AKHNATON
KING OF EGYPT

AKHNATON

KING OF EGYPT

By DMITRI MEREZHKOVSKY

Translated from the Russian by
NATALIE A. DUDDINGTON

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1927
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE BIRTH OF THE GODS

E. P. Dutton & Company

Thou Father art in my heart and there is no other that knoweth Thee save Thy son Akhnaton. "I ... called My Son out of Egypt." Hosea, XI, 1

AKHNATON

KING OF EGYPT

PART I

AKHNATON, KING OF EGYPT

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He struck the strings and sang:

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

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

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

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

"Why flattery?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His—King Akhnaton's, she understood.

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

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

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

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

"Do not go out to-day."

"Why?"

He answered after a pause:

"Maybe there will be a riot."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Aïe-aïe-aïe! What is it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tutankhaton.

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

"Tell him I will come."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What of?"

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

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

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

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

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

He paused, and then asked her:

"Will you go to see Ptamose?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you seen much of him?"

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

"Osiris?"

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

"Whom do you mean?"

"The spirit of the desert, Set."

"The Devil?"

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

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

"Yes, more ancient than Amon."

"And you worship him?"

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

"Then what is your quarrel about?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

Khnumhotep was an honest and god-fearing man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When was the decree received?" Khnum asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And what is the second decree about?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Someone must have informed against you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, master."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He would say nothing more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One day she sang a different song:

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

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

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

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

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

"Where is Yubra, your brother?"

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

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

And Khnum asked her no more about Yubra.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nibituia too raised her eyes in alarm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have told you already."

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

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

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

He paused again and asked:

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

"What parable?"

"Shall I tell it you?"

"Do."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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