--by whom?

"Go up, you will see what He is doing," the words of Ptamose sounded in her ears.

She turned round at the sound of footsteps. Issachar came up to her.

"Where is Pentaur? What has happened?" she cried, and, before he had time to answer, she understood from his face that Pentaur had been killed.

The familiar pain of inexpiable guilt, insatiable pity pierced her heart. "To destroy those whom you love--that's your misery," the words of the seer sounded in her ears again.

It took her some time to grasp what Issachar was saying; at last she understood: they would not give Pentaur's body to him, but perhaps they might give it to her.

She followed him. A cordon of sentries guarded the approach to the gates of Amon's temple. The centurion recognised Dio: he had seen her at the Viceroy's white house; he let them both through and told the soldiers to give her Pentaur's body.

He was lying where he had been killed--by the threshold of the western gates. Their gold with the hieroglyphics of dark bronze--two words 'Great Spirit'--dimly glittered in the moonlight.

Dio knelt down, and looking into the dead man's face, kissed him on the lips. Their cold penetrated down to her very heart.

"It is my doing--His doing," she thought and the word 'He' had a double meaning for her: he--the king, and He--the Son.

IX

Dio was watching the fire beyond the River from the flat roof of Khnum's house. Charuk Palace was burning--the residence of the Viceroy Tutankhaton.

Built of very old dry cedar and cypress wood, it burned hotly and steadily like a resin torch. The bare crags of the Lybian Mountains above it glowed as though red hot; the flames were reflected in the river as a pillar of fire and white smoke coiled in clouds of moonlight blue and fiery crimson.

Khnum's servants were standing by Dio's side on the roof. All the faces wore the look of that unaccountable joy which people always feel at the sight of a fire at night.

"There, look where it has caught now! The women's apartments are on fire!" someone said.

"No, the prince's lodge," another answered.

"And now something in the garden is on fire, by the very lake, it must be Aton's chapel."

"I expect it's all Kiki's doing--his handiwork!"

"The rabble will warm their hands at the fire, you may be sure!"

"Look, mates, look, it's begun on our side, too!" said someone joyfully, pointing to the right side of the river, where fire broke out in two places at once.

"Ah, the dogs, they've set it ablaze from all sides!"

Khnum came up on to the roof by a steep staircase. Two servants supported him. He had just got out of bed: after the trial of Yubra that afternoon he had had a liver attack. Nibituia and Inioteph, his secretary, followed him.

An armchair was brought for Khnum and Nibituia sat on a stool at his feet. Dio came up to them and kissed them both on the shoulders.

"Is it long since you came back from town, my daughter?" Khnum asked her.

"I have only just returned."

"Have you heard anything?"

"The rebels have been scattered near Amon's temple, at Oisit, but at other places they are gathering together again, burning and plundering. I've heard that the Achaean mercenaries have come with Mahu, the king's chief of the guards."

"Extraordinary!" Inioteph muttered under his breath and shook his head with a smile.

Khnum looked at him sullenly from under his brows.

"What are you muttering?"

"Extraordinary, I say: there are plenty of loyal troops in the town and instead of sending them against the rebels they wait for the Achaeans!"

"Hold your tongue, silly! You must be careful what you say.... And where is the Viceroy?" he turned to Dio again.

"No one knows for certain. Some say he is on the other side of the river and others that he has come over to this side, with a large detachment of Nubians."

She very nearly said 'run away' and Khnum understood.

"Uhuh have mercy upon us!" Nibituia sighed. "What if he falls into the brigands' hands!"

Khnum looked at the fire for some time without speaking.

"Quite, quite, quite! Here it is, this is the beginning," he said, quietly, as though thinking aloud. "According to Ipuver's prophecy 'the slaves shall be masters, the beggars shall become new gods.' Our Yubra knew what he was doing, the worm: an ant knows how far the flood will reach and build its hill on safe ground. He has gone to the rebels just in time."

Dio, too, was looking at the fire and suddenly the familiar feeling of repetition, of eternal recurrence came over her--_nem-ankh_--'all this has been already'; the red flame of the fire lighted from below the bare rocks and was reflected as a red pillar in the water in exactly the same way; white smoke curled in clouds of moonlight-blue and fiery crimson just like this; now as then the cold of the dead lips penetrated her through and through--it never left her from the moment she kissed Pentaur good-bye.

There was a sound of rapid steps on the stairs. The centurion of the Viceroy's bodyguard, quite a young boy, ran up to the roof. From his dusty helmet, torn clothes, restless eyes and trembling lips one could see that he had just come from a serious engagement.

"Rejoice, my lord!" he said, approaching Khnum with a low bow, "His Highness asks me to tell you...."

He stopped breathless with hurry.

"Is His Highness safe?" Khnum asked, looking into the frightened face of the boy.

"Thanks be to Aton, he is safe now, but he has been in great danger. The riotous rabble is so turbulent, it is terrible.... His Highness will be here directly, he asks you to give him shelter."

"How many are coming with him?"

"Less than thirty."

"Where are the others?"

"Some have run away and others have been sent to Mahu, the chief of the guards: His Highness has given him the command of the city."

"Quite, quite, quite," said Khnum, shaking his head, thoughtfully: he understood that Tuta ran away like a coward. "Mahu is a brave soldier and will make short work of the rebels. For the moment the city is saved, though God only knows what the end of it will be.... Well, let us go, my son, I shall be happy to receive His Highness."

Khnum got up and went downstairs. All followed him.

Dio and Zenra went into Dio's room on the second storey. Dio began to undress. She was trembling so that her teeth were chattering. The cold still penetrated her through and through.

"Why are you trembling?" Zenra asked her.

Dio made no answer and lay down on the couch. Zenra tucked her in, kissed her and was about to go when Dio took her hand.

"Do you know, nurse, Pentaur is killed?" she said quietly, with apparent calm.

The old woman's legs gave way under her. She sat down on the edge of the couch so as not to fall.

"Good Lord!" she whispered, with the surprise people always feel at the news of a sudden death. "But how, where, when?"

"Just now in the riot by Amon's temple."

"Ah, poor thing!" Zenra wept. "Such a good man, and I had hoped..."

Dio smiled.

"You hoped he would marry me? Yes, the bridegroom was right enough, but the bride was no good.... Well, go now and don't cry. One mustn't cry for him--he died a good death. God grant us all to die like that!"

Dio closed her eyes, but as soon as Zenra went out she opened them again and looked at the other end of the room where a moonbeam fell upon the tall Amon's harp with crossed strings and two rainbow-coloured sun discs at the foot; their golden centres glittered dimly in the uncertain light. It was the harp on which Pentaur had played that afternoon his quiet songs of love and death.

Whether a cloud had covered the moon or Dio's eyes were dimmed with tears, she suddenly fancied that somebody's shadow flitted across the slanting square made by the moonbeams on the white wall. "It is he," she thought, and was all alert as though waiting for the harpstrings to sound. But all was silent and the shadow disappeared; the light on the wall was once more even and white. Dio covered her head with the bedclothes and settled down to sleep but she could not.

All of a sudden she heard the sound of the harp. She threw off the coverlet, sat up and listened: the chords were ringing and singing:

"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh, Death is now to me like healing, Death is now to me like refreshing rain, Death is now to me like a home to an exile!"

And again a shadow flitted across the wall. Terror possessed her. But the familiar pain of inexpiable guilt, insatiable pity was stronger than terror: oh, if she could only see his shadow, could only say to his shadow 'forgive'!

She got up from the bed and went to the harp. The strings continued vibrating quietly but clearly. Something living was fluttering down below. Dio looked down and saw a bat that was caught in the network of the crossed strings and was struggling against them.

Dio smiled bitterly and regretted the terror of the moment ago. The wall of death rose between them more impenetrable than ever, the dead went further away into death, as though he had died again.

She carefully released the captive, kissed it on the head and, climbing on to a chair, let it out of the long and narrow window right up by the ceiling.

She returned to her bed, lay down and sank at once into the deep heavy sleep of grief.

"Get up, my dear, get up, it is time to go," she heard Zenra's voice over her.

"To go? Where?" she muttered without opening her eyes.

"To the City of the Sun. Tuta is going to-day and we go with him. Come, wake up, sleepy head!"

Dio opened her eyes. The light was still dim in the windows: the sun had not yet risen. But a sudden joy flooded her like sunlight. It seemed she had only now understood what it meant--"Akhnaton, the Joy of the Sun!"

She dressed quickly and ran up to the roof.

The winter morning was still and misty and its stillness seemed to say that the riot was over, the earth had not turned upside down, but stood firmly and would go on doing so for a long time yet. Everything was as usual: two white turtle-doves were cooing in the garden under the black feathery cedar tree; the morning sounds, slightly muffled by the fog, were wafted from afar over the water of the canal: the braying of the donkey, the creaking of the water-raising wheels, the clatter of the laundry bats and the mournful droning song:

"Washerman, washing clothes in the river, Good neighbour of the crocodile swimming past"

As always one smelt in the morning freshness the slightly bitter smoke of manure-bricks, like the smell of autumn bonfires in the fields of her native north.

Suddenly a warm, rosy light shone through the cold whiteness of the mist, like heavenly joy through earthly sorrow. "Heaven is united with the earth; on earth there is the joy of heaven." Dio recalled the words of the Osiris mysteries.

"Joy of the Sun, Joy of the Sun--Akhnaton!" she repeated, weeping and laughing with joy.

Zenra called to her and told her to make haste. Dio ran downstairs to say good-bye to Khnum and Nibituia. Khnum gave her his blessing and kind old Nibituia put her arms around her and wept: she had grown to love Dio as her own daughter.

They stepped into a boat and went down the Big Canal to the Risit Harbour where the Viceroy's boat was waiting. Tuta was on it already: he had gone before daylight.

The boat had two masts; the sails with a check pattern were spread out widely like a falcon's wings; on the prow was the horned head of a gazelle and on the stern a huge lotus-flower: the rudder was a flowering shrub and its handle the head of a king in a high tiara; the deck cabins of carved acacia wood were arranged in two storeys, like a small palace, magnificently painted and gilded, and fenced round the top with a network of royal snakes standing on their tails; coloured flags were displayed everywhere. The whole ship was a living miracle of gold, purple and azure, half bird, half flower.

The anchor was raised and they set off. The sun had risen and the mists melted away. A fresh wind blowing through the mountain gorges, filled the sails; the oarsmen plied their oars and the ship swiftly glided down the river.

Tuta did not leave his cabin all day: he had toothache and his cheek was swollen. The cat Ruru went about with a bandaged paw: it had been hit with a stone in the riot. When at last Tuta did come out towards evening he looked so crestfallen that Dio thought he was just like a cat that had received a shower bath.

Later on the wits at court composed a song about this dismal journey.

Poor little Tuta Moans in his cabin. His cheek is swollen, Toothache very bad.

He warmed himself that night By the Charuk palace fire, Then exposed his heated cheek To a draught in terror dire.

"Well, he hasn't had his way this time, but he will the next," Dio thought. "You will be king over the mice, you cat."

The City of the Sun, Akhetaton, Egypt's new Capital, was built in the province of Hares, half-way between Memphis and Thebes, four hundred aters or five days' journey from Thebes.

They sailed in the day-time only and spent the nights in harbours: sailing at night was dangerous because of the many shallows and whirlpools. The bed of the Nile changed continually, especially in winter when the water was shallow. The pilot, standing on the ship's prow, was all the time feeling the bottom with a pole.

They passed the big commercial harbour, Copt, which lay on the caravan route leading through the desert to the Red Sea; the town of Dendera, with the great temple of Isis-Hathor; the town of Abt, where the body of the god-man, Osiris, was buried, and the most ancient of the Egyptian cities, Tinis, the capital of Men, the first king of Egypt.

But the cities were few; poor villages with huts made of the dried mud of the Nile were more frequent. The yellow streak of dead sand and the black streak of fertile earth--Black Earth, Kemet, was the name of Egypt--stretched on either side of the river, peaceful, simple and monotonous; the black of the Nile mud, humid and shining like the living 'pupil of Isis' and the yellow of the desert--life and death--were side by side, in an eternal union, eternal peace.

It was winter--sowing time. Men were ploughing, harrowing, sowing. Oxen slowly walked along drawing rich furrows with the plough. Here and there the first crops already showed their bright spring green. And the melancholy singing of the ploughman echoed far in the stillness of the fields.

The dull white waters of the Nile now flowed fast, pressed in by rocky banks; now widened out in pools and backwaters still as a pond, with impassable jungles of papyrus and green carpets of floating lotus leaves; only a hippopotamus, waddling ashore, and a lion or a leopard, coming down to drink, cut narrow paths in those thickets.

A long-legged ibis strode along the humid slime measuring the ground like the wise god Tot, the land-measurer. Crocodiles lay on the sandbanks, like slimy logs, and the birds benu--a kind of heron--walked along their backs picking off the water fleas or, fearlessly thrusting their heads into the open jaws, cleaned the monsters' teeth.

And long after the fall of dusk, the tops of the cliffs glowed a fiery yellow and the girlishly slender outlines of the palms and the coal black cones of the granaries showed black against the crimson west.

The nights were as still as the days; only the jackals barked and howled in the desert and the hippopotamus in the papyrus thicket bellowed, like a bull, at the dazzlingly bright moon, the sun of the night.

And in the morning the day-sun rose as radiant as ever. The two streaks--the black and the yellow--stretched along the banks as monotonously as before; the oxen walked along as slowly, cutting deep furrows with the plough and the melancholy singing of the ploughman echoed in the stillness of the fields.

And everything was as still and gentle as the face of the god whose name is Quiet-Heart.

On the evening of the fifth day after passing a rocky gorge that seemed like a dark and narrow fortress gate, the ship suddenly came out into a sunlit expanse of water. One gate was in the south and another in the north; between them, surrounded on all sides by mountain ridges, as by fortress walls, lay the great plain cut in two by the Nile: in the west green meadows stretched as far as the Lybian Hills that melted into rose and amethyst in the light of the setting sun; in the east lay the semicircle of rocky and sandy desert, rising gradually towards the parched rocks of the Arabian mountains. Between the river and the desert there was a long and narrow streak of palm groves and gardens. White houses were scattered among them like dice and a huge white temple towered above them.

"The City of the Sun! The City of the Sun!" Dio recognised it at once and with a joyous terror she thought: "_He_ is here!"

And just as when she stood by the body of Pentaur, the word 'He' had a double meaning for her: he--the king and He--the Son.