WHO IS MY BROTHER?
Sarchedon, stretched senseless in the desert, bled so freely, that he must have bled to death but for the sand on which he lay. Its fine particles served to stanch the wound ere life was quite extinct; and though very faint and feeble, the mysterious spark was not so wholly quenched but that a tender hand might nurse it into flame once more.
Sadoc and his little band of Israelites, journeying peaceably on, so long as their asses seemed to travel without fatigue, and finding their course through the wilderness by the stars, were about to halt for the night, when they came across the prostrate form of the Assyrian, very white and death-like in the moonlight, lying near the lion's skeleton in their path. Those were patriarchal times, and it was not the nature of a son of Abraham, witnessing such a calamity, to "pass by on the other side." Sadoc was down by the helpless figure in an instant with his hand on its breast, rejoiced to trace the feeble flutterings of its heart. What little skill of surgery he possessed came into practice forthwith. He forced some drops of wine between the clenched teeth; he drew the arrow, and poured oil into the gaping wound; he tore his linen garment into strips for a bandage; and lifting the wounded man on his own beast, walked patiently by its side, until they reached a fitting spot of encampment for the night.
That Sadoc should have been thus journeying in freedom and honour, while his Egyptian fellow-captives were bewailing their bondage in the heart of Babylon, was due to one of those strokes of policy in which Assarac the eunuch took especial pride.
Ever since her subjection under an Eastern people of wandering and warlike habits, counting their possessions by their flocks, but showing rather the rapacious instincts of the wolf than the meek and gentle nature of those creatures they loved to tend, Egypt had learned to hate, even more than she feared, all races of mankind that lay nearer the land of Morning than herself. She had not long shaken off the loathed supremacy of the Shepherd Kings ere she employed her new-found strength in making war on the nations of her eastern border—the formidable Philistines, the terrible sons of Anak, and the mighty empire of which Nimrod was the founder, ruled in succession by a line of heroic kings. As her victories increased, so she enlarged her territories, until she became powerful enough to contest with her Assyrian rival the supremacy of the Eastern world.
Perhaps that protracted famine, which wasted other countries, and for which the wise and high-minded stranger whom Pharaoh had made his regent provided so skilfully, may have enhanced her relative resources as it weakened her neighbours; perhaps the balance in which nations are weighed was so adjusted by that Supreme Power, to whom worlds are but as grains of sand, through other means; but it came to pass that the more Southern and less warlike people contended with varying success against their ancient enemy; and to proud Assyria the very name of Egypt was as an offence that stunk in her nostrils, a wound that spread and festered in her flesh.
It was a day of triumph, therefore, in great Babylon when her fiery old monarch returned victorious from his Egyptian campaign, and the common multitude rejoiced to tell each other how their hereditary foes had been humbled, how Memphis and Thebes had seen the banners of Ashur flaunting defiance at their gates, his horsemen encompassing their walls; but wiser heads reflected on the small amount of real gain represented by all this glory, of real damage inflicted on the enemy by an invasion that had obtained no concession of dominion, no increase of national power. What were a few herds of cattle, a drove of captives, a heap or two of gold, garments, armour, and common spoil. Like the subsiding of their own river, this ebbing wave of war left, perhaps, increased fertility where it had passed, in the stern lessons of experience learned by those who were honourably worsted in hard-won fight. Egypt was little weaker in numerical force than when the Great King entered her territories; in skill, confidence, and spirit, she was actually stronger than before.
These considerations were not overlooked by the wisdom of Semiramis; while to Assarac's far-seeing eye, the sapping of Egyptian strength, by every means at home and abroad, seemed the surest and safest policy for the attainment of his one paramount object—the aggrandisement of his country, and through her supremacy, his own.
It did not escape his penetration, that Assyria's great rival was vexed with a sore at her very heart, to prove a constant drain on her resources, an object of daily anxiety and alarm. By a flagrant breach of faith, an unscrupulous desecration of the rites of hospitality, she had converted a race of exiles into a nation of slaves. Those who came to her for bread had indeed received a stone, and the hand she once stretched to them in friendship was now clenched in menace, or fell heavily in blows of tyranny and oppression. As the Israelites increased in numbers, like certain herbs that spring into growth and vitality more profusely, the more they are trampled under foot, the wiser Pharaohs began to realise the danger they incurred. No state, however powerful, could be safe having a numerous race of aliens mixed, yet not mingling, with its native population, strangers in thought, feelings, usages, above all, in creed and worship. They might be tamed with hard work, disheartened by ill-usage, coerced and kept down in every mode that a remorseless policy could suggest, still nothing less than their absorption or extinction could give security to their conquerors; and Providence permitted neither the one nor the other.
They lived, a people apart, dogged, unresisting, suffering with but little complaint, yet preserving, apparently for consolation under the bitterest hardships, some strange confidence in their future, some mysterious trust in a Power before which Pharaoh and his bowmen should be swept away like locusts in an east wind. They worked in sad suggestive silence, they earned their morsel of bread with sweat and blood and tears; but they had no voluntary dealings with their task-masters—neither ate nor drank with them, married nor gave in marriage, bought nor sold.
Much of this Assarac had already learned from intercourse with the many strangers who crowded to the great mart of Babylon out of the South; much from his conversation with Sadoc, whom he had liberated, not without a purpose. By the Israelite's narrative, he verified his own information concerning the captive people, and won the other's confidence in his sympathy with their sufferings, his desire to right them by the unanswerable arguments of sword and spear. His plan, he thought, was not unworthy of his own intellect and the glory of the Great Queen.
To send back this venerable Israelite, as an emissary to his countrymen, promising them the powerful aid of Assyria at the time when they should see fit to cast off the Egyptian yoke; exhorting them to rise unanimously from within, while all the force of Ashur pressed on the enemy from without; thus to obtain complete conquest, to extend unbounded dominion over the land of the South; and, finally, when the sway of the Great Queen should extend from the sands of the Libyan desert to the farthest mountains of Armenia, to place this strange people in some district suited to their habits, there to become hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Assyrian nation. What matter? They would have served his purpose, and might be cast aside like a frayed bowstring or the shaft of a broken spear.
But the wily eunuch was perplexed by the coldness with which the Israelite received, while he accepted, these warlike overtures. Sadoc seemed to have but little confidence even in the mighty resources of Assyria; little faith in chariots of iron, and horsemen countless as the sands by the Red Sea.
"Our fathers," said he, "came down into Egypt, directed by the finger of our God. When he thinks fit, he will lead us out of the house of our captivity into a land of corn and wine and oil, where we shall worship him in freedom, teaching our children, and our children's children, that he only is mighty, and that the gods of the nations are in his sight but as chaff winnowed from the threshing-floor, as smoke from a burnt-offering, that melts into empty air."
Nevertheless, he was satisfied to take with him to his captive people the good tidings of promised assistance at their need, and journeyed back to Egypt, pondering deeply on the prospect of a path to freedom thus opened out by the assurances of a priest of Baal.
It was characteristic of the man and of his national habits, that he refused all guard or escort for his long and toilsome journey. His own servants, taken captive at the same time with himself, and a few asses bearing a slender store of water and provisions, formed the whole troop. Thus scarcely half a score of wayfarers gathered round Sarchedon, to preserve him from a lonely death on the desert sand.
Long days the little company plodded on, taking by choice the most frequented route, in order to avoid those wandering and predatory tribes of the Philistines, whose hand was already against every man, as "every man's hand was against them." But the domestic policy of Semiramis had made her name a terror to these pitiless spoilers; and many a swarthy robber, who would have scorned to quail before the face of Ninus himself, trembled at the ghastly punishments inflicted on his kindred by order of the Great Queen. They believed her—and not entirely without reason—to be omnipotent, omnipresent, beautiful as morning, terrible as the lightning, pitiless as fate.
Wide tracts of desert, therefore, stretching between the different wells and stations that enabled travellers to proceed in a direct course to Egypt, though lonely, were as secure as the main streets of Babylon itself, especially since they had been so recently trodden by the returning army of the Great King. Sadoc's only anxiety was the insufficiency of water on their way; his only apprehension, lest his patient should die ere he could bring him into the land of strangers he was forced to call his home.
It was weary work for the sick man in the wilderness, after he had recovered consciousness and began to regain strength day by day. He had never known before with what force that merciless sun could pour down on his face and hands, with what a glare it could be refracted on his aching eyes. How he sickened for the bright translucent waters of the mirage, though he knew them false and illusive as a dream! How he loathed the protracted crawl, the unbroken sky-line, the palms that promised rest and refreshment, but seemed never a furlong nearer, as he journeyed sadly on! The ass's patient step, the monotonous jingle of its bell, the heat, the thirst, the unvarying interminable sea of sand, the longing for something green, were it but a leaf, a blade of grass, a single bulrush, became almost maddening; and when at noon they halted to fling themselves gladly down in any cubit's-breadth of shade they could find, no palace had ever seemed so commodious, no hangings of silk or velvet so grateful, as the dark lines cast by a clump of slender palm-trees, the protection of some uncovered boulder jutting from the surface to offer repose and shelter—the "shadow of a great rock in a weary land."
The Assyrian's constitution, however, was sound, as his frame was strong and agile. Ere he reached the confines of Egypt, his health was reëstablished, he had strength to look his destiny firmly in the face.
The wayfarers rose from their encampment before dawn. With the first streaks of morning the summits of the mighty Pyramids—already time-honoured records of long-past ages and exhausted dynasties—peered daily above the horizon. Crossing the frontier, Sadoc pointed them out to his companions, while over his usually gentle brow swept an expression of fierce anger and hate.
"Behold them!" said he—"the monuments and the archives of our masters, detailing like a scroll the history of their cruelties, their iniquities, and their oppressions. I tell you, the mortar that daubs them has been tempered with human blood. Every brick is cemented with tears of women and children, every slab founded on the body and bones of a murdered man. I know their cruelties; for is not my own nation crushed and tortured every hour to complete their like? I know that the Egyptian is without compunction or remorse; that in life he would shrink from no crime, as he would accept any privation, but to secure a palace for his resting-place after death. Vain, frivolous, pleasure-seeking, this people—living but for the empty gratification of the hour, jesting, dancing, posture-making, revelling in wine and flowers—can yet erect for the vile body they are so loath to leave tombs that might contain an army, that shall outlast countless generations of their slavish, tyrannous, blood-thirsty, and luxurious race."
"They are skilful warriors," answered Sarchedon, whose only experience of the Egyptian was under shield; "but they cannot stand against the chariots of Assyria. Why do not your people rise and cast off their yoke?"
The Israelite shook his head.
"Who is to lead us?" said he, "and whither are we to go? Shall we take our little ones in our hand, and wander forth to the wilderness without food, without arms, without flocks and herds, skins of water, beasts of burden, and means of daily life? How shall you conduct a multitude like ours through the desert? Where shall we encamp at night, and whither bend our steps at dawn? If we fled to the South, we should arrive at fathomless rivers, impassable mountains, troops of evil spirits and demons, the servants of Seth and Abitur, if indeed, our task-masters tell us truth, that the hideous square-eared offspring of the Great Serpent has been expelled to the confines of Ethiopia. Shall we move eastward to be a spoil to the terrible children of Anak and the fierce tribes of Philistia, who live but to slay, ravage, and destroy? Should we seek the land of our fathers, to find it occupied by our own nation—a race of warriors, men of fierce countenance, worshippers of many gods? No, my son, no. While we remain in Egypt, we have bread, though it be moistened with tears; we have safety of life and limb, though we are subject to outrage, insult, and ignominy; we have a home like the weary ox in the stall, and food like the ass at his master's crib."
"And you can bear it!" exclaimed the fiery Assyrian. "I had rather go out afoot in the desert to die of hunger and thirst with my bow in my hand!"
"We bear it," answered the other gravely, "because of the promise to our father Abraham, in which we believe. We shall not bear it a day longer, when the time comes and the man!"
They were approaching a small cavalcade of Egyptians, journeying in an opposite direction. It consisted of a nobleman and his attendants on some party of pleasure or business. The two principal figures were seated in a light fanciful chariot, gaudily painted, drawn by a pair of desert-born steeds, chestnut and grey. Contrary to the custom of the Assyrians, who usually drove at a gallop, these proceeded in an airy, lofty, trotting pace, their heads borne up, their yoke highly ornamented, and their trappings heavily fringed with scarlet, blue, and gold. In the car sat its lord, accompanied by his charioteer, who held the reins, and attended by some score of servants on foot and horseback—lithe, slender, laughing varlets, fancifully dressed and garlanded with flowers. As this noisy throng approached, the Israelites drew aside to let them pass, halting respectfully, and saluting their present masters with deep humility. The Egyptian lord whirled by with no more notice than a scornful smile; but his people laughed and jeered at the way-worn travellers, mocking their speech and gestures with flippant insolence and scorn.
"Go to," said they, "shepherds and sons of shepherds! Go, seek your straw and burn your bricks! So shall ye build houses and tombs for your masters, and temples for your master's gods. Shepherds and sons of shepherds, go to!"
Sarchedon's grasp tightened round the tent-pole he carried in his hand. The fiery temper illness had not subdued would soon have broken in on their mirth; but Sadoc's restraining touch was on his shoulder, while the Israelite's grave accents whispered in his ear,
"And these be our masters. Better, indeed, the gripe of the demons or the sword of the Anakim. Better, far better, the iron yoke of Assyria than such degradation as this! How long must we endure—how long?"