Kenkenes saw the foremost, a tall Nubian in a striped tunic, stop in his tracks, and the second, smaller and lighter but a Nubian also, following immediately behind, bumped against his fellow.

Mouths agape, eyes staring, they stood and marveled. The strange presence, they discovered at once, was neither a human being nor an apparition. It was stone—a statue.

"Sacrilege!" the first exploded. "A—a—by Amen, it is the slave herself!"

In the little pause, Kenkenes recovered himself, but he knew that he gave Rachel to her fate, if the pair overcame him. He caught her hand and with the whispered word, "Run!" fled with her toward the front of the cliff facing the Nile. It was a desperate chance for escape but he seized it.

Immediately they were pursued and at the brink of the hill, overtaken. The stake was too large for the young artist to risk its loss by adhering to the unwritten rules of combat. He released Rachel, whirled about, and as the foremost descended on him, ducked, seized the man about the middle, and pitched him head-first down into the valley. The second, the tall Nubian that wore the striped tunic, halted, dismayed, and Kenkenes, catching Rachel's hand, prepared to descend. But she checked him with a cry. "Look!"

His eyes followed her outstretched arm. At regular intervals along the Nile, the distant figures of men were seen posted. Escape was cut off. He mounted to the top of the cliff and led Rachel out of view from the river. The second man retreated, and raged from afar. The sculptor turned up the shingly slope toward the sun-white ridge of higher hills inland. Here, he would hide with Rachel, till his strength returned and the ache left his head clear to plan a safe escape. The Nubian called on all the gods to annihilate them and started in pursuit. The sculptor did not pause, and, emboldened by the indifference of the man he dogged, the pursuer drew near and made menacing demonstrations. Kenkenes had no desire to be followed. He bade Rachel wait for him and approached the Nubian.

"Now," he began coolly, "thou art unwelcome, likewise, insolent. Also art thou a fool, but it is an arch-idiot indeed that lacketh caution. This maiden is beloved of all the Israelites. Thou art one man, and alone. It would not be safe for thee to attempt to take her without help even across that little space between Masaarah and the Nile. I should harass thee with others within call. Do thou save thyself and send the chief adviser after her. I would treat with him also."

The Nubian backed away and Kenkenes followed him relentlessly until the man, overcome with trepidation, took to his heels and fled.

Even then, Kenkenes did not lessen his vigilance. He caught up Anubis, who had bounded beside him during the entire time, and running back to Rachel, turned into the limestone wastes.

Kenkenes had risked his suggestions to the single Nubian, and their effect upon him gave the young sculptor some hope that the pursuing force had been limited to these three. Though the men along the Nile were not within call, they would prevent flight into Memphis, and the camp of the Israelites, if not similarly picketed, would offer security only for the moment. Why had not the Hebrews protected her in the beginning? He would get to a place of perfect safety first and learn all concerning this matter.

After an hour's cautious dodging from shelter to shelter, through the masses of rocks, they toiled up the great ridge of hills deep into the desert. Rachel would have gone on and on, but Kenkenes drew her into the shadow of a great rock and stopped to listen. The oppressive silence was unbroken. Far and near only gray wastes of hills heaved in heated solitude about them.

"Sit here in the shadow and rest," he said, turning to the weary girl beside him. "I shall keep watch."

He cleared a space for her among the debris at the base of the great fragment and pressed her down in the place he had made. Next he undid his belt and fastened Anubis to a boulder, too heavy for the ape to move. The animal resented the confinement, and Kenkenes, tying him by force, found in the forepaws the collar of golden rings. With a murmur of satisfaction, the young man reclaimed the necklace and thrust it into the bosom of his dress.

When he arose the day grew dark before him, and he was obliged to steady himself against the rock till the vertigo passed. His assailants had hurt him more than he had thought. But he took up his vigil and maintained it faithfully till all sense of danger had vanished.

Rachel, who had been watching his face, touched his hand at last, and bade him rest. The invitation was welcome and with a sigh he sank down beside her.

"Lie down," she said softly. "Thou hast been most cruelly misused. And all for me!"

Obediently, he slipped from a sitting to a recumbent posture. She put out her arm, and supporting him, seemed about to take his head into her lap. Instead, she slipped the mantle from the strap that bound it across his shoulders, and rolling it swiftly, made a pillow of it for his head.

The wallet that had hung by the same strap over his shoulder, attracted her attention and she guessed that it had been used as a carrier for provision. She laid it open and took out the water-bottle. The pith-stopper had held, during all the violent motion, and the dull surface of the porous and ever-cooling pottery was cold and wet.

She put the bottle to his lips and, after he had drunk, bathed his bruises most tenderly.

Succumbing to the gentle influence of her fingers, he put up his hands to take them, but they moved out of his reach in the most natural manner possible. He could not feel that she had purposely avoided his touch, but he made no further attempt when the soothing fingers returned. Finally he raised himself on his elbow and supported his head in his hand.

"Now am I new again," he said; "once more ready to help thee. Let us take counsel together and get into safety and comfort." He paused a moment till his serious words would not follow with unseeming promptness upon his light tone.

"I know thy trouble, Rachel," he began again soberly. "There is no need that thou shouldst hurt thyself by the telling. But there are details which would be helpful in aiding thee if I had them in mind. Thou knowest better than I. Wilt thou aid me?"

Her golden head drooped till her face was bowed upon her hands. After a little silence she answered him, her voice low with shame.

"This man sought to take me before, at Pa-Ramesu, but Atsu learned of it in time and sent me to Masaarah. This morning I met him again—" She paused, and Kenkenes aided her.

"Aye, I can guess—poor affronted child!"

"Atsu meant to escape with me again, but the servants of the nobleman came before we could get away."

Kenkenes knew by her choice of words that she did not know the name of her persecutor, and he did not tell her what it was. He could not bear the name of Har-hat on her lips. She went on, after a little silence.

"I came—" she began, coloring deeply, "to leave thy collar with the statue—I did not expect to find thee there."

How little it takes to dispirit a lover! How could he know that any thought had led her to do that thing save an impulse actuated by indifference or real dislike? His hope was immediately reduced to the lowest ebb. The mention of the taskmaster's name brought forward the probability of a rival.

"I can take thee back to Atsu," he said slowly. "These menials will not remain in the hills after sunset, and under cover of night I can slip thee, by strategy, past any sentries they may have set and get thee to Atsu. I, by my sacrilege, and he by his insubordination, are both under ban of the law, but danger with him will be sweeter danger than peril with me, I doubt not."

She looked at him, and the hurt that began to show on her face gave place to puzzlement.

"Is it not so?" he asked with a bitter smile. "The companionship of ones beloved works wonders out of heavy straits!"

"But—. Dost thou—? Atsu is naught to me," she cried, her grave face brightening.

The blood surged back to his cheeks and the life into his eyes. He leaned toward her, ready to ask for more enlightenment concerning her conduct, when she went on dreamily: "But he is wondrous kind and hath made the camp bright with his humanity. Israel loveth Atsu."

Kenkenes turned again to the perplexity in hand.

"I came this morning to ask thy permission to give thee thy freedom. I doubt not Israel of Masaarah, hidden in a niche in the hills, does not dream that it is the plan of the Pharaoh—nay, the heir to the crown of Egypt by the mouth of the Pharaoh—to exterminate the Hebrews." Rachel recoiled from him.

"What sayest thou?" she exclaimed, her voice sharp with terror.

"Nay, forgive me!" he said penitently. "So intent was I on thy rescue that I forgot to soften my words. Let it be. It is said; I would it were not true."

Her affright was only momentary, for her faith restored her ere his last words were spoken.

"It will not come to pass," she declared. "Jehovah will not suffer it. Thou shalt see—and let the Pharaoh beware!" Her words were vehement and she offered no argument. She saw no need of it, since her belief, merely expressed, had the force of fact with her.

"I am committed to the cause of Israel—that thou knowest, Rachel," Kenkenes made answer. After another silence he took up the thread of his talk.

"If thy danger from this man were set aside I should not return thee to the camp, even if there were no doom spoken upon Israel. I would have thee free; I would have thee in luxury, sheltered in my father's house—I would—"

"Thou dost paint a picture that mocks me now, O Kenkenes," she broke in on his growing fervor. "Doubly am I enslaved, and the safety of Masaarah and Memphis is no more for me."

"Thou hast said," he answered in a subdued voice. "It was given me last night to win favor with the Pharaoh for thy sake, but the need of that favor fell before it was won. But I despair not. What is thy pleasure, Rachel? Shall I take thee to Atsu, or wilt thou stay with me?"

"This nobleman will know of a surety that Atsu is my friend, but he must guess the other Egyptian who hath helped me. If I go to Atsu I take certain danger to him; if I stay with thee the peril must wander ere it overtakes us. But I would not burden either. Is there no other way?"

He shook his head. "It lies between me and Atsu to care for you, and the peril for you and for us is equal. My name is as good as published, for I am gifted with a length of limb beyond my fellows. I was found before the statue and they, describing me to the priests, will prove to the priests, who know my calling, that the son of Mentu has committed sacrilege. And the priesthood would not wait till dawn to take me."

"I will stay with thee, Kenkenes," she said simply.

He became conscious of the collar on his breast and drew it forth.

"With this," he began, assuming a lightness, "I fear I gave thee offense one day and thou hast held it against me. Now let me heal that wound and sweeten thy regard for me with this same offending trinket. Wilt thou take it as a peace-offering from my hands and wear it always?" She bent toward him and, with worshiping hands, he put aside the loosened braids and clasped the necklace about her throat.

"There are ten rings," he continued. "Let them be named thus," telling them off with his fingers, "This first of all—Hope—it shall be thy stay; this—Faith—it shall comfort thee; this—Good Works—it shall publish thee; this—Sacrifice—it shall win thee many victories; this—Chastity—it shall be thy name; the next—Wisdom—it shall guide thee; after it—Steadfastness—it shall keep thee in all these things; Truth—it shall brood upon thy lips; Beauty—it shall not perish; this, the last, is Love, of which there is naught to be said. It speaketh for itself."

Their eyes met at his last words and for a moment dwelt. Then Rachel looked away.

"Are the fastenings secure?" she asked.

"Firm as the virtues in a good woman's soul."

"They will hold. I would not lose one of them."

A long silence fell. The curious activity of desert-life, interrupted for the time by the presence of the fugitives, resumed its tenor and droned on about them. The rasping grasshopper, the darting lizard, the scorpion creeping among the rocks, a high-flying bird, a small, skulking, wild beast put sound and movement in the desolation of the region. The horizon was marked by undulating hills to the west; to the east, by sharper peaks. The scant growth was blackened or partly covered with sand, and it fringed the distant uplands like a stubbly beard. The little ravines were darkened with hot shadows, but the bald slopes presented areas, shining with infinitesimal particles of quartz and mica, to a savage sun and an almost unendurable sky. From somewhere to the barren north the wind came like a breath of flame, ash-laden and drying. There was nothing of the cool, damp river breeze in this. They were in the hideous heart of the desert to whom death was monotony, resisting foreign life, an insult.

The two in the shortening shadow of the great rock were glad of the water-bottle. The necessity of comfortable shelter for Rachel began to appeal urgently to Kenkenes. He put aside his dreams and thought aloud.

"What cover may I offer thy dear head this night?" he began. "We may not return to the camp, for there of a surety they lie in wait for us. Toora is deserted and so tempting a spot for fugitives that it will be searched immediately. Not a hovel this side of the Nile but will be visited. I would take thee to my father—"

"Nay," she said firmly. "I will take affliction to none other. Already have I undone two of the best of Egypt. I will carry the distress no further."

After a silence he began again.

"How far wilt thou trust in me, Rachel?"

She raised her face and looked at him with serious eyes.

"In all things needful which thou wilt require of me."

"And thou canst sleep this night in an open boat?"

She nodded.

"To-morrow, then," he continued, taking her hand, "we shall reach Nehapehu, where I can hide thee with some of the peasantry on my father's lands. And there thou canst abide until I go to Tape and return.

"Thou must know," he continued, explaining, "the Athor of the hills is not my first sacrilege. Once I committed a worse. My father was the royal sculptor to Rameses and is now Meneptah's murket." Rachel glanced at him shyly and sought to withdraw her hand, for she recognized the loftiness of the title. But he retained his clasp. "He is a mighty genius. He planned and executed Ipsambul. For that, which is the greatest monument to Rameses, the Incomparable Pharaoh loved him, and while the king lived my father was overwhelmed with his favors. Nor did the royal sculptor's good fortune wane, as is the common fate of favorites, for the great king planned that my father's house should be honored even after his death though the dynasties change. So Rameses gave him a signet of lapis lazuli, and its inscription commanded him who sat at any time thereafter on the throne of Egypt to honor the prayer of its bearer in the unspeakable name of the Holy One.

"After the death of Rameses," the narrator went on, "we went to Tape, my father and I, to inscribe the hatchments and carve the scene of the Judgment of the Dead in the tomb of the great king. Now, I am my father's only child and have been taught his craft. I have been an apt pupil, and he had no fear in trusting me with the execution of the fresco. I had long been in rebellion, practising in secret my lawless ideas, and I was seized with an uncontrollable aversion to marring those holy walls with the conventional ugliness commanded by the ritual. I assembled my ideas and dared. I worked rapidly and well. The work was done before my father discovered it." Kenkenes paused and laughed a little.

"Suffice it to say the fresco was erased. And the solemnity of the crypt was hardly restored before my father found that his sacred signet, which he always wore, was gone. Nay, nay, I might not search for it more than the fruitless once, for he declared, and of a truth believed firmly, that the great king had reclaimed his gift. I did not and never have I believed it. Now I need the signet and I shall go after it on the strength of that belief.

"Having found it, I shall appeal to Meneptah for thy liberty and safety and whatever boon thou wouldst have and for myself. What thinkest thou? Shall I go on?"

Rachel smiled and looked up at him gratefully.

"I will go with thee, Kenkenes," she said.

Her ready confidence and the easiness of his name on her lips filled him with joy. "Ah! ye ungentle Hathors!" he mourned to himself, "why may I not tell her how much I love her?"

But the white hand which he pressed against his breast asked its release with gentle reluctance, and he set it free.

Once again the silence fell and was not frequently broken thereafter.

There was no invitation in her manner, and he could not speak what he would.

The sun dropped behind the Libyan hills and the heights filled with shadow. At length he said:

"It is time."

Lifting her to her feet, the ape attending them, he went toward the Nile, hand in hand with Rachel, his love all untold.



CHAPTER XX

THE TREASURE CAVE

The sudden night had just fallen, and there was an incomplete moon in the west. But already the desert was full of feeble shadows and silver interspaces, and all that tense silence of evening upon unpeopled localities.

Kenkenes stood upon the top of a huge monolith, listening. Below, with only her face in the faint moonlight, was Rachel, looking up to him. Anubis, oppressed by the voiceless expectancy of the two young people, crouched at his master's feet. For a while there was only the ringing turmoil of his own quickened blood in the young man's ears. But presently, up from the southern slope, rose the sound he had heard some minutes before—a long, quavering note, ending in a high eery wail.

Kenkenes was familiar with the screams of wild beasts, and he knew the irreconcilable differences between them and the human voice. Instantly he sent back across the hollow a strong reply that the startled echoes repeated again and again. Almost immediately the first cry was repeated, but a desperate power had entered into it. Kenkenes dropped from his point of vantage.

"Some one calleth, of a surety," he said, "and by the voice, it is a woman."

"It is Deborah come up from the camp to seek for me!" Rachel exclaimed.

"I doubt not. But the gods are surely with her, to fend the beasts from her in this savage place. It is well we came this way."

With all the haste possible on the rough slope, they descended. The ground was familiar to Kenkenes, for the niche was near the foot of the declivity.

Half-way down he called again, and the answer came up from the hiding-place of Athor. In another moment they were within and beside the prostrate form of the old Israelite. Rachel dropped on her knees, crying out in her solicitude. Her words were in the soft language of her own people and unintelligible to Kenkenes, but her voice trembled with concern. The old woman answered soothingly and at some length. The narrative was frequently broken by low exclamations from Rachel, and at its end the girl turned to Kenkenes with a sob of anger.

"The Lord God break them in pieces and His fury be upon them!" she cried. "They set upon her and beat her and left her to the jackals!"

"Set consume them!" Kenkenes responded wrathfully. "How came they upon you? Did you not return to camp?"

"Nay, the mother heart in me would not suffer me to desert Rachel. I stayed without this place, and ye outstripped me when ye fled. After a time the fat servitor, rousing out of his swoon, came forth from here, and another, who had been lurking in the rocks, joined him, and the pair, in searching for you, discovered me and beat me with maces, leaving me for dead."

After a grim silence, broken only by the low weeping of Rachel, Kenkenes bade her continue.

"The search they made for you was not thorough, for one was ill and both were afraid. But they came upon the statue again, and the sight of it mocked them, so they overthrew it and broke it."

Kenkenes drew a sharp breath and glanced at the place where Athor should have been. Except for themselves, the niche was evidently vacant. The old woman continued:

"Then they descended into the camp of Israel. After a time I heard the sound of voices as if there were many men in the hills, and the heart of me was afraid. With much pain and travail I crept into this place, and here sounds come but faintly. But I heard sufficient to know that there were many who sought diligently, but whether they were our own people or the minions of thine enemy, Rachel, I could not with safety discover."

"Said they aught concerning their intents—this pair, who set upon you?" Kenkenes asked.

"O, aye, they blustered, and if they bring half of their threats to pass, it will go ill with thee, Egyptian. They will set the priests upon thee immediately; the hills will be searched; the Nile will be picketed. It behooves thee to have a care for thyself. As for Rachel, I know not what will become of her. She is penned out in the desert, for the camp is to be watched, and they boast that the hunt will end only with her capture."

"Let them look to it that it does not end with the choking of the swine who inspired it! I long to put him beyond the cure of leeches."

He made no answer to Deborah's words concerning Rachel's plight. Deborah had disarranged his plans. He could not take the old woman, grievously wounded, on the long journey to Nehapehu, and, indeed, had she been well, his small boat might not hold together with a burden of three for a distance of half a hundred miles. For a moment his perplexity baffled his ingenuity.

It occurred to him that he might cross to the Memphian shore and procure a larger boat; but what would protect his helpless charges during the hours of absence, or in case he were taken? He realized that he dare not run a risk; his every movement must be safe and sure. He could not ask the wounded Israelite to return to the camp now, seeing that she had suffered mistreatment at the hands of Har-hat's servants and deserted not.

"If there were but a grotto in the rocks—a cave or a tomb—" he stopped and smote his hands together.

"By Apis! I have it—the Tomb of the Discontented Soul!"

He turned to the two women, who had talked softly together in Hebrew, and spoke lightly in his relief.

"We have shelter for this night—safer than any other place in all Egypt. Trouble no more concerning that. Let me hide my sacrilege and rob them of indisputable evidence against me, and then we shall get to our refuge."

He lifted Deborah in his arms, and bearing her out into the open, left her with Rachel.

Then he reentered the shadowy niche. The night was not too dark to show the interior. Athor, a torso, broken in twain, headless, armless, was prostrate. It had been pushed over against the great cube that sheltered it and the fall against the hard limestone had ruined it. Kenkenes clenched his hands and choked back the angry tears. To the artist the destruction partook of the heinousness of murder, of the pathos of death. He set about concealing the wreck with all speed, for he wished to be merciful to his eyes.

He collected the fragmentary members, and carrying them down the slope a little way, dug a grave for them in the sand. To the trench he rolled the trunk on the tamarisk cylinders, and buried all that was left of Athor the Golden. Over the grave he laid a flat stratum of rock that the wind might not uncover the ruin.

Returning to the niche, he took up the matting with its weight of chipped stone, and went down through the dark to the line of rocks opposite the quarries. There he permitted the rubble to slide with a mixture of earth, like a natural displacement, into the talus, of a similar nature, at the base of the cliff. The matting he shook and laid aside. It would serve for a bed in the tomb that night.

Then he destroyed the north wall. In the four months of its existence the sand had banked against it more than half its height. Each stone removed in the dismantling was carried away to a new place, until the whole fortification was, as once it had been, scattered up and down the slope. The light, dry sand he pitched with his wooden shovel against the great cube until it all lay where the wind would have piled it had no second wall stood in its way. By dawn the strong breeze from the north would cover every footprint and shovel-mark to a level once more. He went again to the line of rocks and threw the shovel with a sure aim and a strong arm into the quarries across the valley. To-morrow it would seem that an Israelite had forgotten one of his tools.

The work was done.

With an ache in his heart, Kenkenes returned to Deborah and Rachel.

"The shelter for us is in the cliff to the north, near Toora," he began immediately. "It is a tomb, but others before us have partaken of the dead's hospitality." [1]

"How am I to reach it?" Deborah asked. "Is the place far?"

"A good hour's journey, but we go by water. Still, we must walk to the Nile."

"That I can not do," the old woman declared.

"Nay, but I can carry you," Kenkenes replied, bending over her. She shrank away from him.

"Thou hast forgotten," she protested.

"Not so," he insisted stoutly. Taking her up, he settled her on one strong arm against his breast. The free hand he extended to Rachel, who had taken the matting, and together they went laboriously down the steep front of the hill. They proceeded cautiously, watching before and behind them lest they be surprised.

He had covered his boat well with the tangle of sedge and marsh-vines, and after a long space of search, he found it.

Once again he lifted Deborah and laid her in the bottom of the boat. With its triple burden, the bari sank low in the water, but Kenkenes wielded the oars carefully. The faint moonlight showed him the way. Now and then a red glimmer across the grain marked the location of a farmer's hut, but there was no other sign of life. Even at the Memphian shore there was little activity.

When the line of cultivation ended Kenkenes knew he was in the precincts of the Marsh of the Discontented Soul. He rowed across what he believed to be one-half of its width and drew into the reeds. The sound and movement awoke many creatures, which hurried away in the dark, and something slid off into the river with a splash. The lapping of the ripples sounded like a drinking beast. Kenkenes put a bold foot on the soggy sand and stepped out. Rachel followed him with bated breath. Anubis unceremoniously mounted his shoulder. He dragged the bari far up on the shore, once more lifted Deborah and started up the warm sand.

At the base of the limestone cliff he deposited his burden and brought together a little heap of dried reeds and flag blades. This he fired after many failures by striking together his chisel and a stone. Rachel hid the blaze from the Nile while he made and lighted a torch of twisted reeds and stamped out the fire. In the feeble moonlight he discerned a stairway of rough-hewn steps leading into a cavity in the wall. The southern side of the ascent was sheltered by an outstanding buttress of rock.

He put the torch into Rachel's hand, and, taking up Deborah, climbed a dozen steps to a dark opening half-closed by a fallen door. Pushing the obstruction aside with his foot, he entered. When they were all within he closed the entrance and unrolled the reeds.

There was a helter-skelter of mice past them and a rustle of retiring insects. The torch blazed brightly and showed him a squat copper lamp on the floor of the outer chamber. The vessel contained sandy dregs of oil and a dirty floss of cotton. With an exclamation of surprise Kenkenes lighted the wick, and after a little sputtering, it burned smokily.

"Nay, now, how came a lamp in this tomb?" he asked without expecting an answer.

The chamber was low-roofed and small—the whole interior rough with chisel-marks. To the eyes of the sculptor, accustomed to the gorgeous frescoes in the tombs of the Memphian necropolis, the walls looked bare and pitiful. There were several prayers in the ancient hieroglyphics, but no ancestral records or biographical paintings. Several strips of linen were scattered over the floor, with the customary litter of dried leaves, dust, refuse brought by rodents, cobwebs and the cast-off chrysalides of insects. In one corner was a bronze jar, Kenkenes examined it and found it contained cocoanut-oil for burning.

"Of a truth this is intervention of the gods," he commented, a little dazed, but filling his lamp nevertheless.

Ahead of him was a black opening leading into the second chamber. He stooped, and entering, held the lamp above his head. He cried out, and Rachel came to his side.

In the center of the room was a stone sarcophagus of the early, broad, flat-topped pattern. In one corner was a two-seated bari, in another a mattress of woven reeds. Leaning against the sarcophagus was a wooden rack containing several earthenware amphorae; on the floor about it was a touseled litter of waxed outer cerements torn from mummies. All these things they observed later. Now their wide eyes were fixed on the top of the coffin. At one time there had been a dozen linen sacks set there, but the mice and insects had gnawed most of them away. The bottoms and lower halves yet remained, forming calyxes, out of which tumbled heaps of gold and silver rings, zones, bracelets, collars and masks from sarcophagi—all of gold; images of Isis in lapis lazuli and amethyst; scarabs in garnets and hematite, Khem in obsidian, Bast in carnelian, Besa in serpentine, signets in jasper, and ropes of diamonds which had been Babylonian gems of spoil.

"The plunder of Khafra and Sigur, by my mummy!" Kenkenes ejaculated.

"Will they return?" Rachel asked, in a voice full of fear.

"They are gathered to Amenti for their misdeeds many months agone," he explained. "See how thickly the dust lies here without a print upon it. They were tomb-robbers. None of the authorities could discover their hiding-place, and lo! here it is."

He walked round the sarcophagus and found at the head, on the floor, several bronze cases sealed with pitch. He opened one of them with some difficulty. Flat packages wrapped with linen lay within.

"Dried gazelle-meat,—and I venture there is wine in those amphorae. They lived here, I am convinced, and fed upon the food offerings they filched from the tombs. Was there ever such intrepid lawlessness?"

"Here is a snare and net," Rachel reported.

"Did they not profit by superstition? As long as they were here they were safe. They did not fear the spirit."

"The spirit?" Deborah, still in the outer chamber, repeated with interest.

"The spirit of this tomb," Kenkenes explained, returning to her. In a few words he told her the story as Hotep had told it to him.

"Canst thou discover the name?" she asked when he had finished.

"The sarcophagus is plain. There is no inscription within yonder crypt, for I have this moment looked. But let me examine this writing here by the door."

After a while he spoke again. "The name is not given. It says only this:

'The Spouse to Potiphar, Captain of the Royal Guard to Apepa, Child of the Sun, In the Twelfth Year of Whose Luminous Reign She Died. Rejected by the Forty-two at On, because of Unchastity, She Lies Here, Until Admitted to the Divine Pardon of Osiris.'"

"Aye, I know," Deborah responded. "It is history to the glory of a son of Abraham. Him, who brought our people here, she would have tempted, but he would have none of her. Therefore she bore false witness against him and he was thrust into prison.

"But the God of Israel does not suffer for ever His chosen to be unjustly served, and he was finally exalted over Upper and Lower Mizraim. And honor and long life and a perfumed memory are his, and she—lo! she hath done one good thing. Her house hath become a shelter for the oppressed and for that may she find peace at last."

Kenkenes looked at the old woman with admiring eyes. The quaint speech of the Hebrews had always fascinated him, but now it had become melody in his ears. In this, the first moment of mental idleness since midday, he had time to think on Deborah. He knew that he had seen her before, and now he remembered that it was she who had transfixed him with a look on an occasion when Israel had first come to Masaarah.

But he did not remind her of the incident. Instead, he set about counteracting any effect that might follow should her memory, unaided, recall the occurrence. He had put her down on the matting, and the running spiders and slower insects worried her.

"A murrain on the bugs," he said. "We shall have a creepy night of it. Let us bottle this treasure and lay the mattress out of their reach on the sarcophagus. Endure them a while, Deborah, till we make thee a refuge."

He set the lamp in the opening from the outer into the inner crypt and entered the second chamber. Rachel followed him, and the old Israelite watched them with brilliant eyes.

Kenkenes swept the jewels as if they had been almonds into an empty amphora and returned it to the rack. The mattress he laid upon the broad top of the sarcophagus.

"A line of oil run around the coffin will keep the insects away," Rachel ventured. Kenkenes returned to the outer chamber for the jar of oil; but Rachel took it from him.

"Let me be thy handmaid," she said softly.

He did not protest, and she reentered the crypt.

"Luckily the mattress is large enough for the two of you," Kenkenes observed to Deborah, "but it will be hard sleeping."

"The Hebrews are not spoiled with couches of down," she replied.

"There are enough of the wrappings in yonder to take off the hardness, but even with the matting over them they will be gruesome things to sleep upon. They would bewitch your dreams. But mayhap ye will not suffer from one night's discomfort."

"Where go we to-morrow?"

Kenkenes did not answer immediately. Another plan for Rachel's security had been growing in his mind, and his heart leaped at the prospect of its acceptance by her.

"There is a large boat here, and we might go to On," he began at last. "There is one way possible to save Rachel from this man as long as I live, and I would she were to be persuaded into accepting the conditions."

"Name them and let me judge."

He hesitated for proper words and his cheeks flushed. Deborah looked at him with comprehension in her gaze.

"Rachel is not blind to my love for her, and thou, too, art discerning. Yet I would declare myself. I love Rachel, and I would take her to wife. Then, not even the Pharaoh could take her from me by law."

Deborah raised herself with difficulty, and after peering into the inner chamber to see where Rachel was, approached him softly.

"Thou lovest Rachel. Aye, that is a tale I have heard oftener than I have fingers to count upon. From the first men of her tribe I have heard it, from the best of Egypt and the worst. But she kept her heart and stayed by my side. Now thou comest, young, comely, gifted with fair speech and full of fervor. Thou lovest as she would be loved, and her heart goes out to thee, even as thou wouldst have it—in love."

Kenkenes' face glowed and his fine eyes shone with joy.

"But mark thou!" she continued passively. "If thou wouldst save her, think upon some other way, for thou mayest not wed her. Jehovah planteth the faith of Abraham anew in Israel. In Rachel and in Rachel's house it died not during the hundred years of the bondage. Therefore the name is godly. Of her, what would thy heart say? Hath she not beauty, hath she not wisdom, hath she not great winsomeness? There is none like her in these days among all the children of Abraham. To her Israel looketh for example, for, since she compelleth by her grace, those who behold her will consider whatever she doeth as good. Great is the reward of him who can direct and directeth aright, but shall he not appear abominable in the sight of the Lord if he useth his power to lead astray? Lo! if she wed thee, to her people it will seem that she would say: 'Behold, this man is fair in my sight, and it is good for the chosen of the Lord to take the idolater into his bosom.' There is a multitude in Israel, which, like sheep, follow blindly as they are led. Great will be the labor to engrave the worship of the Lord God in their hearts, when all the powers of Israel shall strive to do that thing for them. How shall there be any success if Moses and the appointed of the Lord bid them worship, while the husband or wife that dwelleth in their tent saith 'Worship not'? To these, Rachel's marriage with thee would be justification and incentive to incline toward idolaters and idols. Then there are the wise and discerning who know that Rachel hath turned away from the best among her people. How, then, shall she be fallen in their sight if she wed with an idolater?

"She knoweth all these things and she keepeth a firm hold upon herself, but she hath not said these things to thee lest her strength fail her."

And thus was the mystery explained to him.

"Thou bowest down to a beetle," she went on without pausing. "Thou worshipest a cat; thou offerest up sacrifice to an image and conservest abominable and heathen rites. Thou art an idolater, and as such thou art not for Rachel. And yet, this further: if thou canst become a worshiper of the true God, thou shalt take her. Never have I seen an Egyptian won over to the faith of Abraham, but there approacheth a time of wonders and I shall not marvel."

To Egypt its faith was paramount. Israel in its palmiest days was not more vigilantly, jealously fanatical than Egypt. Every worshiper was a zealot; every ecclesiast an inquisitor. Church and State were inseparably united; law was fused with religion; science and the arts were governed by hieratic canons.

The individual ate, slept and labored in the name of the gods, and national matters proceeded as the Pantheon directed by the ecclesiastical mouthpiece.

Life was an ephemeral preface to the interminable and actual existence of immortality. Temporal things were transient and only of probationary value. The tomb was the ultimate and hoped-for, infinite abiding-place.

To the ideal Osirian his faith was the essential fiber in the fabric of his existence, to withdraw which meant physical and spiritual destruction. The forfeiture of his faith for Rachel, therefore, appealed to Kenkenes as a demand upon his blood for his breath's sake. His plight was piteous; never were alternatives so apparently impossible.

At first there was no coherent thought in the young man's mind. His consciousness seemed to be full of rebellion, longing and amazement. Never in his life had he been refused anything he greatly desired, when he had justice on his side. Now he was rejected, not for a shortcoming, but, according to his religious lights, for a virtue instead. His gaze searched the visible portion of the other chamber and found Rachel. In the half-light he saw that she had cast herself down against the sarcophagus, face toward the stone, her whole attitude one of weary depression.

Piteous as was the sight, there was comfort in it for him. Rachel loved him so much that she was bowed with the conflict between her love and her duty. His manhood reasserted itself. Love in youth bears hope with it in the face of the most hopeless hindrances. With the blood of the Orient in his veins and the fire of youth to heighten its ardor, he was not to be wholly and for ever cast down. Furthermore, there was Rachel to be comforted.

He turned to Deborah.

"Let it pass, then. Deny me not the joy of loving her, nor her the small content of loving me. If there should be change, let it be in thy prohibitions, not in our love. Enough. Art thou weary? Wouldst thou sleep?"

"Nay," she answered bluntly.

"Then I would take counsel with thee. Thou knowest the end of Israel?" he asked.

"I know the purpose of the Pharaoh, but there is no end to Israel."

"Not yet, perchance," he said calmly, "or never. But we shall not put trust in auguries. The oppression of the people is already begun at Pa-Ramesu and the brick-fields. Ye shall not return to those dire hardships. Ye can not return to Masaarah. In Memphis I offer my father's house, but Rachel refuses it. In Nehapehu there is safety among the peasantry on the murket's lands. My father lost an all-powerful signet in the tomb of the Incomparable Pharaoh at Tape, and did not search for it because he believed that Rameses had taken it away from him. The king will honor it and grant whatever petition I make to him. If ye are unafraid to abide in this tomb for the few remaining hours of this night I shall take you to Nehapehu at dawn. There ye can abide till I go to Tape and return. What sayest thou?"

The old woman looked at him quietly for a moment.

"Is this place safe?" she asked.

"The forty-two demons of Amenti could not drive an Egyptian into this tomb."

"How comes it that thou art not afraid?"

"I have no belief in spirits."

"Nor have we. Why need we go hence? We shall abide here till thou shalt return."

"In this place!" Kenkenes exclaimed, recoiling. "Nay! I shall be gone sixteen days at least."

"We shall not fear to live in a tomb, we who have defied untombed death daily. We shall remain here."

"This hole—this cave of death!"

"We have shelter, and by thine own words, none will molest us here. We are not spoiled with soft living, nor would we take peril to any. Without are fowls, herbs, roots, water—within, security, meat and wine. We shall not fear the dead whom, living, Joseph rebuked. We shall be content and well housed."

"But thou art wounded," he essayed.

She scouted his words with heroic scorn. "Nay, let us have no more. If thou canst accomplish this thing for Rachel, do it with a light heart, for we shall be safe. If thou art successful, Israel will rise up and call thee blessed; if thou failest, the sons of Abraham will still remember thee with respect."

No humility, no cringing gratitude in this. Queen Hatasu, talking with her favorite general, could not have commended him in a more queenly way.

To Kenkenes it seemed that their positions had been reversed. He craved to serve them and they suffered him.

"I shall go then to-night," he said simply.

"Nay, bide with us to-night, for thou art weary. There is no need for such haste."

He opened his lips to protest, his objections manifesting themselves in his manner. But she waved them aside.

"Thou hast the marks of hard usage upon thee," she said; "thou hast slaved for us since midday, and now the night is far spent. Thine eyes are heavy for sleep, thy face is weary. And before thee is a task which will require thy keenest wit, thy steadiest hand. Thou owest it to Rachel and to thyself to go forth with the eye of a hawk and the strength of a young lion."

Because of Rachel's name in her argument he yielded and turned immediately to the subject of their lonesome residence in the haunted tomb. "If aught befall me," he said, "for I am in the unknowable hands of the Hathors, disguise thyself and Rachel. If thou art skilled in altering thou canst find pigment among the roots of the Nile. Dye her hair and stain her face, take the boat and go to my father's house in Memphis. He is Mentu, the murket to the Pharaoh—a patriot and a friend to the kings. He knows not the Hebrew, but he is generous, hospitable and kind to the oppressed of whatever blood. Tell him Rachel's trouble and of me. I am his only child, and my name on thy lips will win thee the best of his board, the shelter of his roof, the protection of his right arm. Wait for me, however, in this place till a month hath elapsed.

"Keep the amphorae filled with water, fresh every day, and preserve a stock of food within the tomb always to stand you in good stead if Rachel's enemy discover her hiding-place and besiege it."

His eyes ignited and his face grew white.

"Starve within this cave," he went on intensely, approaching her, "but deliver her not into his hands, I charge thee, for the welfare of thy immortal soul. If thou art beset and there is no escape, before she shall live for the despoiler—take her life!"

Deborah scanned him narrowly, and when he made an end she opened her lips as though to speak. But something deterred her, and she moved away from him.

"Come, spread the matting, Rachel," she said. "The master will stay with us to-night."

Obediently the girl came, still white of face, but composed. She made a pallet of one roll of the matting, generously sprinkled the floor about it with oil to keep away the insects, put the lamp behind the amphora rack, hung her scarf over the frame that the light might not shine in her guest's eyes, and set the door a little aside to let the cool night air enter from the river. Having completed her service, she bade him a soft good-night and disappeared into the inner crypt, where Deborah had gone before her.

Kenkenes immediately flung himself upon the pallet because Rachel's hands had made it, and in a moment became acutely conscious of all the ache of body and the pain of soul the day had brought him. The first deprived him of comfort, the second of his peace, and there was the smell of dawn on the breeze before he fell asleep.

After sunset the next day Deborah roused him. He awoke restored in strength and hungry. The old Israelite had prepared some of the gazelle-meat for him, and this, with a draft of wine from an amphora, refreshed him at once. Provisions had been put in his wallet, and a double handful of golden rings, with several jewels, much treasure in small bulk, had been wrapped in a strip of linen and was ready for him. By the time all preparations were complete the night had come.

He bade Deborah farewell and took Rachel's hand. It was cold and trembled pitifully. Without a word he pressed it and gave it back. He had reached the entrance, when it seemed that a suppressed sound smote on his ears, and he stopped. Deborah, her face grown stern and hard, had moved a step or two forward and stood regarding Rachel sharply. Neither saw her.

"Did you speak, Rachel?" Kenkenes asked. He fancied that her arms had fallen quickly as he turned.

"Nay, except to bid thee take care of thyself, Kenkenes," she faltered, "more for thine own sake than for mine."

He returned and, on his knee, pressed her hand to his lips.

"God's face light thee and His peace attend thee," she continued. The blessing was full of wondrous tenderness and music. He knew how her face looked above him; how the free hand all but rested on his head, and for a moment his fortitude seemed about to desert him. But she whispered:

"Farewell."

And he arose and went forth.



[1] The tombs of the Orient in ancient times were common places of refuge for fugitives, lepers and outcasts.



CHAPTER XXI

ON THE WAY TO THEBES

The moon was ampler and its light stronger. The Nile was a vast and faintly silvered expanse, roughened with countless ripples blown opposite the direction of the current. The north wind had risen and swept through the crevice between the hills with more than usual strength, adding its reedy music to the sound of the swiftly flowing waters.

After launching his bari, Kenkenes gazed a moment, and then, with a prayer to Ptah for aid, struck out for the south, rowing with powerful strokes.

At the western shore lighted barges swayed at their moorings or journeyed slowly, but the Nile was wide, and the craft, blinded by their own brilliance, had no thought of what might be hugging the Arabian shore. Yet Kenkenes, with the inordinate apprehension of the fugitive, lurked in the shadows, dashed across open spaces and imagined in every drifting, drowsy fisher's raft a pursuing party. He prayed for the well-remembered end of the white dike, where the Nile curved about the southernmost limits of the capital. The day had not yet broken when he passed the last flambeau burning at the juncture of the dike with the city wall. He rowed on steadily for Memphis, and immediate danger was at last behind him.

The towers of the city had sunk below the northern horizon when, opposite a poor little shrine for cowherds on the shore, a brazen gong sounded musically for the sunrise prayers. The Libyan hilltops were, at that instant, illuminated by the sun, and Kenkenes, in obedience to lifelong training, rested his oars and bent his head. When he pulled on again he did not realize that he had been, with the stubbornness of habit, maintaining the breach between him and Rachel. There was no thought in his mind to give over his faith.

At noon, weary with heat, hunger and heavy labor, he drew up at Hak-heb, on the western side of the Nile, fifty miles above Memphis. The town was the commercial center for the pastoral districts of the posterior Arsinoeite nome—Nehapehu. Here were brought for shipment the wine, wheat and cattle of the fertile pocket in the Libyan desert. Being at a season of commercial inactivity, when the farmers were awaiting the harvest, the sunburnt wharves were almost deserted.

Few saw Kenkenes arrive. Most of the inhabitants were taking the midday rest, and every moored boat was manned by a sleeping crew. He made a landing and went up through the sand and dust of the hot street to the only inn. Here he ate and slept till night had come again. Refreshed and invigorated, he continued his journey. At noon the next day he stopped to sleep at another town and to buy a lamp, materials for making fire, ropes and a plummet of bronze sufficiently heavy to anchor his boat. He was entering a long stretch of distance wherein there was no inhabited town, and he was making ready to sleep in the bari. Then he began to travel by day, for he was too far from Memphis to fear pursuit, and rest in an open boat under a blazing sun would be impossible.

The third evening he paused opposite a ruined city on the eastern bank of the Nile. Hunters not infrequently went inland at this point for large game, and although the place was in a state of partial demolishment, Kenkenes hoped that there might be an inn. He tied his boat to a stake and entered Khu-aten,[1] the destroyed capital of Amenophis IV, self-styled Khu-n-Aten.

Here under a noble king, who loved beauty and had it not, the barbarous rites of the Egyptian religion were overthrown and sensuous and esthetic ceremonies were established and made obligatory all over the kingdom. In his blind groping after the One God, the king had directed worship to the most fitting symbol of Him—the sun.

He appeased the luminous divinity by offerings of flowers, regaled it with simmerings from censers, besought it with the tremulous harp and had it pictured with grace and vested with charm. And since the power of the national faith was all-permeating, its reconstruction was far-reaching in effect. Egypt was swept into a tremendous and beautiful heresy by a homely king, whose word was law.

But at his death the reaction was vast and vindictive. The orthodox faith reasserted itself with a violence that carried every monument to the apostasy and the very name of the apostate into dust. Now the remaining houses of Khu-ayen were the homes of the fishers—its ruins the habitation of criminals and refugees.

The hand of the insulted zealot, of the envious successor, of the invader and conqueror, had done what the reluctant hand of nature might not have accomplished in a millennium. The ruins showed themselves, stretching afar toward and across the eastern sky, in ragged and indefinable lines. The oblique rays of the newly risen moon slanted a light that was weird and ghostly because it fell across a ruin. Kenkenes climbed over a chaos of prostrate columns, fallen architraves and broken colossi, and the sounds of his advance stirred the rat, the huge spider, the snake and the hiding beast from the dark debris. Here and there were solitary walls standing out of heaps of wreckage, which had been palaces, and frequent arid open spaces marked the site of groves. In complex ramifications throughout the city sandy troughs were still distinguishable, where canals had been, and in places of peculiarly complete destruction the strips of uneven pavement showed the location of temples.

There was not a house at which Kenkenes dared to ask hospitality. Those that lived so precariously would have little conscience about stripping him of his possessions.

He retraced his steps to the wharves and drew away, prepared to spend the night in his boat.

After leaving Khu-aten, the Nile wound through wild country, the hills approaching its course so closely as to suggest the confines of a gorge. The narrow strip of level land on the eastern side lay under a receding shadow cast by the hills, but the river and the western shore were in the broad brilliance of the moon. The night promised to be one of exceeding brightness and Kenkenes shared the resulting wakefulness of the wild life on land.

The half of his up-journey was done and the conflict of hope and doubt marshaled feasible argument for and against the success of his mission. In some manner the destruction of Khu-aten offered, in its example of Egypt's fury against progress, a parallel to his own straits.

In his boyhood he had heard the Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten anathematized by the shaven priests, and in the depths of his heart he had been startled to find no sympathy for their rage against the artist-king.

Ritual-bound Egypt had resented liberty of worship—a liberalism that lacked naught in zeal or piety, but added grace to the Osirian faith. In his beauty-worship, Kenkenes was not narrow. He would not confine it to glyptic art, nor indeed to art alone—all the uses of life might be bettered by it. His appreciation of Khu-n-Aten's ambition had been passive before, but when his own spirit experienced the same fire and the same reproach, his sympathy became hearty partizanship.

His mind wandered back again to the ruin. How fiercely Egypt had resented the schism of a Pharaoh, a demi-god, the Vicar of Osiris! The words of Rachel came back to him like an inspiration:

"Thou hast nation-wide, nation-old, nation-defended prejudice to overcome, and thou art but one, Kenkenes."

But one, indeed, and only a nobleman. Could he hope to change Egypt when a king might not? Behold, how he was suffering for a single and simple breach of the law. At the thought he paused and asked himself:

"Am I suffering for the sacrilege?"

The admission would entail a terrifying complexity.

If he were suffering punishment for the statue, what punishment had been his for the sacrilegious execution of the Judgment of the Dead in the tomb of Rameses II? What, other than the reclamation of the signet by the Incomparable Pharaoh, even as Mentu had said? If the hypothesis held, he had committed sacrilege, he had offended the gods, and might not the accumulated penalty be—O unspeakable—the loss of Rachel?

On the other hand, if the signet were still in the tomb, Rameses had not reclaimed it—Rameses had not been offended. The ritual condemned his act, but if Rameses in the realm of inexorable justice and supernal wisdom did not, how should he reconcile the threats of the ritual and the evident passiveness of the royal soul? If he found the signet and achieved his ends, aside from its civil power over him, what weight would the canonical thunderings have to his inner heart?

Once again he paused. The deductions of his free reasoning led him upon perilous ground. They made innuendoes concerning the stability of the other articles of hieratical law. He was startled and afraid of his own arguments.

"Nay, by the gods," he muttered to himself, "it is not safe to reason with religion."

But every stroke of his oar was active persistence in his heresy.

He believed he should find the signet.

Thereafter he could turn a deaf ear to any renegade ideas such an event might suggest.

It was an unlucky chance that befell the theological institutions of Egypt as far as this devotee was concerned, that Kenkenes had landed at the capital of the hated Pharaoh.

But he shook himself and tried to fix his attention on the night. The stars were few—the multitude obliterated by the moon, the luminaries abashed thereby. The light fell through a high haze of dust and was therefore wondrously refracted and diffused. The hills made high lifted horizons, undulating toward the east, serrated toward the west. In the sag between there was no human companionship abroad.

Throughout great lengths of shore-line the tuneless stridulation of frogs, the guttural cries of water-birds and the general movement in the sedge indicated a serene content among small life. But sometimes he would find silence on one bank for a goodly stretch where there was neither marsh-chorus nor cadences of insects. The hush would be profound and an affrighted air of suspense was apparent. And there at the river-brink the author of this breathless dismay, some lithe flesh-eater, would stride, shadow-like, through the high reeds to drink. Now and then the woman-like scream of the wildcat, or the harsh staccato laugh of the hyena would startle the marshes into silence. Sometimes retiring shapes would halt and gaze with emberous eyes at the boat moving in midstream.

Kenkenes admitted with a grim smile that the great powers of the world and the wild were against him. But Rachel's face came to him as comfort—the memory of it when it was tender and yielding—and with a lover's buoyancy he forgot his sorrows in remembering that she loved him. He dropped the anchor and, lying down in the bottom of his boat, dreamed happily into the dawn.

During the day he landed for supplies at a miserable town of pottery-makers, leaving his boat at the crazy wharves.

When he returned the bari was gone. A negro, the only one near the river who was awake, told him that a dhow, laden with clay, in making a landing had struck the bari, staved in its side, upset it and sent it adrift.

The mischance did not trouble Kenkenes.

After some effort he aroused a crew of oarsmen, procured a boat, and continued at once to Thebes.



[1] Khu-aten—Tel-el-Amarna.



CHAPTER XXII

THE FAN-BEARER'S QUEST

At sunset on the day after the festivities at the Lady Senci's, Hotep deserted his palace duties and came to the house of Mentu. He had in mind to try again to persuade his friend from his folly, for the scribe was certain that Kenkenes was once more returning to his sacrilege and the Israelite.

The old housekeeper informed him that the young master was not at home, though he was expected even now.

Hotep waited in the house of his aunt, neighbor to the murket, and about the middle of the first watch asked again for Kenkenes.

Nay, the young master had not returned. But would not the noble Hotep enter and await him?

The scribe, however, returned to the palace, and put off his visit until the next day.

The following noon a page brought him a message from his aunt, the Lady Senci. It was short and distressed.

"Kenkenes has not returned, Hotep, and since he is known to have gone upon the Nile, we fear that disaster has overtaken him. Come and help the unhappy murket. His household is so dismayed that it is useless. Come, and come quickly."

The probability of the young artist's death in the Nile immediately took second place in the scribe's mind. Kenkenes had displayed to Hotep the effect of Rameses' savage boast to exterminate the Hebrews. It was that incident which had convinced the scribe that the Arabian hills would claim the artist on the morrow. He had not stopped to surmise the extremes to which Kenkenes would go, but his mysterious disappearance seemed to suggest that the lover had gone to the Israelitish camp to remain.

He made ready and repaired to the house of the murket. Mentu met him in the chamber of guests. By the dress of the great artist it would seem that he had returned at that moment from the streets.

Hotep sat down beside him, and with tact and well-chosen words told his story and summarized his narration with a mild statement of his suspicions.

There was no outbreak on the part of Mentu. But his broad chest heaved once, as though it had thrown off a great weight.

"But Kenkenes has been a dutiful son," he said after a silence, "I can not think he would use me so cruelly—no word of his intent or his whereabouts."

The objection was plausible.

"Then, let us go to Masaarah and discover of a surety," the scribe suggested.

When Atsu emerged from the mouth of the little valley into the quarries some time after the midday meal, he was confronted by the murket and the royal scribe. Neither of the men was unknown to him.

Hotep halted him.

"Was there a guest with the fair-haired Israelite maiden last night?" the scribe asked.

Atsu's face, pinched and darker than usual, blazed wrathfully.

"Have ye also joined yourselves with Har-hat to run that hard-pressed child to earth?" he exclaimed. "Do ye call yourselves men?"

"The gods forbid!" Hotep protested. "We do not concern ourselves with the maiden. It is the man who may be with her that we seek."

The taskmaster made an angry gesture, and Hotep interrupted again.

"I do not question her decorum, and the man of whom I speak is of spotless character. He is lost and we seek him."

"I can not help you; my wits are taxed in another search."

Hotep's face showed light at the taskmaster's words.

"Is she also gone?" he asked mildly. "Then let me give you my word, that the discovery of one will also find the other."

Atsu gazed with growing hope at the scribe.

"How is he favored?" he asked at last.

"He is tall, half a palm taller than his fellows; comely of countenance; young; in manner, amiable and courteous—."

Atsu interrupted him with a wave of his hand. "I saw him once—good three months agone, but not since."

The reply baffled Hotep for a moment. He realized that to find Kenkenes he must begin a search for Rachel.

"Good Atsu, he whom we seek is a friend to the maiden. He is much beloved by me—by us. Whomsoever he befriendeth we shall befriend. Wilt thou tell us when and from whom the maiden fled?"

Atsu had become willing by this time. This amiable young noble might be able to lift the suspense that burdened his unhappy heart.

"Har-hat—Set make a cinder of his heart!—asked her at the hands of the Pharaoh for his harem—"

Mentu interrupted him with a growling imprecation and Hotep's fair face darkened.

"Yesterday morning he sent three men to me," the taskmaster continued, "with the document of gift from the Son of Ptah, but she saw them in time and fled into the desert. At that hour there were only women in the camp, and the three men made short work of me when I would have held them till she escaped. In three hours, two of them returned—one, sick from hard usage, and the third, they said, had been pitched over the cliff-front into the valley of the Nile. They had not captured her and they were too much enraged to explain why they had not. During their absence I emptied the quarries of Israelites and posted them along the Nile to halt the Egyptians, if they came to the river with Rachel. But we let them return to Memphis empty-handed, and thereafter searched the hills till sunset. The maiden's foster-mother, it seems, fled with her, but neither of them, nor any trace of them, was to be found."

"Does it not appear to thee," Hotep asked, after a little silence, "that the same hand which so forcibly persuaded the Egyptians to abandon the pursuit may have led the maiden to a place of safety? My surmises have been right in general, O noble Mentu, but not in detail," he continued, turning to the murket. "There is, however, the element of danger now to take the place of the gracelessness we would have laid to him. Thou knowest Har-hat, my Lord."

He thanked the dark-faced taskmaster. "Have no concern for the maiden. She is safe, I doubt not."

He took Mentu's arm and passing up through the Israelitish camp, climbed the slope behind it.

"It is my duty and thine to hide this lovely folly up here, ere these searching minions of Har-hat or frantic Israelites come upon it."

The scribe's sense of direction and location was keen. It was one of the goodly endowments of the savage and the beast which the gods had added to the powers of this man of splendid intellect. He doubled back through the great rocks, his steps a little rapid and never hesitating, as though his destination were in full view. Mentu followed him, silent and moodily thoughtful. At last Hotep stopped.

Before them was a narrow aisle leading down from the summit of the hill. It was hemmed in on each side by tumbled masses of stone. The aisle terminated at its lower end in a long white drift of sand against a great cube. Instinct and reason told Hotep that here had been the hiding-place of Athor, but there was no sign that human foot had ever entered the spot. After a space of puzzlement, Hotep smiled.

"He hath made way with the sacrilege himself," he said with relief in his voice; "I had not credited him with so much foresight. Nay, now, if the runaway will but come home, we will forgive him."

Mentu said nothing. Indeed, since Hotep had told him of the recent doings of Kenkenes, the murket had had little to say. He had felt in his lifetime most of the sorrows that can overtake a man of his position and attainments—but he had never known the chagrin of a wayward child. The fear that he was to know that humiliation, now, made his heart heavy beyond words.

As they turned away the sound of voices smote upon their ears.

"Near this spot, it must be, my Lord," one said.

"Find the sacrilege, lout. We seek not the neighborhood of it."

Hotep caught the murket's arm and drew him out of the aisle into hiding behind another great stone.

"This is the place; this is the place," the first voice declared, and his statement was seconded by another and as positive a voice.

There was the sound of the new-comers emerging into the aisle, and immediately the first speaker exclaimed in a tone full of astonishment and disappointment:

"O, aye; I see!" the master assented with an irritating laugh.

"Har-hat!" Hotep whispered.

Another of the party broke in impatiently: "Make an end to this chase. Saw you any sacrilege, or was it a phantom of your stupid dreams?"

"Asar-Mut," Mentu said under his breath.

The first voice and its second protested in chorus.

"As the gods hear me, I saw it!" the first went on. "It was a statue most sacrilegiously wrought and the man stood before it. It was cunningly hidden between two walls, and there is no spot on the desert that looks so much like the place as this. And yet, no wall—no statue—no sign of—"

"How did you find it yesterday?" the fan-bearer asked.

"We followed the hag, and she, the girl. The pair of them were in sight of each other, as they ran."

"How did they find it?"

"Magic! Magic!"

"There were three of you and one man overthrew you all?" the high priest commented suspiciously.

"Holy Father!" the servant protested wildly, "he was a giant—a monster for bigness. Besides, there were but two of us, after he had all but throttled me."

Har-hat laughed again. "Aye, and after he pitched Nak over the cliff, there was but one. But tell me this: was he noble or a churl?"

"He wore the circlet."

Mentu's long fingers bent as if he longed for a throat between them.

"The craven invented his giant to salve his valor," the priest said.

"It may be," the fan-bearer replied musingly, "but thy nephew, holy Father, is conspicuously tall and well-muscled. Likewise, he is a sculptor. Furthermore, the two slaves came home badly abused. Unas has some proof for his tale—"

"Kenkenes is the soul of fidelity," the high priest retorted warmly. "He has had unnumbered opportunities to betray the gods and he has ever been steadfast."

"Nay, I did not impugn him. The similarity merely appealed to me. Let us get down into the valley and question that villain Atsu. I would know what became of the girl."

"Mine interests are solely with the ecclesiastical features of the offense, my Lord," Asar-Mut replied. "I would get back to Memphis."

"Bear us company a little longer, holy Father. The taskmaster may tell us somewhat of this blaspheming sculptor-giant."

When the last sound of the departing men died away, Mentu turned across the hill toward the Nile-front of the cliff.

"Nay, I will go back to Memphis first," he said grimly. "Mayhap Kenkenes hath returned. If Asar-Mut should question him, he would not evade nor equivocate, so I shall send him away that he may not meet his uncle. I would not have him lie, but he shall not accomplish his own undoing."

But days of seeking followed, growing frantic as time went on, and there was no trace of the lost artist. Even his pet ape did not return. Asar-Mut questioned Mentu closely concerning the fidelity of Kenkenes to the faith and the ritual.

"I ask after his soul," he explained. But he gained no evidence from Mentu.

On the fourteenth day after the disappearance of the young sculptor, Sepet, the boatman that had hired his bari to Kenkenes, found the boat among the wharf piling. It was overturned, its bottom ripped out, one side crushed as if a river-horse had played with it. In the small compartment at the tiller were provisions for a light lunch; a wallet, empty; a rope and a plummet of bronze used to moor a boat in midstream while the sportsman fished; the light woolen mantle worn as often for protection against the sun as against the cold, and other things to prove that Kenkenes had met with disaster.

The fate of the young man seemed to be explained. The great house of Mentu was darkened; the servants went unkempt and the artist wore a blue scarf knotted about his hips. The high priest dismissed the subject of the sacrilege from his mind, now that his nephew was dead. The people of Memphis who knew Kenkenes mourned with Mentu; the festivities were dull without him, and there were some, like Io and the Lady Senci, who went into retirement and were not to be comforted.

But Har-hat presented jeweled housings to Apis for the prospering of his search after Rachel, and set about assisting the god with all his might. He sent couriers, armed with a description and warrant for the arrest of Kenkenes and the Israelite, into all the large cities of Egypt. He ransacked Pa-Ramesu and the brick-fields, Silsilis, Syene, where there were quarries, and especially Thebes, which was large and remote, a tempting place for fugitives.

When he heard the news of the young sculptor's death, he actually sent a message of condolence to Mentu, much to the tearful and unspeakable rage of the heart-broken murket. Yet, with all the limitless resources placed at the command of a bearer of the king's fan, Har-hat continued to search for the young artist, until word came to him from Thebes several days later.

His next move was to bring to the notice of the Pharaoh that the taskmaster Atsu was pampering the Israelites of Masaarah and defeating the ends of the government. Furthermore, the overseer had treated with contempt the personal commands of the fan-bearer. So Atsu was removed entirely from over the Hebrews, reduced to the rank of a common soldier, and returned to the nome from which he came, in the coif and tunic of a cavalryman.

Thus it was that Har-hat avenged himself for the loss of Rachel, put all aid out of her reach, and kept up an unceasing pursuit of her.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE TOMB OF THE PHARAOH

It was far into the tenth night that Kenkenes arrived in Thebes. On the sixteenth day Rachel would begin to expect him, and he could not hope to reach Memphis by that time. She should not wait an hour longer than necessary. He would get the signet that night and return by the swiftest boat obtainable in Thebes. The dawn should find him on the way to Memphis.

He entered the streets of the Libyan suburb of the holy city, and passed through it to the scattering houses, set outside the thickly-settled portion, and nearer to the necropolis. At the portals of the most pretentious of these houses he knocked and was admitted.

He was met presently in the chamber of guests by an old man, gray-haired and bent. This was the keeper of the tomb of Rameses the Great.

"I am the son of Mentu," he said, "thy friend, and the friend of the Incomparable Pharaoh. Perchance thou dost remember me."

"I remember Mentu," the old man replied, after a space that might have been spent in rumination, or in collecting his faculties to speak.

"He decorated the tomb of Rameses," the young man continued.

"Aye, I remember. I watched him often at the work."

"Thou knowest how the great king loved him."

The old man bent his head in assent.

"He was given a signet by Rameses, and on the jewel was testimony of royal favor which should outlive the Pharaoh and Mentu himself."

"Even so. A precious talisman, and a rare one."

"It was lost."

"Nay! Lost! Alas, that is losing the favor of Osiris. What a calamity!" The old man shook his head and his gray brows knitted.

"But the place in which it was lost is small, and I would search for it again."

"That is wise. The gods aid them who surrender not."

By this time the old man's face had become inquiring.

"There is need for the signet now—"

"The noble Mentu, in trouble?" the old man queried.

"The son of the noble Mentu is in trouble—the purity of an innocent one at stake, and the foiling of a villain to accomplish," Kenkenes answered earnestly.

"A sore need. Is it— Wouldst thou have me aid thee?"

"Thou hast said. I come to thee to crave thy permission to search again for the signet."

"Nay, but I give it freely. Yet I do not understand."

"The signet was lost in the tomb of the Incomparable Pharaoh. May I not visit the crypt?"

The old man thought a moment. "Aye, thou canst search. If thou wilt come for me to-morrow—"

"Nay, I would go this very night."

The keeper's face sobered and he shook his head.

"Deny me not, I pray thee," Kenkenes entreated earnestly. "Thou, who hast lived so many years, hast at some time weighed the value of a single moment. In the waste or use of the scant space between two breaths have lives been lost, souls smirched, the unlimited history of the future turned. And never was a greater stake upon the saving of time than in this strait—which is the peril of spotless womanhood."

The old man rubbed his head. "Aye, I know, I know. Thy haste is justifiable, but—"

"I can go alone. There is no need that thou shouldst waste an hour of thy needed sleep for me. I pledge thee I shall conduct myself without thee as I should beneath thine eye. Most reverently will I enter, most reverently search, most reverently depart, and none need ever know I went alone."

The ancient keeper weakened at the earnestness of the young man.

"And thou wilt permit no eye to see thee enter or come forth from the valley?"

"Most cautious will I be—most secret and discreet."

"Canst thou open the gates?"

"I have not forgotten from the daily practice that was mine for many weeks."

"Then go, and let no man know of this. Amen give thee success."

Kenkenes thanked him gratefully and went at once.

The moon was in its third quarter, but it was near midnight and the valley of the Nile between the distant highlands to the east and west was in soft light. On the eastern side of the river there was only a feeble glimmer from a window where some chanting leech stood by a bedside, or where a feast was still on. But under the luster of the waning moon Thebes lost its outlines and became a city of marbles and shadows and undefined limits.

On the western side the vision was interrupted by a lofty, sharp-toothed range, tipped with a few scattered stars of the first magnitude. In the plain at its base were the palaces of Amenophis III, of Rameses II, and their temples, the temples of the Tothmes, and far to the south the majestic colossi of Amenophis III towered up through the silver light, the faces, in their own shadow, turned in eternal contemplation of the sunrise. Grouped about the great edifices were the booths of funeral stuffs and the stalls of caterers to the populace of the Libyan suburb of Thebes. But these were hidden in the dark shadows which the great structures threw. The moon blotted out the profane things of the holy city and discovered only its splendors to the sky.

At the northwest limits of the suburb, the hills approached the Nile, leaving only a narrow strip a few hundred yards wide between their fronts and the water. Here the steep ramparts were divided by a tortuous cleft, which wound back with many cross-fissures deep into the desert. The ravine was simply a chasm, with perpendicular sides of naked rock.

At its upper end, it was blocked by a wall of unscalable heights. Nowhere in its length was it wider than a hundred yards, and across the mouth a gateway wide enough for three chariots abreast had been built of red granite.

This was the valley of the Tombs of the Kings.

In chambers hewn in solid rock, the monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties were entombed. All along the walls of the gorge, nature had secured the sacred resting-place of the sovereigns against trespass from the end and sides of the chasm, and Egypt had dutifully strengthened the one weak point in the fortification—the entrance—by the gateway of granite. But there was no vigilance of guards. Whosoever knew how to open the gates might enter the valley. The secret of the bolts was known only among the members of the royal family and the court. To Kenkenes, whose craft as a sculptor had taught him the intricate devices used in closing tombs, the opening of these gates was simple. Even the mighty portals of Khufu and Menka-ra would yield responsive to his intelligent touch.

He let himself into the valley and, closing the valves behind him, went up the tortuous gorge, darkened by the shadows of its walls. He continued past the mouth of the valley's southern arm wherein were entombed the kings of the eighteenth dynasty. Here, in this open space, he could see the circling bats, which before he could only hear above his head. Somewhere among the rocks up the moonlit hollow an owl hooted. But the tombs he sought were in the upper end of the main ravine.

Here lay Rameses I, the founder of that illustrious dynasty—the nineteenth. Near-by was his son, Seti I, and next to him the splendid tyrant, Rameses the Great, the Incomparable Pharaoh.

By the time Kenkenes had reached the spot, all lightness in his heart had gone out like the extinguishing of a candle, and the weight of suspense, the fear of failure, fell on him as suddenly. He approached the elaborate facade of the solemn portals, climbed the pairs of steps, and paused at each of the many landings with a prayer for the success of his mission, not for the repose of the royal soul, after the custom of other visitors. With trembling hands he pushed the doors, rough with inscriptions, and the great stone valves swung ponderously inward, the bronze pins making no sound as they turned in the sockets. Kenkenes entered and closed the portals behind him.

Instantly all sound of the outside world was cut off—the sound of the wind, the chafing of the sands on the hills above, the movement and cries of night-birds, beasts and insects. Absolute stillness and original night surrounded him.

With all speed he lighted his lamp, but the flaring name illuminated only a little space in the brooding, hovering blackness about him.

The atmosphere was stagnant and heavily burdened with old aromatic scent, and the silence seemed to have accumulated in the years. Even the soft whetting of his sandal, as he walked, made echoes that shouted at him. The little blaze fizzed and sputtered noisily and each throb of his heart sounded like a knock on the portal.

He did not pause. The darkness might cloud and tinge and swallow up his light as turbid water absorbs the clear; the silence might resent the violation. This was the habitation of a royal soul in perpetual vigil over its corpse and vested with all the powers and austere propensities of a thing supernatural. But not once did the impulse come to him to fly. Rachel's face attended him like a lamp.

He moved forward, his path only discovered to him step by step as the light advanced, the sumptuous frescoes done by the hand of his father emerging, one detail at a time. The solemn figures fixed accusing eyes upon him from every frieze; the passive countenance of the monarch himself confronted him from every wall. One wondrous chamber after another he traversed, for the tomb penetrated the very core of the mountain.

The innermost crypt contained the altars. This was the sanctuary, the holy of holies, never entered except by a hierarch.

When Kenkenes reached the final threshold he paused. Thus far, his presence had been merely a midnight intrusion. If he entered the sanctuary his coming would be violation. He thought of the distress of Rachel and dared.

The first alabaster altar glistened suddenly out of the night like a bank of snow. Kenkenes' sandal grated on the sandy dust that lay thick on the floor. Not even the keeper had entered this crypt to remove the accumulated dust of six years.

Under this floor of solid granite was the pit containing the sarcophagi of the dead monarch, of his favorite son and destined heir, Shaemus, and his well-beloved queen, Neferari Thermuthis. The opening into the pit had been sealed when Rameses had descended to emerge no more. The chamber over it was brilliant with frescoing and covered with inscriptions. There were three magnificent altars of alabaster and over each was an oval containing the name of one of the three sleepers in the pit below.

In this chapel the signet had been lost.

Kenkenes set his light on the floor and began his search. The first time he searched the floor, he laid the lack of success to his excited work. The second time, the perspiration began to trickle down his temples. Thereafter he sought, lengthwise and crosswise, calling on the gods for aid, but there was no glint of the jewel.

At last, sick with despair, he sat down to collect himself. Suddenly across the heavy silence there smote a sound. In a place closer to the beating heart of the world, the movement might have escaped him. Now, though it was but the rustle of sweeping robes, it seemed to sough like the wind among the clashing blades of palm-leaves.

For a moment Kenkenes sat, transfixed, and in that moment the sound came nearer. He remembered the injunction of the old keeper. Human or supernatural, the new-comer must not find him there. He leaped behind the altar of Shaemus, extinguishing the light as he did so. He flung the corner of his kamis over the reeking wick that the odor might not escape, but his fear in that direction was materially lessened when he saw that the stranger bore a fuming torch.

On one end of the short pole of the torch was a knot of flaming pitch, on the other was a bronze ring fitted with sprawling claws. The stranger set the light on the floor and the device kept the torch upright. He crossed the room and stood at the altar of Neferari Thermuthis.

By the deeply fringed and voluminous draperies, and by the venerable beard, rippling and streaked with gray, the young sculptor took the stranger to be an Israelite. As Kenkenes looked upon him, he was minded of his father, the magnificent Mentu. There was the bearing of the courtier, with the same wondrous stature, the same massive frame. But the delicate features of the Egyptian, the long, slim fingers, the narrow foot, were absent. In this man's countenance there was majesty instead of grace; in his figure, might, instead of elegance. The expression had need of only a little emphasis in either direction to become benign or terrible. Kenkenes caught a single glance of the eyes under the gray shelter of the heavy brows. Once, the young man had seen hanging from Meneptah's neck the rarest jewel in the royal treasure. The wise men had called it an opal. It shot lights as beautiful and awful as the intensest flame. And something in the eyes of this mighty man brought back to Kenkenes the memory of the fires of that wondrous gem.