“Take care, woman,” warned the judges, “lest thy sacrilegious tongue bring upon thee judgment more terrible than thou hast hitherto deserved.”
She laughed a strange, weird, maniacal laugh, and said:
“That cannot be, oh, learned and wisest of the judges of Kamt. Dost think perchance that thy mind can conceive or thy cruelty devise a more horrible punishment than that which I endured yesterday, when my avenging hands tried to reach her evil form and failed, for want of strength and power?”
“Be silent! and hear from the lips of thy accusers the history of the heinous sin which thou didst commit yesterday, and for which the high priest of Ra will anon deliver judgment upon thee.”
“Nay! I will not be silent, and I will not hear! I will tell thee and the holy Pharaoh, and him who has come from heaven to live amongst the people of Kamt, I will tell them all of my sin. Let them hate and loathe me, let them punish me if they will; the Pharaoh is mighty and the gods are great, but all the powers of heaven and the might of the throne cannot inflict more suffering on Kesh-ta than she has already endured.”
“Be silent!” again thundered the judges; and at a sign from them the two men quickly wound a cloth round the unfortunate woman’s mouth and a few yards of rope round her body. Thus forcibly silent, pinioned and helpless, she knelt there before her judges, defiant and, I thought, crazy, while her accuser began slowly to read the indictment.
“Kesh-ta, the low-born slave, who has neither father nor mother, nor brother nor sister, for she is the property of the most pure and great, the Princess Neit-akrit of the house of Memmoun-ra.
“The gods gave her a son, who through the kindness of the noble princess became versed in many arts, and being a skilled craftsman was much esteemed by the great Neit-akrit, of the house of Memmoun-ra.
“Yesterday, whilst Sem-no-tha knelt before the great princess, whilst she deigned to speak to her slave, Kesh-ta, his mother, crept close behind him, and slew her son with her own hand before the eyes of Neit-akrit, the young and pure princess, and then with the blood of the abject slave his murderess smeared the garments of Neit-akrit, causing her to turn sick and faint with loathing.
“Therefore I, the public accuser, do hereby demand, in the name of the people of Kamt, both freeborn and slave, that this woman, for this grievous sin she committed, be for ever cast out from the boundaries of the land; that her body be given as a prey to the carrion that dwell in the wilderness of the valley of death, so that the jackals and the vultures might consume the very soul which, abject and base, had conceived so loathsome a crime.”