PART IV

THE SHADOW OF THE ONE TO COME

I

Saakera came up to Dio, his face so distorted that she hardly knew him.

"The king is waiting for you, go to him," he said, and was about to go when she stopped him.

"What has happened, prince?"

"He will tell you himself, go to him."

"I am keeping watch; I must wait till I am relieved."

"Never mind. I will take your place."

Dio ran up the stairs to the flat roof of Aton's temple.

The day was just dawning. The sky seemed empty and glassy like the open eye of a corpse. The waters of the river looked leaden. The earth was under the spell of sleep. The town below appeared dead. It was the hour when men's sleep is like death as is said in the hymn to Aton:

Men sleep in darkness like the dead, Their heads are wrapped up, their nostrils stopped, Stolen are all their things that are under their heads, While they know it not. Every lion comes forth from his den, All serpents creep out of their holes, The creator has gone to rest and the world is silent.

The white walls of the temple were dull-green as though under water. All was dead; only on the great altar of the Sun a perpetual fire was burning and the sun disc of Aton above it--the highest point of the whole huge edifice--glowed with a dull-red glow as though a ray of an invisible sun were reflected in it.

Dio saw the king in the distance, but she did not recognise him at once. He was sitting on the altar steps in a curiously cramped attitude, with his chin resting against his knees and his face buried in his hands. "Sitting on their heels in the dust," she recalled the refrain of the Babylonian song about the dead in the underworld, mournful as the howling of the night wind. He probably did not hear her step, for he did not stir. She did not dare to call him, thinking he was asleep.

Suddenly he raised his head and looked at her in a way that made her heart stand still.

"Ah, Dio! Have you seen Saakera?"

"Yes."

"Has he told you what I wanted to say to you?"

"No."

"Sit down."

She sat down beside him. He took her hand, kissed the palm of it and smiled in a way that wrung her heart again.

"There, now I have forgotten. I remember what I wanted to say, but I can't think how to say it. It must be the fit that has made me so forgetful."

She understood he was referring to the epileptic fit he had had recently.

He stretched himself so that the knuckles of his fingers cracked, and yawned loudly. Two deep wrinkles formed round his mouth. He looked like the ancient Sphinx with the face of Akhnaton.

"Do you remember my telling you, Dio, that my kingdom was coming to an end? Well, it has come to an end. I want to go away."

"How go away? Where?"

"Anywhere, so long as I go away from here, escape out of this prison.... But why do you ask? You know it all better than I do."

"But how are you to go? Will they let you?"

"No one is to know, except you and Saakera. You two will help me. He has already promised."

"Promised what?"

"I will tell you. It was he who killed Maki; she had the child by him. He has just confessed it. He is so wretched that he wants to kill himself and drink the remainder of the poison out of Merira's ring, my present to him. But I have thought of a worse punishment for him: he is to be king when I go away."

"But can he do it?"

"He will be no worse than I am. And it won't be for long: he will hand over the power to Horemheb, the Viceroy of the North. Horemheb refuses to be king so long as I live, but I expect he will agree when I am dead."

"How, when you are dead?"

"When I go away I shall be dead to all. No one will know that I have gone, and those who hear of it will not believe it but will think me dead."

Dio knew that Horemheb was an enemy of Aton's faith. Would the king ruin the work of his whole life by putting him into power? She wanted to ask the question, but felt she had better not.

"This is how Saakera is going to help me," the king went on. "We shall set out for Memphis together to see Horemheb and on the way I shall go ashore somewhere in the night--and that will be the last they will see of me."

"Will you go alone?"

"Yes. I will take off my royal dress, put on the clothes of a nab priest--you know, those that walk about the high roads collecting money for the temples, and go off with a staff and wallet."

"What for? What will you do?"

"What I have done all my life. Do you remember, Iserker said 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight'? Well, I shall be preparing it. I will leave the great and go to the small, leave the first and go to the last; the first have not heard me--perhaps the last will...."

He was saying extraordinary things in a dull, dreary way. He kept yawning; perhaps those who 'sit in the dust on their heels in the underworld' yawn like that, too.

"Well, why are you silent? Do you think I am mad?"

"No, it isn't that...."

"Speak, don't be afraid."

"I think .... forgive me, sire, but all you kings are like babies: you don't know what poor, hard life is like. As soon as you have gone you will perish senselessly--of thirst, of hunger, from a wild beast, or a brigand's knife. You will be like a naked child on naked earth...."

"'Be merciful to yourself, Uaenra!' Is that it? Do you remember who said it? My friend, Merira. No, Dio, my Father will not leave me. He who preserves worms and midges of the air will not forsake a man. And what is more terrible--a robber's knife or Tuta's flattery, thirst in the desert or Merira's poison? Isn't this so, Dio the prophetess?"

"It is. But I shall say, like Merira again: can't a king do more good than a beggar?"

He laughed.

"No, you are not Merira. You don't believe what you are saying. I have reigned for many years and much good I have done! Ramose is right: nothing is more vile than empty noble words, nothing more wicked than empty good words. I thought I could make people happy, bring heaven down to earth--and this is the happiness I have bestowed upon them: blood is being shed everywhere between the Delta and the Waterfalls, it is hell upon earth. I wanted to efface the boundaries of the fields, to make the poor equal with the rich, and what has happened is that the whole of Egypt is like a dirty Jews' village where people live and die like cattle in perfect equality! And it is all done by the decree of the king Who-lives-in-Truth--Ankh-em-Maat--a fine name! Iserker wanted to stab me, Merira to poison me, but isn't it doing me too much honour? To spit into the liar's face would be punishment enough.... Do you ever have shameful dreams, Dio, so ridiculous that one could die of laughter?"

"Yes, I know."

"Ah, so you have them, too.... Well, I have had such a dream--I nearly died of laughter. To laugh at oneself is death. 'I am He,' is what I laugh at, what is killing me. Laughter will kill me one day like epilepsy.... Dio, Dio, if you love me, save me, help me!"

"How can I help you?"

"Stay with her!"

She understood: with the queen.

"Does she know?"

"No."

"How then will you .... deceive her?"

"I can't deceive her--she will find out. But if at least it weren't just now, after Maki's death--one wound on the top of another.... Later on, when everything is over, you will tell her, you alone will know how to tell her so that she should forgive me...."

"No, she won't forgive, and if she does...."

"I know, you need not tell me! Oh, it would be better if she didn't forgive me! But she is sure to forgive.... What am I to do, what am I to do? To stay is to kill myself: to go away is to kill her, to trample upon her heart? ... Help me, stay with her. Perhaps you will save her. Remember, if she dies I shall die, too."

"You ask me for a miracle?"

"Yes, do a miracle--a miracle of love. You do love her, don't you? Love her to the end. Relieve me of my burden and take it upon yourself. Will you?"

"I will."

She was silent for a while and then asked:

"You will go away and I shall never see you again?"

"Yes, you will; I will call you as soon as I can and we will go to Him together!"

He spoke no more, and raising his knees as before put his chin on them and wept, covering his face with his hands.

She put her arm round his head and pressed it to her bosom, stroking it gently with the other hand.

Shiha, the eunuch, was right: the king did not know how to cry: he swallowed his tears convulsively, choked, trembled as in a shivering fit. But Dio's caress gradually calmed him, and he only shuddered from time to time with a sob like a child tired of crying.

"Perhaps you are right," he began again, "and I shall perish senselessly. Saakera wants to kill himself; perhaps I do also.... Dio, my sister, oh if you only could...."

"What is it? Tell me."

"If you could only tell me whether I ought to go away?"

Dio knew that the right answer was "no one but yourself can tell." But she also knew that saying this would mean abandoning him--the naked child upon the naked earth.

She pressed his head to her bosom and said:

"You ought."

The trumpets down below played the hymn to Aton:

"Glorious is Thy rising in the East Lord and giver of life, Aton!"

The dead sky revived and turned rosy. A red ember blazed up in the misty gorge of the Arabian mountains and the first ray of the sun glittered on Aton's disc.

The king rose, took Dio by the hand and led her up the sloping approach to the great altar of the Sun. He turned to the East, raised his arms and said:

"I come to glorify thy rays, living Aton..."

But his voice failed him: he suddenly felt that he could no longer pray to Aton.

He fell on his knees and cried:

"My God, my God, have mercy upon me, a sinner! In thee have I put my trust, let me never be ashamed...."

And with a sob he beat his head against the flagstones:

"Let me never, never be ashamed!"

On the twenty-ninth day of the month of Hoyak, December, on the thirteenth anniversary of the foundation of the City of the Sun and the day of Aton's nativity, the king set out on his journey.

Everyone wondered at his breaking his oath not to leave the domain of Aton, but they did not wonder very much; it was the privilege of a king and a god to release himself from his vows, and besides, many had noticed that his fervour for the new faith had begun to cool. The decree prohibiting the worship of the gods had never been declared after all, and the day of departure was fixed on the very day of the great festival, as though on purpose to cancel it.

The king made no secret of his journey: he was going to Memphis to see Horemheb, the Viceroy of the North, to persuade him to take Saakera's place as heir to the throne. Sensible people rejoiced: they did not want Saakera for king; there was nothing to be proud of in being ruled by a king who had his ears boxed by his Ethiopian concubine; Horemheb, the husband of the queen's sister, Nezemmut, a direct descendant of the great king Tutmose the Third, had every right to reign; the gods themselves had commanded him to do so. "The gods rocked thy cradle," as it said in the song of Amon's priests. He was a faithful servant of the king and was not implicated in any court or priestly intrigue; but he had not been false to the faith of his fathers, had not worshipped the new god, and the enemies of Aton hoped he would destroy the work of the apostate king and restore the old gods.

Everyone rejoiced except the queen. The parting from her husband frightened her; she had never been parted from him during the fifteen years of their married life. Did she suspect anything? If she did she showed no sign of it, but submitted without a murmur. She did not ask him to take her with him--she knew he would not; and besides she could not leave Rita, who was ill. And she herself was not well: she had a racking cough, was feverish at night and there was an ominous flush in her cheeks.

The king had not been seen so joyful for years as he was on the day of his departure. Only when he took leave of the queen a shadow passed over his face; but he looked at Dio and was happy again.

The crowd on the quay was joyful, too. When the king's ship set sail, a white falcon, the bird of Horus, circled over it, foretelling a happy journey.

The people stood for some time watching the three ships, magnificently painted and gilded--marvels of gold, purple, and azure, half birds, half flowers--glide along the white water: after the overflow the Nile turns white 'like the milk of Isis.'

Memphis was four hundred _aters_ from the City of the Sun, down the river.

The further the king went the happier he was, as though he had, indeed, escaped from prison. It made him happy that the yellow streak of the dead sands and the black of fertile earth stretched on either side of the river simply, quietly and monotonously: life and death side by side in eternal union, eternal peace; that the slow oxen were drawing deep furrows in rich earth and the bright green crops already showed here and there, and the monotonous singing of the ploughman echoed far in the stillness of the fields.

A deserted temple of the Sun, built a thousand years before Akhnaton, stood at the edge of the desert in the middle of a great pyramid cemetery, within four or five hours' journey from Memphis down the river.

A full moon, huge and red-hot, was rising beyond the Arabian Mountains when the king's ship stopped by the temple. The king, Saakera and two priests, with sacred utensils, the bread of offering, wine for libations and incense, came ashore.

The only priest and guardian of the temple, an old man of a hundred years, met them and wept when he heard that the king wanted to offer a sacrifice: the last person to visit the temple was king Tutmose the Fourth, Akhnaton's grandfather.

They walked from the harbour to the temple down a long covered passage. On the large flat roof of the temple a huge obelisk, the Sun stone, Ben-ben, stood on a pyramid-shaped base, facing an altar made of five huge blocks of alabaster, exactly like the one in the City of the Sun, on the roof of Aton's temple.

The king burned incense, made the libation and prayed in silence for a few minutes. Then he sent everyone away and walked with Saakera to the secret gates that led into the desert. He gave him a scroll of papyrus--his resignation from the throne, and a letter to Horemheb, in which he implored him to save Egypt and accept the crown.

When Saakera had sworn that all should be done, the king embraced and kissed him on the mouth and, taking off his royal tiara, with a golden snake of the sun, Uta, over the forehead, put it on Saakera's head; he took off all his royal robes, put on the dress of a wandering priest, _uab_, slung a wallet over his shoulder, took a staff in his hand and walked out of the gate.

The full, dazzlingly bright moon stood high in the starless sky. Coal-black shadows fell upon the white sand that sparkled like snow with sapphire sparks, and the black triangles of the pyramids stood out against the sky on the distant horizon.

Saakera watched the king go. He walked as though he had been a wanderer all his life, with a light quick step, along a faint path--a jackals' track--to the neighbouring fishing village, Ptah-Sokkaris, consisting of some two dozen mud huts.

His figure grew smaller as he walked away; he had been the size of an animal, now he was the size of a bird, a mouse, an ant, a point, and finally he disappeared, melted away in the fire of the moon.

"Strange!" Saakera thought, unconscious of the tears that were trickling down his face. "There is no God, I know there isn't, then why...?"

He broke off and started as though someone else had finished for him:

"There is God, there is! It is because there is God that he has gone away!"

II

The pyramid cemetery of the ancient kings stretched along the edge of the desert from Memphis to Heliopolis--a three days' journey.

A great battle of men with death had once been fought here; death conquered, men ran away, the field became a desert; only the pyramids remained like fortresses, besieged but not taken.

In the very middle of the cemetery, in the plain of Rostia, the three largest pyramids stood--those of Menkaur, Hafra and Cheops. The many hundred-weight blocks of stone over the king's tomb within were packed so close together that a needle could not be thrust between them; outside, the mirror-like facing of sandstone was so perfect that the pyramids looked like huge crystals. The eternal triangles, rising from the earth to one point in the sky, proclaimed to men the mystery of Three: "I began to be as one God, but three Gods were within me."

All the other tombs had been destroyed; the royal mummies had been thrown out and lay about in the sand, turning to dust under the feet of the passers-by. Bats, hyenas and jackals lived in the tombs. Thieves had plundered them for a thousand years, but had not yet succeeded in clearing everything away.

As the blind singers sang at feasts:

"I have heard of what befell my forefathers: The walls of their tombs are destroyed, Their coffins are empty like coffins of beggars, Forsaken by everyone on earth. Their dwelling-place is no more. It is as though they had never been.

In a wild rock close by that looked like a lion at rest, the great Sphinx was carved, no one knew by whom and when. Its face was the first human face sculptured in stone. Its names were Ra-Harmahu--the Sun-at-the-edge-of-the-horizon; Khu-Zeshep--Shining Terror, and Kheper--Rising from the Dead.

Perpetually buried by the sand, it lifted its head from under it with a mysterious smile on the flat lips, to see the first ray of the rising sun; and there was the dazzling terror of death and resurrection in its eyes of stone.

Not far from the Sphinx stood a temple built also no one knew when and by whom. The square pillars and rafters of such enormous stones that one could hardly believe them to have been carved by human hands were of black granite; all was smooth, bare and divinely simple.

The temple had not been destroyed and, indeed, there was nothing to destroy in it; but it had fallen into decay like everything around it. The high road from Memphis to Heliopolis went past it and part of the temple had been turned into an inn. The alabaster floors were dirty and the mirror-like granite had turned dull with the smoke of kitchen fires.

One day towards the end of winter shepherds were keeping the night watch in the field of Rostia; the tombs in the hills close by served as cattle sheds. They lighted a bonfire of manure bricks and straw right at the foot of the Sphinx. The night was cold; the tall grass was white with hoar frost.

Wayfarers who had not been able to obtain shelter at the inn settled by the shepherds' bonfire. Issachar was among them. When King Akhnaton had left the City of the Sun for Memphis, he went after him and, not finding him there, set out in search of him. Issachar's uncle, the merchant Ahiram, who was going with his young daughter-in-law, Tabitha, to the town of Tanis on business, was there, too, and so was Yubra, the former slave of Khnumhotep; wounded in the Nut-Amon rising, he had only just recovered after a long illness.

"Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord," Yubra was saying. "He shall come down like rain upon the freshly cut meadow, like dew upon parched-up earth. He shall save the souls of the humble and the oppressor he shall lay low...."

"Of whom are you speaking?" asked Merik, a shepherd, with a kind and intelligent face somewhat like that of King Hafra, the pyramid builder, whose effigies stood in the temple by the inn. "Do you mean the new prophet?"

"No, the One of Whom the prophet speaks."

"Prophets prophesy, magpies chatter and it makes no difference to us one way or another," grunted Mermose, a sickly-looking man with a sarcastic smile on his thin lips, a saltworker from the Miuer lakes.

"Very true! Prophets are no use to poor people," Anupu, an old peasant, confirmed. Rough and shaggy he looked like a tree-stump dug out of the ground and covered with earth. He had been silent, eating bread soaked in water and wrapping his sheepskin closer round him, but suddenly he grew lively and began talking as though he had recalled something.

"I have dragged the plough myself for forty years--never had any money to buy oxen; and you know how little land we have. And the summer before last part of the bank was washed away during the overflow and a quarter of my field had fallen into the river and the house very nearly went, too. Tax collectors came: 'You are in great arrears, Anupu,' they said, 'sixty bushels of wheat, sixty of spelt and a hundred and seventy of barley.' 'I have nothing at all,' I said, 'have patience with me, fathers!' 'No,' they said, 'the treasury cannot wait, lie down.' And one made a sign behind the other's back to give him a bribe, but I had nothing to do it with. So they laid me out and gave me a flogging, and to my wife, too--she had stood up for me and abused them. And they sent me to clean the canals in Set's salt marshes during the very fierce heat. I had to stand up to my knees in water, devoured by midges, shaking with fever. I still get a shivering fit when the night comes on. And a neighbour told me the other day that my wife is dead, my house has tumbled down, my two sons have been taken for the army, and my daughter has been led astray by some Midian merchants. I have nothing now to return to.... And so I say, what is the use of prophets to me?"

Merik added some straw to the bonfire. The flames leapt up, lighting the face of the Sphinx in the black starry sky. Tabitha, with a baby in her arms, was sleeping between the Sphinx's lion paws.

Tabitha means 'gazelle.' She had the eyes of a gazelle, the long, dark eyelashes of a child, and such a smile that Merik's son User, a young man with a sad and girlishly charming face, wanted to cry with happiness at the sight of her. He looked at her as though he were praying: he fancied that she was Mother Isis with the baby Horus and that the Shining Terror fixed its stony eyes into the starlit darkness merely so that it might watch over the Mother and the Babe.

"It goes ill with peasants, but soldiers are no better off," said a thin little old man, rather like a grasshopper--a retired centurion, Aziri. "A soldier climbs up the hills carrying burdens like a donkey, drinks water out of pools like a dog; when he sees the enemy he trembles like a bird in a net; and when he comes home he is covered with wounds, cankered with illness, like an old wormeaten tree; he cannot work and is ashamed to beg--he may as well lie down and die."

He did not say it, but all understood "prophets are no use to a soldier."

"Come, friends, don't be so gloomy," Merik said, looking round at them all with a serene smile. "I have lived in the world for forty years, I have seen much evil, but also a great deal of good. One can't say of a man's life that it is quite good, nor that it is quite bad either; it's all mixed up; to-day is bad, to-morrow will be better."

"No, it won't be better," Mermose retorted. "It is bad now but it will be worse. It is written in the ancient scrolls: 'the Lord will give men a tremulous heart, their eyes shall melt away, their souls shall pine and they shall tremble night and day; in the day they shall say, 'oh, if it were night!' and at night 'oh, if it were day!' 'The sky over their head shall be brass and the earth under their feet shall be iron and dust shall fall upon them till they all perish.'"

"No, they will not perish: the Saviour will come and save the perishing," Yubra said, simply and quietly.

"How will he save them, by the sword or by the word?" asked a puny little man, with a spotty face, a sharp red little nose and squinting, shifty eyes. He was a scribe, dismissed from the service, Herihor or Heri, a quarrelsome, debauched and backbiting man, as one could see from his face.

"And what do you think?" Yubra answered evasively: he was afraid of Heri who was said to be a spy.

Heri did not answer at once; he had a pull at his flask and then said, with a wink:

"The sword. Or, if there is no sword at hand, with an axe or a stick. Until we get the rich by the throat and give their fat bellies a shake, they won't give back what they have plundered.... But it's enough babbling, we must act!"

"How?"

"Raise a cry throughout the world, 'rise up, rebel, paupers, kill, plunder, burn!' A great fire will be kindled and a thing that has never been will happen; beggars will be as gods and then the earth will turn upside down like a potter's wheel!"

"You should not say such things, my son!" Ahiram stopped him. "You must not rail against the rulers even in your thoughts, nor speak evil against the rich in your own chamber, for a bird of the air may carry your words."

"A-ah, you are afraid? Well, then it's no use talking," Heri laughed and he drained the last drop out of his flask.

"But who are you, where do you come from?" Yubra asked with sudden alarm.

"And who are you and your prophet? Tramps, I expect, runaway slaves, rogues, game for the gallows, we have seen enough of such, ugh!"

He paused, looking round at them all with sleepy but still cunning eyes, and then spoke amiably again.

"Come, dear old man, don't be cross, let us kiss! Ah, mates, I am sorry for you! You are poor, ignorant people, anyone can injure you and there's no one to stand up for you. And I am so fond of poor people--I am ready to lay down my life for them!"

And suddenly bending down to Yubra, he whispered in his ear: "Do you know Kiki the Noseless? He is a man of sense, cleverer than any prophet. They say he is stirring things up again on the Upper Nile! That's the man to join! Shall I take you to him?"

Yubra said nothing, and drew back. All were silent, as though they really were afraid to speak.

Far away in the desert the hungry roar of a lion was heard suddenly, and the dogs by the sheep-fold barked and howled frantically.

Merik rose and thanking his guests for their conversation with stately courtesy typical of the men of the desert, went with two shepherds on his watch round. The others began to settle down for the night on the warm sand by the bonfire, wrapping themselves in furs and cloaks.

Issachar went up to Yubra and said, taking him aside:

"May I see the prophet?"

"Why not? Everyone will see him to-morrow."

Isaachar paused and, looking round to see if anyone was listening, asked in a whisper:

"Who is he, where does he come from?"

"A _uab_ priest, but where he comes from I do not know."

"You really don't know or don't want to tell me?"

"No, I really don't know."

"And what is his name?"

"Neser-Bata."

Issachar knew that Bata was one of the names of Osiris: the Soul of Bread, of God's flesh broken and eaten by men; and Neser meant offspring, Son. Neser Bata--Son of Osiris, second Osiris.

"Are you an Israelite?" Yubra asked.

"Yes."

"Your Moses is a great prophet, but this one is greater than he."

"Only one Man on earth will be greater than Moses--do you know Who?"

"I know."

Issachar looked at Yubra as though wishing to ask something else.

"You will see for yourself and know," Yubra said in answer to that silent question, and walked away.

Issachar lay down by the bonfire, wrapping his cloak round him, but could not go to sleep for thinking about the prophet. There was something in Yubra's words and reservations that suggested the mysterious smile of Khu-Zeshep, the Shining Terror. He dropped asleep just before daybreak; he vaguely heard the distant roar of the lion and remembered the voice crying in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.'

Merik's son, too, could not go to sleep that night: he kept looking as though in prayer at the mother with the child asleep between the lion paws of the Sphinx.

Tabitha's ass dozed, hanging its head. The flame of the dying fire seemed to stand like a fine and sharp sword in the still air. From the low-lying meadows down by the river came the melancholy call of the hoopoo. The stars grew dim and twinkled like flames blown out by the wind. The sky turned white and rosy and there glowed in it a star, pure and dazzling like the sun. A red-hot ember blazed up in the misty gorge of the Arabian Mountains and the first ray of the sun lighted the Sphinx's face.

The baby woke up and cried. The mother gave him the breast. Then she held him up, showing him the sun. The boy laughed and stretched out his arms as though he would seize the sun.

The same mystery was in the smile of the baby as in the smile of the Sphinx. User fell on his face and worshipped Baby Horus--the Shining Terror.

Issachar woke up when the sun had already risen above the palm trees. He jumped up, afraid of having slept too late and missed the prophet.

Some people were hurrying past him.

"Where are you going?" he asked them.

"To Ieket-Chufu, to hear the prophet," they answered.

He followed them. Walking ankle-deep in sand along a trade between sharp, projecting rocks, they climbed on to the flat top of the hill Ieket-Chufu, facing the Great Pyramid of the same name. In the shadow the grass was still white with hoar-frost, but in the sun it had melted and fell in drops clear and bright as tears.

The expanse seen from the top of the hill was boundless: sands, yellow as the lion's hair, stretching to the edge of the horizon; bluish-green meadows and palm groves by the river; golden points of the Heliopolis obelisks, sparkling against the bare parched rocks of the Arabian hills purple as amethyst and yellow as topaz; and close by, opposite the hill, the huge pale phantom of Cheops' pyramid glimmering in the rosy sunlit mist. The perfect triangles rising from the earth to one point in the sky proclaimed to men the mystery of Three: "I began to be as one God but three Gods were in me."

The people crowding on the flat top of the hill surrounded the prophet so closely that Issachar could not squeeze his way to him. The lame, the halt, the dumb, the blind were among the crowd, as well as lepers, paralytics and men possessed by the devil. Neser-Bata laid his hands upon them with prayer and they were healed. Then he stood on a hillock in the middle of the plateau. The sun rising behind him surrounded the prophet with dazzling brilliance that seemed to come from his body. Issachar could not see his face. "Thy flesh is the flesh of the Sun; thy limbs are beautiful rays. In truth thou dost proceed from the Sun as the child from its mother's womb," he recalled the words of the service to Aton.

The prophet's voice was heard and the crowd grew so still that one could hear the drops of melting hoar-frost falling to the ground. The sound of that voice was so familiar that Issachar's heart throbbed with an incredible presentiment. He looked down: he was afraid of seeing and recognizing him.

Neser-Bata was speaking of the second Osiris, of the Son who was to come, of Him Whom the prophets of Israel called the Messiah.

Issachar raised his eyes, saw and recognized: "it is he!" and covered his face with his hands as though blinded by the sun. Yet he did not believe his eyes and looked once more, but by that time the prophet had gone down from the hillock and could not be seen for the crowd.

Issachar went up to Yubra and said:

"I want to speak to Neser-Bata."

"Go down to Khu-Zeshep, he will walk past there," Yubra answered.

Issachar walked down the hill and sat down on the sand at the foot of the Sphinx.

The sun was rising and the black shadow of the great pyramid slowly moved along the white sand like the shadow on a sundial measuring out minutes and ages, the passage of time and eternity. "How many minutes--how many ages will it be till He comes?" Issachar thought.

He suddenly saw Neser-Bata coming towards him down the hill. He went to meet him, fell at his feet and cried:

"Rejoice, Akhnaton, King of Egypt!"

He gazed into his face still unable to believe his eyes; he recognized him and yet he did not.

The prophet looked at him in silence and said, shaking his head:

"No, my son, you are mistaken, I am a beggar and a wanderer, Bata. And who are you?"

"Issachar, son of Hamuel, the one who wanted to kill you. Don't you know me?"

Suddenly Bata bent quickly down to him and whispered:

"If you love me, don't tell!"

And he looked into his eyes. There was such power in that look that had he said "die!" Issachar would have died.

But when Bata turned to go he embraced his feet and asked:

"May I follow you?"

"No, you may not. Go your way and I shall go mine: we shall both come to Him and meet there."

"To Him? But aren't you....?"

He gazed into his face once more, terror-stricken: it suddenly seemed to him that this was neither the beggar Bata, nor the king of Egypt, Akhnaton, but Someone else.

"Who are you? Who are you? I adjure you by the living God, who are you?" he whispered desperately.

The prophet shook his head and smiling pointed to the black shadow on the white sand.

"Do you see my shadow? As this shadow is from me, I am from Him. He comes after me but I am not He!"

He said it and walked along the foot of the Sphinx, followed by his shadow. He turned the corner and disappeared, and the shadow disappeared too. Only the light footprints were left on the white sand.

Issachar bent down and not daring to kiss them kissed the sand where the shadow had passed.

III

There was a riot in Busiris, a town in the Northern district.

As usual it was started by the Israelites working in the brick factories when they were no longer given any chopped straw necessary for making bricks, but were ordered to chop it themselves, while producing the usual quantity of bricks. Porters and loaders from the harbour joined them when they heard that boys younger than fifteen were to be taken for the army. The mothers said indignantly, "What is the good of bearing sons? They are no sooner grown up than they are driven to the slaughter, and you, their fathers, put up with it!" Part of the garrison of Kidjevadan mercenaries, who had received in their monthly ration nasty smelling sesame oil instead of olive oil for ointment, also joined the rioters.

Usirmar, son of Ziamon, the governor of the province of Busiris and an old soldier of the times of Tutmose the Fourth, sternly put down the rebellion. With a number of other rioters the tramp Bata, the slave Yubra and the Jew Avinoam--this was the assumed name of Issachar--denounced by the scribe Herihor, were seized as the chief culprits.

"This accursed Bata," so the denunciation ran, "a godless and seditious fellow, having gathered a band of thieves and brigands like himself, intended to cause rebellion not only in the Busiris province, but throughout Egypt, preaching that people should not obey the authorities and that they should refuse to serve in the army, that the poor ought to be equal to the rich, saying that the boundaries between fields should be effaced and the land be common property, and wealth taken from the rich and given to the poor. The said accursed man blasphemes against the gracious god-king and says in his vain talk that there is only one King in heaven and on earth--the god Ra-Aton."

The denunciation was illiterate but cleverly put together. It was a troubled time. Horemheb, the governor of the North, had just set out to the eastern province, Goshen, to put down a rising of the Israelites who were always dreaming of a second Exodus, and to repulse the attack of the Sinai nomads against the Great Wall of Egypt. Terrible rumours reached Usirmar of King Akhnaton's madness, suicide, or assassination, of a new rising in Thebes and an imminent war between the two rivals for the throne, Saakera and Tutankhaton.

The riotous band of the false prophet, Bata, might be the first spark of a new conflagration.

When Bata had been brought in fetters from the prison to the governor's white house, Usirmar ordered everyone out of the room and looked at him with surprise: he was so unlike a criminal. Usirmar had seen King Akhnaton only once, some twenty years ago, and would not have known him now.

"What is your name?" he asked the prisoner.

"Bata."

"Whose son are you?"

"God's."

"Are you joking? Take care."

"No, I am not joking. I do not know my earthly father; I know only the Heavenly."

"Who are you, where do you come from?"

"You see, I am a tramp. I walk about all over the country but I do not remember where I come from."

"Is it true that you incite the mob to rebellion and want to make the poor equal to the rich?"

"No, it is not true. Rebellion is an evil thing, and I want what is good."

"Why then don't you honour our gracious god-king?"

"I do honour the king, but the king is not God; only one Man on earth shall be God."

"What man?"

"Men call him Osiris, but they do not know his real name."

"Do you know it?"

"No, I don't know it either."

"And will _He_ be like you?"

"No, the sun is not like the shadow."

"Is it he then who will make the rich and the poor equal?"

"He, He alone and no one but He! You have said it well, my brother."

"I am not a brother to you, but a judge. Don't you know that I have the power to put you to death or to pardon you?"

"Whether you put me to death or pardon me, either will be a welcome gift to me," Bata answered with such a serene smile that Usimar marvelled more than ever and thought 'Poor crazy creature, one can't be angry with him.'

He asked him many more questions, but could not discover anything. Usirmar was a just and intelligent man: he understood that the denunciation was for the most part untrue and wanted to pardon the unfortunate prisoner, but could not do so legally; he gave him a light sentence, however; a light corporal punishment and then three years labour in the Nubian gold mines.

The sentence was carried out. With a number of other convicts Bata was sent in a large flat-bottomed barge, a floating prison, up the Nile to the distant Elephant City, Ieb, in the South. A caravan route went from Ieb through the terrible desert of Kush. There in the mining wells in the burning hot depths of the earth old and young men, women and children, with chains on their naked bodies, worked day and night under the overseer's whip, grinding quartz on hand mills, washing gold sand, and dying like flies of heat and thirst.

Issachar had escaped out of prison before the trial. The cunning sons of Israel bribed the gaolers and helped him to run away. Yubra escaped with him. They hired from a fisherman a sailing boat, old and damaged but swift, and sailed up the Nile following the prison barge at a distance.

They overtook and passed it by the City of the Sun. Issachar went ashore, found the chief of the guards, Mahu, and told him that Akhnaton, King of Egypt, was on the barge that was approaching the city.

Knowing something about the king's sudden disappearance, Mahu was not very much surprised, but he did not believe Issachar at once. Detaining him, he promised to reward him if his words proved to be true and, if not, to put him to death; he gave orders to stop the barge and at nightfall went to the harbour with fifty black soldiers on whose loyalty he could rely. Going on board he called the chief gaoler and ordered him to bring the prisoner called Bata; he took Bata into a deck cabin, shut the doors and windows and bringing a lamp close to his face recognised King Akhnaton.

"We guards are used to all sorts of things," Mahu used to tell afterwards. "We have seen so much that our hearts are like stone. But at that moment my heart melted like wax!"

It would have been terrible to him to see a wretched madman instead of King Akhnaton, Joy of the Sun; but it was more terrible to find before him a happy and rational man.

"Life, strength and health to the king," he began, but his voice failed him, his knees gave way under him and, falling at the king's feet, he wept.

The king bent down and said, putting his arms round him:

"There, Mahu, don't cry. I am happy here...."

And added, after a pause:

"I am better here than at home."

Mahu was still looking intently at him, hoping to see a madman; but the king certainly was not mad, and, all at once, Mahu felt as though he himself were going out of his mind.

"What are you saying, what are you saying, sire? You are better here among thieves and murderers than among your faithful servants?"

"Yes, Mahu. My brother, do you love me? I know you love me. Do then what I ask you: tell no one about me and let me go."

"God knows, Uaenra, I would gladly give my soul for you, but it is easier for me to kill you than leave you here."

"You will kill me if you don't leave me," the king said, and again he bent down and, putting both arms round Mahu's head, looked into his eyes with entreaty.

Mahu said afterwards that in another minute he would have broken down, lost his reason and gone, leaving the king behind. But Akhnaton had pity on him.

"You cannot?" he whispered as though lost in thought, looking at Mahu so that his heart again melted like wax. "Well, there is nothing for it then, let us go!"

They went from the cabin on to the deck. The king stepped into a litter. The soldiers lifted it and carried him to the palace.

IV

Dio woke up, opened her eyes and saw that the dull gold of the palm leaves on the capitals was turning silver in the bluish light of the morning, while the flickering flame of the night-light still threw a reddish reflection on the pale green, pointed leaves at the bottom of the columns; in the middle, where the disc of the god Aton was spreading its hand-shaped rays over the royal couple, the two lights merged in one.

Dio lay on a panther skin spread on the floor between two beds; the queen slept in one, but the king's bed was empty. Dio raised her head and looked at the sleeper: she slept quietly, breathed evenly; only at times the fine brows twitched like a butterfly's antennae and the wrinkle between them grew deeper, as though she were thinking hard even in her sleep; the pale face with the black shadow of the long lashes was beautiful in spite of the ravages wrought by disease.

Dio looked at the queen and it seemed to her it was he and not she: the sister-wife was strikingly like her brother-husband, especially in sleep.

Her hand, transparently pale with the blue veins standing out, hung over the edge of the bed. Dio touched it with her lips as lightly as the night wind and again it seemed to her it was not her hand but his.

"The two are one," she thought. "How could they have parted? How could he have left her? What will become of her, what will become of him?"

He had told the queen before his departure that he was going to Horemheb, the Viceroy of the North, to persuade him to accept the throne. The queen had always dreamed of resigning the throne and being free from the heavy yoke of sovereignty. She was glad and believed him, though not quite; she was surprised at his not taking her with him: for so many years they had hardly ever parted for a single day, and now in those dreadful weeks after Maki's death he left her, ran away as it were. She felt he was concealing something from her. She soon learned that he had never arrived at Memphis and no one knew or wanted to tell her where he was. She asked Dio, but she did not know either, or did not want to tell. Dio said nothing for days, but at last, seeing that the torture of uncertainty was worse than anything for the queen, she told her.

The queen listened to her calmly, as though she had been prepared for it; she had submitted to him in everything and she submitted to this, also. But she still failed to understand why he had not taken her with him. Together in happiness but apart in sorrow: so then he did not love her as much as she loved him? But for this, too, she blamed herself: she evidently had not known how to love; had she loved him more this would not have happened.

That same day she took to her bed and did not get up any more. The heart disease she had had for years grew very much worse.

Dio never left her for a moment: she remembered her promise to the king. But she sometimes fancied that her love was worse than hatred. She acted like a skilled torturer who preserves his victim's life, inflicting wounds and then healing them to prolong the torture. She deceived the queen from day to day, telling her that they were looking for the king, would soon find him, had already traced him; but each deception was found out and the torture grew worse.

Sometimes she felt indignant on her account: "What has he done to her! He did not want to kill the victim with his own hands--he ran away; he took a light burden upon himself and put upon her a burden no human being can bear."

That night the invalid had a terrible heart attack. The physician, Pentu, thought she would not survive it. The pang in her breast was so severe that she turned blue as though she had been strangled. No drugs were of any help. Finally Pentu decided to try, as the last resort a very powerful and dangerous remedy--the stupefying juice of Kidjevan belladonna, Lybian sylphium, Arabian myrrh and poppy juice with powdered turquoise and bones of the sacred ibis.

The remedy helped: the invalid dropped asleep.

Would she wake? "Oh, if only...." Dio thought and broke off, remembering the king's words, "if she dies, I will die with her." She knew this would be so.

The curtain on the door moved. Dio turned round and saw that Pentu had thrust his head in. She got up and went to speak to him behind the door in the covered passage leading to the river.

The early morning sky, grey as though covered with clouds, reminded her of the winter days when wet snow fell on Mount Ida. But the sun would rise and the sky would be as blue and cloudless as ever. White mist coiled like smoke over the low-lying meadows beyond the river, a water-bird among the reeds was calling in a creaking voice, and as though in answer to it the wheel of a well creaked somewhere in the distance. There was a smell of bitter smoke and winter freshness.

Pentu took Dio by the hand, led her away from the door and whispered in her ear.

"The king has come back...."

"Where is he?" Dio cried.

Pentu silenced her with a gesture.

"Sh-sh! She may hear. We must prepare her; if she heard suddenly it would be fatal...."

"Where is he?" Dio repeated in a whisper.

Pentu pointed to the door at the end of the passage. Dio rushed towards it, but stopped and put her hands to her head.

"Oh, Pentu, how are we to tell her? I cannot, you had better do it."

"No, Dio, you, no one but you!"

"Where did he come from? How did they find him?"

"Mahu brought him, but I don't know where from."

"Have you seen him?"

"I have."

"Well, how is he, what does he look like?"

"Better not ask. Such a thing hasn't happened since the days of the god Ra! In rags, unwashed, unshaved, bristles on his face, thin, black with sunburn and, dreadful to say, scars on his back. But, thanks to Mahu, no one except us knows anything about it--he has managed it all splendidly! We washed, shaved and dressed him...."

He stopped, as though lost in thought and then turned to Dio again.

"Well, why do you stand still? Go to her and I will keep watch here. When the king heard she was ill he rushed to her and we had difficulty to hold him back.... Go, don't be afraid. God willing, everything will come right!"

Dio returned to the bedroom. The queen was lying with her eyes open. She looked at Dio intently.

"Where have you been?"

"Just by the door."

"Whom were you talking to?"

"To Pentu."

"What about?"

"About the king. Good news...."

"Oh, yes, they are looking for him, they will soon find him. They have traced him already. Oh, Dio, aren't you tired of it? It's a mean, silly game! You know I was thinking last night that if I loved him more I wouldn't suffer as I do. He is not a child and not insane--he knows what he is doing. He has gone away--very well, it means it's better for him it should be so. Dio, my dear, my sister, he loves you. Be with him, love him to the end, don't forsake him; if need be, die with him. But don't lie any more...."

She raised herself on her elbow and looked at Dio still more intently.

"What is the matter with you? Why do you tremble?"

"I am afraid. I kept telling you lies and now when I must tell the truth I don't know how to do it. Do you know what Pentu and I were talking of just now? Of how best prepare you for joy...."

"What am I saying, good Lord!" she thought with terror, but could not stop herself, it was like rolling headlong downhill.

"What joy?" the queen whispered, and she too began to tremble.

"Why, a messenger whom Mahu had sent to Memphis has just returned; he had seen the king in two days' journey from here: the king knows you are ill and is coming home. He may be here to-morrow evening. If you don't believe me, ask Mahu...."

Watching the change in the queen's face, Dio felt that she had found the right way, and, fearing no longer, led her with a firm hand by the very edge of the abyss; and she might have led her through safely and saved her. But suddenly a cry was heard, distant at first and then nearer and nearer; someone was running and shouting. A door banged close by. Dio recognized the voice of Princess Meritatona, who though still weak after her illness, was no longer confined to her bed. She must have heard of the king's return and was running to him shouting: "Abby! Abby! Abby!"

With a low exclamation the queen jumped off the bed and ran to the door. Dio held her back, but she struggled, crying:

"Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!"

She wrenched herself free, rushed through the door, pushed Pentu away, and ran towards the door at the end of the covered passage; having guessed the direction from Rita's voice. But after taking a few steps she fell on her knees and stretching out her arms cried "Enra!" in such a voice that an old fisherman mending his net in a boat some distance down the river heard it and wondered "who can be screaming in the palace as though they were being murdered?"

A door at the end of the passage was flung open and, running out of it, the king rushed to the queen who lay on the floor.

Kneeling down he bent over her and lifted her up, passing one arm round her waist, and supporting her head with the other. He looked into her face. With a low moan she opened her eyes and looked at him with a blissful smile, repeating:

"It's you! It's you!"

Suddenly she trembled all over and struggled like a fish on a hook. Her head was thrown back and he felt her body growing heavy. He laid her on the floor and, bending down, kissed her on the lips, receiving her last breath in that kiss.

That same evening the queen's body lay on the bed in her chamber and all except the king and Dio were weeping over her.

"I am thy sister who loved thee on earth, No one has loved thee more than I."

Dio recalled the wail of Isis.

The king took her by the hand and said, leading her aside, "It's a good thing you don't cry."

Dio made no answer and only gazed at him.

"We mustn't cry," he went on, with a quiet, fearful smile. "It is better so."

"Better?"

"Yes, better. Now we are free. Let us go to Him together. Will you?"

"No!" she wanted to cry out, but looking at him she suddenly grasped that it was not he who was speaking. And it was not to him she replied with a smile as quiet and fearful as his own:

"Let us go!"

V

I am the prisoner and you the gaoler, isn't it so, Ramose?"

"No, sire, it isn't. You are my king and I am your slave.... Why do you laugh?"

"It is no use crying over sour milk, as Ay says. The thing is done, the bird is caught. There are sentries at every door: they bow down to the ground, but they don't let me pass--they cross their spears. And so this means you are my slave?"

"The guards are there to protect you, sire. You know yourself, hired assassins, sent by Tuta, are all over the city. You remember Iserker's knife and Merira's poison? Of course I must protect you! You are laughing again?"

"Forgive me, my friend. You are no good at lies: Ramose lying is like a hippopotamus catching a flea! It isn't from assassins but from myself you are trying to protect me. Be frank, tell me what do you want of me?"

"I have told you many times, Uaenra: you are king--so be a king...."

"I am no longer king: I have resigned the throne."

"A king cannot resign when he has no heir. And Saakera is dead...."

"Yes, my dear brother! Tell me how he died."

"He fell on the battlefield like a hero. He led the army of the god Ra against Tuta's rabble; when our men lost heart he rushed forward and drew them all after him with his battle cry--do you know which? 'Sun's Joy, Uaenra!' He had a spear wound in the stomach and suffered for hours. He had lived without God, but he died a believer. 'There is God, there is,' he kept repeating before his death, and he spoke of you--he was happy to be dying for you...."

"You were wounded in the same battle?"

"It's a mere scratch, not a wound. But many brave men have given their lives for you, sire...."

He paused gloomily.

"And do you know who has Amon's ring with poison, your present to Saakera?" he spoke again, smiling. "Merira. No sooner had Saakera breathed his last than Merira sent envoys to me begging for the ring in exchange for twenty war chariots and ten prisoners."

"Did you give it?"

"No, I refused. But the ring was stolen all the same, by his men, I expect. Let him keep it--poison suits the snake. He had poured out half into your cup but the other is left for himself. Perhaps there will be enough for Tuta as well!"

He went on talking at length about the war and rebellion, imploring the king to show himself to the people, so as to deprive Tuta of his chief weapon--the belief that the king was dead and he, Tuta, was the only legitimate heir to the throne. But the king no longer listened, he paced rapidly up and down the covered passage leading to the river, the very one in which the queen had died a fortnight before.

Ramose was sitting in an armchair; he did not like to sit in the king's presence, but Akhnaton pressed him to do so, knowing that he had difficulty in standing because of the wound in his leg.

Big clouds, white and round, were reflected in the smooth surface of the river that had entered its banks for the winter, and boats, with outspread sails flitted like birds over the clouds. An amber ray of the afternoon sun fell upon an old painting on the inner wall of the passage: a girl of twelve was giving a boy of thirteen a half-open tulip to smell; there was the timid languor of love in their graceful, as it were dancing, movements, and in their childish faces a sadness that was not childish. It was a portrait of the king and queen in their youth.

The king looked with strangely insensible surprise at the little girl, thinking that at that very moment her dead body was twisting and turning, like the burning bark of a tree, in the heavy resinous perfumes of the embalmers. He recalled his own saying that 'a corpse is worse than dung,' and began to tremble with quiet laughter, that ran down his body like shivers or like crackling sparks in a fur that is being smoothed with the palm.

Tired of walking he sat down in an armchair next to a small chess table that stood between him and Ramose. A knife lay on the table. The king took it out of its sheath and looked at the silver pattern on the bronze blade--lions hunting antelopes among the reeds.

"Whose knife is it?" Ramose asked.

"I don't know," the king answered. "See how fine and flexible it is--a Keftian 'willow leaf.' It must be Dio's.... What do you think, my friend, is a knife dangerous in a madman's hands?"

"You keep joking, sire, and I am in no mood for jokes."

"Joking? No, not quite. I sometimes fancy...."

He broke off. Shivers again ran up and down his body like crackling sparks in a fur.

"Well, what are we to do about an heir, Ramose? You say there is not one, and I say there are two: Horemheb and Tuta--choose whichever you like."

"Horemheb will not accept the crown while you live, and Tuta is a thief, a murderer, a low born cur...."

His breath failed him; turning purple and shaking with fury, he brought out:

"Tuta--king of Egypt? No, sire, this shall not be so long as I live."

He got up.

"Are you going?" the king asked, getting up, too.

"I am going; there is nothing more to say."

"Wait. There was something else I wanted.... Yes, I know. Do what you think best, it is all the same to me, choose whom you like, only let me go. I cannot bear it any longer...."

His lips trembled, his face twitched like that of a child ready to burst into tears and, before Ramose had time to think, the king fell on his knees before him.

"Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!" he wept, wringing his hands.

If the earth had given way under his feet or the sky had fallen upon him, Ramose would have been less horror-stricken.

He quickly bent down to the king, lifted him up, put him in a chair and himself fell at his feet:

"My king, my god, Sun's Joy, Sun's only Son, all shall be as you wish!"

But the king was no longer listening; he had turned away and was staring before him with fixed, wide-open eyes.

"What is it, sire?" Ramose said gently touching his hand.

The king started, slowly turned to him and looking straight into his eyes said with a quiet smile:

"Do you know, Ramose, when they were beating me with sticks in the Busiris court it was less shameful than this."

He rose and taking the knife walked towards the door. Ramose rushed after him.

The king turned round and shouted: "Let me go! Let me go!"

Freeing his hand he threatened Ramose with the knife, but at the same moment, with a terrible scream, fell on the floor at his feet, struggling in a fit of epilepsy.

Ramose was a courageous man, and he had seen men in a fit more than once. He knew that in the 'sacred illness' men are possessed by god; but he could never decide whether the king was possessed by god or the devil, and only now as he looked at him he decided it was by the devil.

"Help! Help!" he cried, running away as though driven by an unearthly terror.

VI

As many were astonied at Him, His visage was so marred more than any man and his form more than the sons of men." Dio recalled Issachar's prophecy when she looked at the king in his illness.

The first fit was followed by a second and a third one, the worst that he had ever had. Pentu, the physician, was afraid he would not live. He did live, but it was no joy either to himself or to others: it was terrible to see the soul dying in a living body.

The days and hours, however, were not all alike. Sometimes as though waking from deep sleep or a swoon, he understood everything and spoke so rationally that those around him had hopes of his complete recovery. But then his mind was clouded again. He sat for hours on the floor in some dark corner with his back to the wall and his legs stretched out, looking into vacancy with eyes dim as a new-born baby's; or slowly swaying his body to and fro, he muttered something under his breath rapidly and inarticulately as in delirium, laughing quietly, or crying, or humming a song. Or he repeated one and the same word over and over again with meaningless persistence. But sometimes there was an obscure meaning in these repetitions.

"Aton-Amon, Aton-Amon, Aton-Amon," he kept repeating one day, making one word of the two, as though on purpose: he had devoted his whole life to dividing them and now he seemed to have understood that it had not been worth while.

Or he asked himself with perplexity, as though he had forgotten and were trying to remember:

"Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?"

And suddenly, turning to Dio, said with a perfect understanding of what he was saying:

"Oh, if I only knew who I am, I should be saved!"

He often had visions of his mother Tiy, of his wife, Nefertiti, of his daughter, Maki, and spoke to them as though they were living.

He had a vision of Shiha, the eunuch, too: standing by his side on the top of a pyramid, he heard the laughter of innumerable crowds down below, saw the face of Aton the Sun red with laughter in the sky and covering his face with his hands repeated:

"Shame! Shame! Shame!"

But when a flash of consciousness lighted the darkness of his clouded mind, he was wise once more--wiser than he had ever been.

At first Dio rejoiced at these lucid intervals, but she came to fear them: after them the darkness was even more terrible; he suffered acutely each time that madness closed in upon him.

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" he cried out one day, repeating an old Babylonian psalm.

And suddenly Dio felt in a way she had never done before that it was He Himself, the Son Who was to come. She was terrified at the thought, but the memory of it remained in her soul like a trace of lightning.

They moved the king to the Maru-Aton palace where Princess Makitatona had died four months before.

It was a three-storeyed building, high like a tower; the bottom was of brick, the top, light and airy, of cedar and cypress wood, trellis-worked, gilded and painted like a jewel casket. On hot days drops of resin trickled down the match-boarded walls and the palace was fragrant like a censer.

The flat roof had a carved railing all round it--a row of Sun-serpents, with gold sun-discs on their heads, their throats dilated with poison. A fire was perpetually burning upon an altar on the roof and, on an alabaster column in front of it, the sun disc of the god Aton made of _cham_, a mixture of gold and silver, glittered in the sky like another sun.

As soon as the king felt better he went up on the roof to pray.

On the tenth day of his illness there was such an improvement in his health that Dio began to hope again.

He went up to the roof in the evening, himself chopped some sandalwood and put it on the altar, and when a white pillar of smoke rose in the still air he knelt down, and stretching his arms to the hand-shaped rays of Aton's sun began to pray. Standing beside him, Dio heard the words of an ancient Babylonian psalm:

"Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord! Hear my voice, let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication and enter not into judgment with Thy servant, for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified. The enemy has persecuted my soul, has smitten my life down to the ground, has made me to dwell in darkness as those that have been long dead. My spirit is overwhelmed within me, my heart within me is desolate. I stretch forth my hands unto Thee; my soul thirsteth after Thee as a thirsty land. Hear me speedily, O Lord, for I am Thy son!"

The sun had set behind the Lybian hills and in the afterglow the sky seemed covered with feathers of fire; the green of the palm groves had turned blue and the mirror-like surface of the water, almost invisible, like another sky, reflected exquisite opalescent shades of white, blue, green, yellow and rose.

The day had not yet died in the west but the night was already being born in the east: there, in a violet velvety sky, a full moon was glowing, yellow as though filled with honey.

When he had finished his prayer, the king rose, looked round and said:

"How lovely it is, O Lord!"

Tears trembled in his voice. Dio knew they were tears of joy and yet she looked at him anxiously. He smiled at her and gently drawing her towards him put his cheek against hers, as he often did, with a childish tenderness.

"Ma, Ma, how lovely it is! Don't be afraid, I am not raving, I know you are not Ma."

Ma was the Cretan goddess, the Great Mother of gods and men.

And he added, after a pause:

"You and Nefertiti and Tiy, all three of you are One.... Don't be afraid, all shall be well, I will recover ... And if I don't, never mind, it will be well, too: even in my madness I will praise reason, the sun of suns!"

He sat down in a chair and Dio on the ground at his feet. Gently stroking her hair, he said:

"Yes, maybe I shall die in my madness; I shall be cursed, rejected, mocked by men. 'Ah, you silly, you have disgraced yourself before all the world,' as Shiha, the eunuch, says. And yet, I have been the first to see Him Who is to come! The first ray of sunshine is on the top of the pyramid while the rest of the earth is still in darkness: this is how His light rests upon me ... Why are you crying, Dio? Are you afraid that He will not come?"

"No, I am not afraid, I know He will come. If you have, so will He.... But when, when? Men have waited for him for centuries and may have to wait for centuries more! And when He does come, it will not be for us...."

"Yes, for us, too. Do you remember, I said to you 'Let us go to Him'? And now I say we shall not go to Him, but He will come to us!"

And suddenly he began muttering, as though in delirium:

"Soon! Soon! Soon!"

VII

Tutankhaton's troops were approaching the City of the Sun.

Tuta had proclaimed throughout Egypt that King Akhnaton and the heir-apparent, Saakera, had been killed by the traitor Ramose and that he, Tuta, henceforth the only legitimate heir to the throne, was going to put the regicides to death. Troops loyal to Ramose met the rebels at the southern frontier of Aton's province. The issue of the battle was doubtful. The rebels retreated, but so did Ramose. The old leader understood that his cause was lost; his soldiers were dispirited; disturbed by rumours from the enemy camp, they did not know with whom and for whose sake they were fighting or who the real rebel was--Tuta or Ramose. The only way to silence these rumours was for the king to show himself to the troops; but Ramose had hardly any hope of this left.

All the same he retreated towards Akhetaton, so as to give the final battle in the presence of the king. "Perhaps he will think better of it and refuse to give up his kingdom to Tuta, the thief," Ramose thought.

But there was unrest in the city, too. Robber bands of Tuta's followers had stopped the supply of corn to Akhetaton. There were hunger riots, first among the prisoners of war and hired labourers, numbers of whom had been employed in building the new capital, then among the troops left for the defence of the city and, finally, in the Jews' Settlement.

Ramose came to Akhetaton on the first day of the riots but did not venture to enter the town with his untrustworthy troops, and Tuta, who was following him, overstepped the holy boundary of Aton's province.

About one o'clock in the morning, Mahu galloped up from the city to the royal gardens of Maru Aton, bringing nine war chariots, and gave orders to place the best detachments of the palace guards so as to defend Maru Aton from a double attack of Tuta's army and rebels from the city.

"Where is the king?" Mahu asked, running into the ground floor hall of the palace.

"He is asleep," Pentu, the physician, answered, glancing at Mahu in alarm: he looked terribly upset and his head was bandaged: he had evidently been wounded.

"Go and wake him," Mahu said.

"Wake a sick man in the middle of the night?"

"Make haste and go!"

"But what has happened?"

"Rebellion in the town. The king must be saved."

Both ran up to the first storey where the king lay asleep on a humble bed in a small panelled room that had belonged to the princess's nurse, Asa.

They called Dio and sent her to the king. Screening the flame of the lamp with her palm, she went on tiptoe into the king's room and stopped to look at him from a distance. He slept so sweetly that it seemed a pity to wake him. But recalling Mahu's words 'life is dearer than sleep,' she went up to the sleeper and, bending down, kissed him on the head.

He woke up and smiled, screwing up his eyes at the light.

"What is it, Dio? Sleep, I am well."

"No, Enra, we mustn't sleep, get up. Mahu has come and says he must see you."

"Mahu? What for?" he asked, looking at her attentively and half-rising from the couch.

"He will hear it at once in any case," she thought and said:

"There is a riot in the town."

"And Tuta is coming with his army?" he guessed: he must have heard something before. "Why haven't I been told sooner? Though it is better so--all at once."

He spoke calmly, and, as it were, thoughtfully.

"Where is Mahu?"

"Shall I call him?"

"No, I will come."

He began dressing. Dio helped him: they were not shy of each other. He dressed without hurry.

"What is this?" he asked, seeing a glow in the windows.

"There is a fire somewhere."

"Where?"

"I don't know. Mahu will tell."

They went into the next room. From there the fire in the town could be seen: the king's granaries, the barracks, the palace and Aton's temple were burning.

Mahu approached the king and fell at his feet.

"Life, power, health to the king...."

He could not speak for tears. The king bent down and embraced him.

"What is it, Mahu? Don't cry, all will be well. Are you wounded?" he asked, seeing the bandage on his head.

"O, sire, never mind me--we must save you!"

"Save me from what?"

Mahu briefly told him what had happened and exclaimed, falling at his feet again:

"Come, come quickly! The chariots are waiting at the garden gates. We shall manage somehow to go through the desert to the river lower down, where there are no ambushes, take boats and in another five days be in the loyal provinces of the North."

"Run away?" the king asked, as calmly as before.

"Yes, sire," Mahu replied. "Tuta's rabble may be here any minute. I can't answer for your life."

"No, my friend, I cannot. If I run away, what will happen here, in the holy province of Aton? Endless war because of me! I have begun with peace and I shall end with war? I say one thing and do another? No, I have had enough of this shame. And from whom should I run away? From Tuta? But what can he do to me? Take away my kingdom? Why, this is just what I wish. From the rebels? And what will they do to me? Kill me? Let them--death is better than shame. Ankh-em-maat, He-who-lives-in-truth, is to die in falsehood? No, in death I shall say what I have said all my life: let there be peace...."

He stopped suddenly and listened; the blast of trumpets and the beat of drums were heard in the distance. There was a panic in the palace and in the gardens.

The centurion of the Hittite amazons, the king's bodyguard, ran up the stairs shouting:

"Tuta's soldiers are here!"

"Where?" Mahu asked.

"At the garden gates. The fighting has begun."

All, except the king and Dio, ran downstairs.

The fierce noises of war invaded the quiet Maru-Aton gardens: the blast of the trumpets, the beat of the drums, the neighing of horses, the creaking of carts, the rumble of chariots, the cries of the chieftains. Torches glowed in the black shadow of the palm groves: the moonlit sky was red with the dancing flames of the fire that made the face of the moon look pale and crimsoned the gold disc of Aton above the altar on the temple roof.

The gardens were surrounded by a quadrangle of high, thick walls, like a fortress, with only one gateway that gave on the river; an inner wall divided the enclosure into two: stables, cellars, granaries and barracks of the palace guards were in the southern half while the northern was occupied with summer houses, shelters, chapels of the god Aton and the palace by the big artificial pond.

The vanguard of Tuta's troops stopped on reaching Maru-Aton. Knowing how many treasures it held they wanted to plunder it.

They tried to force the gates. Mahu's soldiers repulsed them every time. But reinforcements came to the enemy continually and the rebels from the town joined them. They surrounded the garden, besieging it like a fortress and, at last, forced their way in.

The battle was now fought at the inner wall. The half-savage mercenaries from the north--Achaeans and Trojans--fought like lions. Naked but for brass leggings and brass plumed helmets, they flung small round shields behind their backs and fought desperately with the triangular iron sword-knife, one in each hand. Overcome by superior numbers they retreated to the pond. The water in it was shallow and only reached to the men's waists. The battle continued in the water so fiercely that it became clouded and warm with the blood.

Eteocles, the youthful leader of the Achaeans, was dying on the bank under Maki's withered birch tree and as he looked at its white stem he saw through the darkness of death his far-off native land.

Some were fighting and others plundering.

The tender stalks of the flowers in the beds broke under the soldiers' heavy tread. There were pools of blood on the floor of the chapel. The wood of the sacred pillars was chopped for bonfires, the purple of the sacred curtains was torn to make leg wrappings; the gold was scraped off the walls with fingernails. An old woman from the Jewish settlement, seeing that a precious casket had been screwed into the floor and could not be carried away, bit at it so hard that she secured a pearl with her teeth.

Naaman, the prophet, also from the Jews' Settlement, was stamping on a gilded wooden disc of Aton--a gold one would not have been given even to a prophet--dancing and shouting.

"God of vengeance, Lord God of vengeance, show Thyself! Arise, judge of the earth, and judge the proud!"

Cellars were broken into. They were so flooded with wine that people went down on their hands and knees and lapped it up. People drank themselves to death. Two drunken men had a fight and falling to the bottom of the cellar were drowned in the wine.

The screams of women and the blood of murdered children formed a ghastly tribute to their respective gods--Aton, Amon or Jahve.

The Sun's garden, God's paradise, was turned into hell.

A handful of Achaeans and Trojans, who had not been massacred in the pond, retreated towards the palace that stood in the narrow part between the pond and the north wall of the garden. The palace was defended by Mahu's war-chariots, the black archers, Lycian slingers and Hittite Amazons.

Hearing that the king was in the palace, Tuta's soldiers attacked it: they wanted to take the king, dead or alive, so as to end the war.

At the same time Tutankhaton's main forces were approaching from the south and Ramose's troops from the north. The great battle that was to decide the destinies of Egypt began under the very walls of Maru Aton. It looked phantom-like in the darkness of the night, the white moonlight and the red glow of the conflagration. The blast of the trumpets, the beat of the drums, the neighing of horses, the rumble of chariots, the clashing of swords, the whistling of arrows, the moans of the dying and the cries of the victors were all mingled in one seething hell. And the centre of it, the fixed axis in the whirling hurricane of the war, was the quiet palace tower.

The king and Dio were looking down from its flat roof.

"It's all because of me!" he repeated, wringing his hands, or, stretching them out to the combatants, he cried with desperate entreaty.

"Peace! Peace! Peace!"

It was as though he still hoped that men would hear him and stop fighting.

Or he stopped up his ears, covered his face with his hands, so as not to hear, not to see; or, running up to the roof bannisters, bent down and looked greedily at people dying and killing with his name on their lips, and there was such anguish in his face that it seemed as though every sword and spear and arrow pierced his heart as its aim. Or he ran to the staircase door that had been locked, banged it with his fists, and knocked his head against it, shouting:

"Open!"

And when Dio tried to restrain him he struggled out of her arms and begged her, with tears:

"Let me go to them!"

She knew he wanted to throw himself among the combatants so that they should kill him and stop killing one another.

Now and again he suddenly grew quiet and sat down on the floor, muttering something under his breath, quickly and inaudibly, as in delirium. Listening attentively, Dio caught once the words of the incantation the old nurse Asa had said over the dying Princess Maki:

"Mother Isis calls From the top of the hill, Horus, my son, The hill is on fire, Bring me water, Quench the fire!"

"He will die insane," Dio thought, and sitting next to him on the floor, she gently stroked his head and whispered: "My poor little boy! My poor little boy!"

Listening to the roaring laughter of war, seeing the sun disc of Aton turn red as though filled with blood, she thought: "Perhaps we were mistaken after all and God is not Love but Hate and the law of the world is not peace, but war?"

Time ceased to exist, it was eternity: there always had been, was, and would be this seething hell of war to the furthest ends of the earth from the beginning to the end of time.

"Bring me water. Quench the fire!"

No, no water would quench it and they would burn in it for ever and ever.

"My poor little boy!" she kept whispering as she stroked his head and suddenly she added, with despairing tenderness: "My poor little girl!"

"Here I, too, am going mad," she thought. They both smiled--they understood each other--and there was exquisite joy in this in spite of all the pain.

She saw blood on his face: he must have been wounded with an arrow when he looked at the battle leaning over the parapet; he had not felt it and she had not noticed it. She wiped off the blood with the edge of her dress, but a trace of it still remained.

Gazing at him she recalled 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."

"You are He! You are He!" she whispered, with joyous terror.

"No, Dio, I am only His shadow," he answered, calmly and rationally. "But if His shadow suffers such agony, what will His suffering be?"

Suddenly he raised his eyes to the sky and jumped up.

"He is coming!" he cried in a voice so changed and with his face so altered, that she thought he would fall down in a fit. But she, too, looked at the sky and understood.

A gigantic, pyramid shaped ray, with its base on the ground and its apex in the zenith, flashed in the greyish sky of the morning, above the dying glow of the city fire, and the white opalescent lightnings of zodiacal light danced and quivered in it.

"Quick! Quick!" he repeated, trembling like those tremulous lights in the heavens.

They both made haste as though they were indeed meeting the Unexpected One.

Blowing up the embers on the altar the king put on them splinters of sandalwood and cannacat. Lighting a long golden censer, shaped like an outstretched hand, Dio gave it to the king and herself took a cithern--a brass hoop, threaded with fine silver snakes that gave a high ringing sound. Both stood before the altar facing each other:

"I come to glorify Thy rays, living Aton, one and eternal God!" he intoned, and it seemed to her that his voice drowned the roaring laughter of the hell let loose.

"Praise be to the living Aton, who didst create the heavens and the secrets thereof! Thou art in the sky and Thy beloved son, Akhnaton, is on earth!" she replied.

Suddenly the sound of axes came from below. The building trembled as though it were going to fall; the enemy had rushed into the palace and the battle was being fought indoors.

"Fire!" someone shouted on the stairs and the cry re-echoed, with a familiar dread, in Dio's heart: she remembered how she had lain on the pyre, a victim ready to be slain. She rushed to the bannisters, leaned over, and in the breach of the garden wall saw Tutankhaton, the conqueror, in his chariot, wearing the royal helmet with the royal serpent over the forehead.

He saw her also and shouted to her, waving his hands. She did not hear the words, but understood that he wanted to save her and was calling to her to come down.

A black warrior, agile as a monkey, climbed to the top of a palm by the roof of the lodge and cleverly threw from there right at Dio's feet a rope-ladder. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she picked it up, fixed one end of it to the bannisters and let the other down.

It would have been quite easy for her who had tamed wild bulls on the Knossos arena to take the king in her arms and carry him down--he was thin as a skeleton and no heavier than a child.

But she stopped to think. She leaned over the bannisters once more and looked down. Tuta went on shouting and waving to her. She looked into his face: it was neither ill-natured nor kind; neither stupid nor intelligent: the everlasting mediocre face of the average man.

"Akhnaton will disappear, Tutankhaton will remain and the kingdom of this world shall be Tuta's kingdom," she recalled the saying and thought "Should I spit into that face? No, it isn't worth while."

She threw the ladder into the fire--the bottom storey was in flames already--and returned to the king.

Hearing and seeing nothing, he stood on the same spot stretching out his hands to the rising sun.

"O Lord, before the foundations of the earth were laid Thou didst reveal Thy will to Thy Son Who lives for ever. Thou, Father, art in my heart and no one knows Thee, but me, Thy son!"

With furious roaring laughter red tongues of flame shot up on all sides through the white coils of smoke, as though the hell let loose had leapt up to heaven.

Dio rushed to the king, looked into his face that was like the sun and recognized Him Who was to come.

"Is it Thee, O Lord?"

"It is I!"

He embraced her as a bridegroom embraces a bride and in a fiery storm of love raised her to the Father.

The palace, a light trellis-work structure of cedar and cyprus-wood, dry and resinous, burned like a candle and its fragrant smoke coiled like incense upon an altar to greet the rising sun.

But when the sun rose it shone upon a smoking black ruin--the tomb of Akhnaton and Dio.

VIII

Tutankhaton was king of Egypt. On his accession to the throne he changed his name from Tutankhaton--the living image of Aton--to Tutankhamon--the living image of Amon. He changed his religion just as easily. He took off his feet Amon's sandals with the divine image on the soles and bowed down before the god on whom he had trampled.

He moved from the City of the Sun to the ancient capital, Thebes, and began restoring Amon's temples throughout Egypt: he raised up idols of pure gold to him, multiplied gifts and levys, re-established feasts and sacrifices. He demolished the temples of Aton and destroyed his name wherever it was found--on granite colossi or personal amulets, on the high obelisks or in underground tombs. The same masons were hammering with their mallets as in King Akhnaton's reign: then they had been destroying the name of Amon and now the name of Aton; the same spies who had then been tracking Amon's secret worshippers were now hunting down the servants of Aton.

King Akhnaton's memory was anathematized. The curse was proclaimed throughout Egypt:

"May the Lord destroy the memory of him in the land of the living and may his double, Ka, find no rest in the kingdom of the dead. Woe 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!"

No one dared to mention his name and he was called the Enemy, the Criminal, the Monster, or the Buffoon, the Fool.

The first men of the land--the well-born, the rich, the happy, soon forgot him; but the last--the beggars, the sick, the wretched remembered him for years. They did not believe in his death: "he died and rose from the dead," said some of them, while others asserted that he did not die at all, but escaped from the palace and wandered about the world as a beggar, secretly. But all equally believed that he would come again and restore truth and justice; would punish the wicked, show mercy to the good, comfort the sorrowful, free the slaves, make the poor and the rich equal, wipe out the field boundaries, like the Nile, with the waters of inexhaustible love; would save the world that was perishing in evil and be the second Osiris, the true Redeemer and Son.

"Do you know what rumours there are about?" Tuta said one day to Merira, the high priest of Amon, and his chief helper in the war upon Aton.

"What rumours, sire?"

"That the Criminal is alive."

"I have known it all along," Merira answered, with a smile so strange that Tuta was surprised, almost alarmed.

"Known what?"

"That he is alive. He may die any number of times, but the Fool will always live for the fools! Foolishness is the sun of the world, and he, Uaenra, is the son of the Sun."

Tuta laughed and was reassured. But then he sighed and added sadly:

"Yes, my friend, foolishness is immortal. It is hard to combat it--harder than we had thought."

They spoke of other things. But in the middle of the conversation Merira asked as though recalling something:

"Do you know for certain, sire, that Akhnaton is dead?"

Tuta thought at first he was still joking, but, looking attentively into his face, was again surprised, almost frightened.

"How can you ask, my friend? Why, how could I not be certain when I saw with my own eyes...."

"Yes, you must have excellent eyes: it is not easy to see from the battlefield and recognise a man's face at the top of a house in the night, through thickets of trees, smoke and flame!"

"But not I alone, everyone says he was there and Dio with him, and I certainly did see her."

"You saw her, but did you see him?"

"I think I did."

"You think--that means you are not certain."

"Come, Merira, can you really think?--"

"I don't think anything, sire, I only want to know."

They looked at each other in silence and both felt uncomfortable. Again they spoke of other things. And when Merira rose to go, Tuta asked him:

"How is your health?"

"I am well, why?"

"You don't look well, you have grown much thinner in the face."

"I must be tired of waging war upon the Fool," Merira answered, with the same queer smile as before.

Tuta was holding his hand affectionately and looking into his eyes, as though he wanted to say something more, but did not venture to do so. Merira was silent also.

"And do you know where these rumours come from, about the Criminal being alive?" Tuta said at last. "From that accursed hole, the City of the Sun, damnation take it! Our friend Panehesy is still hiding there like a scorpion in a chink--there is no catching him...."

Panehesy, the second priest of Aton, a mild fanatic, a 'holy fool,' in Ay's words, was one of the few people who had remained faithful to King Akhnaton.

"And it is not only he," Tuta continued. "All sorts of rascals keep going there. Living fools do their best for the dead, spreading seditious rumours among the people...."

He paused and said, after a moment's thought:

"Do me the favour, my friend, go to the City and find out what is going on there; I have long meant to ask you. That wasps' nest ought to be destroyed and burnt down utterly!"

"No, sire, spare me. You have spies enough and I am not any good at that kind of thing," Merira replied so drily that Tuta did not insist.

But two days later Merira returned to the subject himself and suddenly said that he was ready to go. Tuta was overjoyed and at once sent him on the journey, with a whole pack of spies, an assembly of priests and a strong detachment of bodyguards.

The City of the Sun was deserted. Several times during the war the rebellious mob and Tuta's troops burned and plundered it. And when the new king ascended the throne he ordered that it should be destroyed completely and the inhabitants driven out. At first they had to be driven out by force and, afterwards, they fled of their own accord from the accursed place where nothing but ruins remained.

The royal gardens of Maru-Aton were even more desolate than the city. Their walls were destroyed and waves of drifting sand covered the burnt-out flower beds, the dried-up ponds, the fallen trees and the charred remains of the lodges, arbours and chapels. The place that had once been God's paradise was now a desert.

Some three days after his arrival in the town Merira visited Maru-Aton gardens to see the spot where the Criminal perished.

It was the month of Paonzu, March--already hot summer in Egypt. The sun had just set and the Lybian hills stood out black and flat, like the charred edge of a papyrus against the red sky. The Nile, too, seemed black and heavy, streaked with red here and there. The sail of a boat looked like a blood-stained rag against its dark surface.

The breath of the wind was hot as that of a man in a fever; the evening had brought it neither freshness nor rest. The grasshoppers chirped like dry sticks crackling in the fire; felled palms, lying on the ground, rustled with their yellow leaves as the sand dropped from them on the ground.

A shepherd's pipe wailed in the distance; monotonously sad, the sounds fell slowly one after the other like tear after tear.

"The wail is raised for Tatmmiz far away. The mother-goat and the kid are slain, The mother sheep and the lamb are slain, The wail is raised for the beloved Son."

The old shepherd was Engur, son of Nurdahan, a Babylonian slave of Tammuzadad, brought by Dio to Egypt from the island of Crete.

As he drove up to Maru-Aton Merira saw Engur's lean sheep and goats nibbling the dry grass on the hills. "It must be he singing," Merira guessed, listening to the sounds of the pipe. He knew the song: he had heard it once together with Dio and she translated the Babylonian words into Egyptian for him. He recalled them now: "The wail is raised for the beloved Son!"

"It's always about Him, there is no getting away from Him," he thought drearily, frowning with disgust.

A young priest, Horus, a pupil of Ptamose, was walking beside him. He was the young man with the austere and meagre face whom Dio had seen once in the subterranean sanctuary of the god Ram. He was telling Merira about the rebels who had just been arrested as secret worshippers of the Criminal--the king's dwarf, Iagu, the runaway slave, Yubra, old Zenra, Dio's nurse, and other poor and obscure people. He hoped to trace through them Issachar and Aton's priest Panehesy, the two chief rebels.

"Have you questioned them?" Merira asked.

"I have."

"What do they say?"

"That the Criminal is alive."

"How could they believe anything so absurd?"

"They say they have seen him."

"Where, when, how?"

"They would rather die than say."

"What are you going to do with them?"

"Whatever you tell me, father."

"It is all one to me, but remember: if you put the living fools to death the dead one will be alive all the more. I should release them all and make an end of it."

"As you like, master, but what will the king say?"

"Oh yes, the king. You want to please the king? Very well, do what you like, only don't talk to me about it.... What day is it?"

"The twenty-fourth of Paonzu."

"And when did King Akhnaton die?"

"On the twenty-fifth."

"What a coincidence!"

"How do you mean?" Horus asked him, with sudden alarm.

Merira made no answer and stopped to look round.

"Where have you brought me, my friend? A cheerful sort of place!"

The burning sky was a deep red, the breath of the wind was hot and feverish, the yellow palm leaves made a dry rustle as the sand dropped from them on the ground, the crickets chirped and the pipe wailed.

"Always about Him--there is no getting away from Him!" Merira thought again, drearily. He sat down heavily on a tree-trunk on the ground, stretched himself, raising his arms above his head and yawned convulsively like a man who had not slept for several nights.

"How dreary it all is, oh dear!" he said, as he yawned. "Don't you find it dreary, Horus?"

"Find what dreary, father?"

"Everything, my friend, everything: being born, living, dying and rising from the dead. It would not be so bad if there were something new there, but what if it is the same as here--everlasting dreariness!"

He suddenly raised his eyes to Horus and laughed.

"Why, my son, you seem to have two little lumps on your forehead! That's a strange thing. You have grown horns just like a little ram. Bend down, let me feel them."

Horus was frightened. He knew that Merira was seriously ill and knew what his complaint was, but he feared to think of it. He always hoped that God would have mercy and spare the great prophet who had saved the earth from the Criminal.

He stood more dead than alive. But so strong was the habit of obeying the master that at the words 'bend down,' he submissively bent his shaven head. Merira gently moved his palm over it and again a smile that was like a grimace of disgust appeared on his face.

"No, there's nothing, it is smooth.... But why are you so frightened, you foolish boy? Come, I was joking, I wanted to test you. You keep watching me, afraid I will go mad. But I won't, don't you fear. I have only grown rather foolish through my war with the Fool, but it will soon pass off...."

Horus bent down again, seized his hand and kissed it. "If he dies, I will die with him," he thought and calmed down.

"I know you love me, dear boy," Merira said, kissing him on the head. "There, that's enough talking, let us go. Where is the place of the fire?"

Walking a few steps they came to a sandy open space--the big pond. Beside it, Maki's birch tree, buried in the sand, showed a bit of the broken white stem.

As he passed it, Merira for some reason recalled Dio, and he suddenly wanted to kiss the white slender stem, rosy in the light of the setting sun. But he felt shy of Horus: the young man might again imagine something. He merely slowed his pace and touched the stem as though it were a living hand stretched out to him from the earth, and for the first time after many days he smiled a real and not a jeering smile.

Passing the pond they came to a small sandy hillock, with charred planks and beams sticking out here and there. These were the ruins of the burnt palace--the tomb of Akhnaton and Dio.

"Was it here he perished?" Merira asked.

"Yes," Horus replied. "This is a holy place to them: they come here to worship the Criminal."

On the top of the hill two charred cross-beams, with a brass hoop at the top--probably a bolt that had been curled in the fire--stood out clearly against the red evening sky, like the hieroglyphic of life, the looped cross Ankh.

"What is this? Did it happen of itself in the fire?" Merira asked, pointing to it.

"No, the Criminal's worshippers must have made it," Horus answered, and calling one of the soldiers of the bodyguard, who were standing by the hillock, he told him to take away the cross.

The man climbed up, drew the poles out of the sand, broke them and flinging them on the ground, trampled upon them.

"He is alive, alive, alive! He was dead and behold he is alive!" Merira heard a loud voice behind him and, turning round, saw a thin ragged man, blackened by the sun and shaggy like a wild beast, walking towards him with a distorted face and fiercely burning eyes.

"I know what you have come for, murderer!" he cried, like one possessed. "You want to kill the dead, but behold he is alive and you are dead!"

At a sign from Horus the soldiers seized the man.

"Let him go," Merira commanded, and turning to the man asked him:

"Who are you?"

"Don't you recognise me? And yet we are old friends, berries from the same vine. We both are his murderers--only I have grown wiser and you are still foolish!"

Merira looked at him and recognized Issachar the Jew.

"Thus speaks the Lord God of Israel," Issachar cried again, lifting up his hands. "They shall look upon Him Whom they have pierced and they shall mourn for Him as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him as one is in bitterness for his firstborn!"

And as though in answer to the cry the shepherd's pipe wailed:

"Dead is the Lord, dead is Tammuz! Dogs wander about in the ruined house, Ravens flock to his funeral feast. O heart of the Lord! O pierced side!"

Merira walked up to Issachar, took him by the hand, led him aside, and said:

"Stop shouting and tell me plainly what do you want of me?"

"Don't you know?"

"I don't."

"Then I won't tell you: you wouldn't believe me if I did. He will tell you himself."

Merira understood that 'he' meant King Akhnaton.

"Thine hour is at hand, Merira. To-morrow is a great day, do you know what it is?"

"Yes, the day of the Fool's death."

"Mind you don't find yourself among the fools, you clever one!" Issachar said, turning to go.

At a sign from Horus the soldiers again ran up and seized him, but Merira said once more:

"Let him go, don't interfere with him!"

The soldiers released him, and he went without quickening his pace or turning round, as though certain of not being touched again.

"Are you going to let him off, father?" Horus asked Merira. "This is Issachar, the Jew, their prophet, the chief rebel," he added, thinking that Merira had not recognised him.

"But what are we to do with him? You see he is crazy, nothing is to be gained from him!" Merira answered, shrugging his shoulders, and went to where his chariot was waiting for him. He stepped into it and drove into the town.

IX

Merira was staying in Tuta's house, which had, at the king's orders, been preserved for the benefit of posterity. Merira lived in the summer house by himself, Horus and the other priests were in the winter house and the soldiers in the outbuildings.

Returning to the town after dark Merira called on Horus and told him to have everything ready in the upper Aton's temple at daybreak for a service to Amon and laying a curse upon the Criminal.

Then he went indoors to the upper chamber, where the conspirators' meeting had once been held, and lay down on the couch. He lay there with his eyes closed, his face still as death; he did not sleep and knew he would not.

Late at night he got up and sniffed the air with a grimace of disgust. His old illness was upon him again: he was everywhere pursued by bad smells--of dead rats, as in a granary, of bats' dirt as in the tombs, of rotten fish as on the banks of the Nile, where fish is cleaned, salted and dried in the sun. He opened a box at the head of the bed and taking out a gold casket, with white powder in it, sniffed it, put some on his tongue and spat it out. He knew the powder would make him sleep but afterwards sleeplessness would be worse than ever.

He placed the casket back in the box and took out the ring with the carbuncle--Amon's eye. He lifted the stone which turned on a tiny golden hinge and peeped into the cavity underneath, filled with silvery grey powder--the poison. Only a half of it remained, the other he had put into the king's cup at Saakera's feast. Moving the stone into its place he put the ring back into the box.

He went down into the garden and then through a gate in the garden wall into the street, bathed in the white moonlight on one side and black with the shadows of the ruins on the other.

He stooped as he walked with his head bent, treading heavily and leaning on a staff, like a weary pilgrim at the end of a day's journey.

Clouds, fluffy like lambs, with transparent opalescent fleece, tawny-pink and silvery-blue in the moonlight, slowly moved all in one direction as though grazing in the pastures of heaven, with the moon for shepherd. There was stillness in heaven and stillness on earth; nothing stirred, as though bound by the moon's silver chains; only bats flitted to and fro like shuttles in a loom.

Suddenly there came the sound of howling and laughter as though someone, tickled to the point of tears, were both laughing and weeping. It was the howling of hyenas that must have scented Merira. It was followed by the hysterical barking of jackals. The dead city came to life. But gradually they subsided and stillness reigned once more.

Passing a huge piece of waste ground with charred planks and beams--remnants of the king's palace, Merira came to Aton's temple.

Most of the temple had remained. The huge building, with thick walls of well-baked brick and stone, could not be burned and was not easy to demolish. Only wooden rafters in the ceilings had been burned and ceilings and columns had fallen down in places. All bas-reliefs of King Akhnaton sacrificing to the god of the Sun had been broken and hieroglyphic inscriptions painted over or erased. The three hundred and sixty-five alabaster altars, in the seven courts of the temple, had also been destroyed and their place defiled: cartloads of filth had been brought from the Jews' Settlement and flung there, so that for a time the stench took one's breath away. But soon the sun burnt out and cleansed everything, turning filth into black earth; the wind of the desert covered it with sand and what had once been a place of pollution was fragrant with the fresh smell of mint and bitter wormwood.

"Seven courts--seven temples: of Tammuz of Babylon, Attis of the Hittites, Adon of Canaan, Adun of Crete, Mithra of Mitanni, Ashmun of Phoenicia, Zagreus of Thrace. All these gods are the shadow of the One to come," Merira recalled and again he thought drearily: "He is always everywhere, there is no escaping from Him."

Suddenly there was a sound of footsteps. He looked round--there was no one. This happened several times. At last, by the time Merira reached the eighth, the secret temple, where the Holy of Holies had been, he saw in the distance a man who was running from moonlight into the shadow. He knew people were robbed and murdered in the city at night; he remembered he had no weapons; he stopped and wanted to shout "who goes there?" but felt such an aversion from his own voice that he said nothing and went into the temple.

The sixteen giant figures of Osiris in the likeness of King Akhnaton, in royal tiaras and tightly drawn winding sheets, had all been broken to bits. The ceiling had fallen in and pale moonlight fell upon the pale blocks of alabaster--the giant limbs of the dead giants.

Picking his way between them and climbing over them, Merira approached the inner wall of the Holy of Holies, where there was a figure of a Sphinx, with a lion's body and human arms, raising to Aton the Sun a figure of the goddess Maat, the Truth, as a sacrificial offering. The Sphinx had the face of King Akhnaton; if a man had been tortured for a thousand years in hell and then came to the earth again, he would have such a face.

The Sphinx had not been destroyed, either because those engaged on the task had failed to recognize the Criminal's face or because they had not the courage to destroy so terrible a monster.

Merira stood on a stone to see it better in the pale moonlight. He was looking at it eagerly and suddenly stretched forward to it and kissed it on the lips.

At the same moment he felt that someone was standing behind his back: he turned round and saw Issachar.

"Ah, it's you again!" he said, stepping off the stone. "Why do you follow me about? What are you doing here?"

"And what are you doing?" Issachar asked.

"I am waiting for him," Merira answered, with a jeer. "If he is alive let him come. Does he visit you?"

"No. But he will come to us together: we both wanted to kill him and we shall both see him alive."

"Are you speaking of the king?"

"Of the king and of the Son--through the king to the Son--there is no other way for you and me."

"Why do you talk as though you were my equal? I am an Egyptian and you are a dirty Jew. Your Messiah is not ours."

"He is the same for all. You have killed Him and we shall give Him birth."

"And kill him also? .... Well, go along," Merira said, and walked on, without looking round. Issachar followed him.

Suddenly Merira stopped, looked round and said:

"Will you follow me about much longer? Go along, I tell you, while you have a chance."

"Don't drive me away, Merira. If I go away He will not come to you...."

"Do you imagine you've a charmed life, you Jewish dog?" Merira shouted, raising his stick.

Issachar never stirred and looked into his eyes. Merira lowered the stick and laughed.

"Ah, you crazy creature! What am I to do with you?" He paused and then said, in a changed voice:

"Very well, come along. Shall we go to my house?"

Issachar nodded, without speaking.

They walked quickly, as though in a hurry. Passing the seven sanctuary courts they came to the street. They never spoke and only as they drew near Tuta's estate, Merira said:

"What time is it?"

"About seven," Issachar answered, glancing at the sky. The time of the night was reckoned from sunset.

"Another five hours before sunrise. Well, there is plenty of time," Merira said.

They walked through the garden to the summer house. In the hall Merira took a lamp burning in a niche in the wall and led Issachar through several empty chambers. They went up the stairs, passed Merira's bedroom and entered the room next to it.

"Lie down here," Merira said, pointing to a couch, "I shall be next door. Lie still, don't get up and don't come in to me, do you hear?"

Issachar again nodded silently.

"Are you hungry? I expect you have not tasted food for the last day or two. See how thin you are."

"No, I am thirsty," Issachar replied.

Merira took a jug of beer off the table and gave it to him. He drank greedily.

"Why do you tremble?" Merira asked, noticing that Issachar's hands trembled so that he could hardly hold the jug.

He threw a cloak to him.

"Lie down and wrap yourself up, perhaps you will get warm."

"I am not sleepy, I will sit up."

"Lie down, lie down, I tell you!"

Issachar lay down on the couch. Merira covered him up with the cloak.

"Sleep. I will wake you at daybreak. We will go to the upper temple and meet _Him_ there."....

Issachar sat up suddenly and would have kissed Merira's hand but he drew it quickly away.

He went into the next room, carefully shut the door after him, but did not lock it; put the lamp on a stand, took from the shelf by the wall two bleached cedar tablets and writing a few lines upon them hid them in his bosom. Then he took out of the box at the head of the bed the ring with the carbuncle, Amon's eye, and put it on his finger.

He paced up and down the room, muttering something under his breath, quickly and inaudibly as in delirium.

Two chairs of honour, one for the host and another for the visitor, stood according to Egyptian custom on a carpeted brick platform, one step high, in the middle of the room between four lotos-shaped, painted and gilded columns.

Every time that Merira walked past these chairs he slowed down his step and, without turning his head, looked at one of them out of the corner of his eye. His face was sleepy and immovable and he kept muttering to himself.

He spent more than an hour in this fashion. The moonlit sky through the clink-like windows with a stone grating under the very ceiling, turned darker and darker, and at last the grating was no longer visible: the moon must have set.

Merira lingered by the platform longer and longer each time. Suddenly he stopped and smiled, looking intently at one of the chairs. He stepped on to the platform, sat down in the other chair, stretched himself and yawned.

"Forgive me, sire," he said aloud, as though speaking to someone who sat on the chair opposite him. "I know it is unseemly to yawn in the presence of a king, especially of a dead one. But I am fearfully sleepy. And it wouldn't be so bad if I were awake, but this is a dream. Does it ever happen to you? To be asleep and yet to feel sleepy at the same time? Issachar now wouldn't yawn in your presence. I confess I envied him last night. He is shaking with fear but he would give his soul to see you! It is he you ought to visit. But evidently the dead are like women: you only love those who don't put too much trust in you.... By the way, I ought to have locked the door into his room, I forgot to do it. He would be frightened to death if he came in, poor fellow! .... But perhaps I left it open on purpose so that he might come in and I should know whether he could see you.... This is what I am driven to in my dreariness! It is dreary, Enra, very dreary. Can it be as bad in your world? Always the same thing--rotten fish in eternity.... Or is it rather different with you? Is it worse or better? You are silent? I don't like it when you are silent and look at me with pity as though to say 'it's better for such as I and worse for such as you'.... Well, aren't you going to speak? Tell me, what have you come for? Do you remember, Enra, how you said when I wanted to kill you, 'I love you, Merira'.... And just now who is it has said it, you or I?"

He paused as though listening to an answer and then spoke again.

"You love your enemy? He has taught you this? You come from Him to try and save me? No, Enra, you cannot save a man who does not want to be saved. You died for what you loved; let me too die for what I love--not for the world beyond the grave but for this one, for this life--for living and not for rotten fish. The world already smells of putrefaction because of Him and one day it will stifle in its own stench. He lies that the world kills Him; He kills the world. He calls Himself the Son of God in order to kill the true Son--the world. I know it is hard to go against Him, but I don't care, I don't seek for what is easy: I am the first but not the last to rise against Him. There will be men like me when He comes: they will kill Him and destroy His work; they will perish but will not save the world; this is how it will be, Enra!"

He paused again and smiled suddenly, as he did in the Maru-Aton garden that afternoon when looking at Maki's birch tree he recalled Dio.

"How living you are to-day, more living than you have ever been! I see every fold of your dress: see how small the pleats are: you have good pleaters in your world. You have the royal serpent on your forehead; so you had renounced your crown here and accepted it there? I see every line in your face: the charming, childish ones round the mouth--your smile, Enra. I loved it so and I love it now. Enra, Enra, do you know that I love you? You have grown younger, more beautiful. And how is Dio? Is she with you? There, forgive me, I won't... Yes, you are quite living, you could not be more so! And yet I know that you don't exist, that you are my dream.... Goodbye, Enra, this is the last time I see you. I want to escape from Him.... You think I cannot? He is always and everywhere and there is no escaping from Him? ... Well, we shall live and die and see. There is a great deal you don't know, Enra: you are wise like a god, but you are not clever. You remember, you yourself used to say 'wisdom is beyond reason'.... Oh, I nearly forgot: here is the ring, do you remember it? Take it as a keepsake.... A-ah, you laugh! You understand? Yes, I want to test you: if the ring is not on my finger when I wake, it will mean that you exist, and if it is on my finger--you don't exist. Well, will you take it?"

His guest stretched out his hand to him--a hand he knew so well that he would have recognized it among a thousand--a long, slender, beautiful hand, with the same childishly piteous expression as the face, with blue veins under the brown skin, so real that warm, red blood seemed to be flowing in them. The middle finger was slightly apart from the others so that the ring could be slipped on more easily and the nail on it was a dark rosy colour with a white arch at the bottom.

"If I touch this hand I will die of horror," Merira thought and an icy shiver ran down his back. Yet he did touch it, put the ring on the middle finger, felt the firm bone under the soft flesh and he felt no horror but only a desire to know what it was, who it was.

He suddenly clasped the hand: it was soft, dry, warm--a real, living hand!

"You are real! You are real! I adjure you by the living God, tell me, are you real?" he cried in such a voice as though his soul left his body with that cry.

Regaining consciousness he saw an empty chair in front of him and Issachar kneeling beside it. Looking at the chair he trembled so violently that Merira heard his teeth chattering.

"What has frightened you so?"

Issachar said nothing and went on staring at the chair, his teeth chattering.

"He has been here," he whispered at last, turning to Merira.

"Who?"

"King Akhnaton."

"Have you seen him?"

Issachar was going to say 'No,' but said 'Yes,' as though somebody else had uttered the word instead of him. And no sooner had he said it than he believed he had really seen the king.

"Have you heard him?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"That the Son would come to you."

"What else?"

"He spoke about the ring. You gave him the ring to test him."

"Did he take it?"

"He did."

"But what's this?" Merira asked, with a laugh, pointing to the ring on his finger. "You heard me raving--this is all the miracle."

Issachar gazed at the ring in silence with the same terror as he had gazed at the empty chair. Suddenly he raised his eyes to Merira and exclaimed:

"He has been here! He has!"

"Yes, he has. I, too, think that Somebody has been here," Merira answered quietly and, as it were, thoughtfully, without a laugh.

He paused and then said, getting up:

"Let us go, it is time, the sun will soon be rising."

X

The sun had not yet risen but the sky was already rosy and the morning star shone like a tiny sun, when Merira and Issachar climbed by the outer staircase of Aton's temple on to the flat roof where the great altar of the Sun stood intact; only the disc of Aton had been torn away and the bas-relief of King Akhnaton on the wall broken to bits. Aton had once been glorified here and now a service to Amon was to be performed at the altar and the Criminal was to be solemnly anathematized.

Horus, with the other priests, met Merira. All were surprised to see Issachar, the Jew, by his side.

"Leave us," Merira said to the priests, and taking Horus by the hand led him aside, looked into his face and asked: "Do you love me, my son?"

"Why do you ask, father? You know I love you."

"Do then what I ask you."

"Speak, I listen."

"Don't lay a finger on Iserker, let him go; whatever happens, remember that he is innocent. Release also all those whom you have arrested. Will you do it?"

"I will."

"Swear it."

"May I not see the sun in eternity if I don't do it!"

"May God reward you, my son," Merira said, embracing and kissing him. "And now go!"

Horus glanced at Issachar and was about to ask a question, but Merira frowned and repeated:

"Go!"

Horus was frightened, as at Maru-Aton the day before, and obeyed as he had done then; he turned to go without a word. But as he descended the outer staircase of the temple he stopped half-way so that he could not be seen from the roof and yet see what was happening there. The priests stood on the first landing below him and the soldiers still lower down.

"Can you sing the service to Aton?" Merira asked Issachar when they were left alone.

"Yes."

They went up to the small altar at the foot of the great one. White alabaster dust of the broken bas-relief of King Akhnaton crunched like snow under their feet.

All was ready for the service: the altar was decked with flowers and incense was burning upon it.

Merira stood before the altar with his face to the cast, where the red ember of the sun was already ablaze in the misty gorge of the Arabian hills. Issachar stood facing him.

"God Aton is the only God and there is none other God but He!" Merira intoned.

"I come to glorify thy rays, living Aton, one eternal God!" Issachar replied.

"I declare the way of life unto you all, generations that have been and are to be: render praise to God Aton, the living God and ye shall live," Merira intoned again and Issachar replied:

"Praise be to thee, living Aton, who has created the heavens and the secrets thereof! Thou art in heaven and thy son, Akhnaton Uaenra, is on earth."

"Thy essence, Uaenra, is the essence of the sun," they both sang together, "thy flesh is the sunlight, thy limbs the beautiful rays. In truth thou didst proceed from the Sun as a child from its mother's womb. The Sun rises in the sky and rejoices at its son on the earth!"

The rising sun lighted the altar. Merira raised the libation cup and slowly, drop by drop, poured on the burning embers the thick, blood-red wine.

"Lord!" he exclaimed in such a heart-rending voice that Issachar began to tremble as in the night when looking at the empty chair he saw the Invisible, "Lord! Before the foundations of the earth were laid Thou didst reveal Thy will to Thy Son who is forever. Thou, Father, art in His heart and no one knows Thee except Him, Thy Son!"

Then, turning his back to Issachar, he put some fresh wine into the cup, put it on the altar table, took the tablets from his bosom and placed them on the table, too; taking the ring off his finger, he lifted the carbuncle and put the poison in the cup. He took the cup in his hands, again turned with his face to the sun and cried three times in a low, as it were distant, voice:

"Glory be to the Sun, the Son Who is to come!"

Issachar fell on his knees and covered his face with his hands: it suddenly seemed to him that Merira saw the One Who was to come.

Merira raised the cup to his lips, drained it, and dropping it, stretched his hands to the sun with a low cry:

"He! He!"

Then he fell to the ground like a man struck by lightning.

Horus rushed to him and bending over him cried:

"Father!"

But glancing into his face he knew he was dead. People rushed to the roof in answer to Horus's cries and seized Issachar, thinking he was the murderer. But someone gave Horus the tablets. He read:

"I, Merira, son of Nehtaneb, high priest of Aton, the only living God, kill myself for having wanted to kill a righteous man. Akhnaton Uaenra, Sun's Joy, Sun's only Son, lives for ever!"

Horus carried out the dead man's behest and released Issachar. All made way for him when he moved to go--so strange and terrible was his face.

He went to the very edge of the roof and stretching his arms to the rising sun cried, as though he knew that his voice would be heard at the furthest ends of the earth:

"Thus says the Lord God of Hosts, the God of Israel: out of Egypt shall I call my Son. Behold I will send my Messenger and the Lord whom you seek and the Messenger of the covenant you delight in shall suddenly come to His temple. Behold, He cometh!"

THE END