After the departure of Tutmosis, which resembled a flight, the heir fell to thinking deeply; he even felt fear.
Ramses was a skeptic. As a pupil of the priests, and a member of the highest aristocracy, he knew that when certain priests had fasted many months and mortified their senses they summoned spirits, while others spoke of spirits as a fancy, a deception. He had seen, too, that Apis, the sacred bull before which all Egypt fell prostrate, received at times heavy blows of a cane from inferior priests, who gave the beast food and brought cows to him.
He understood, finally, that his father, Ramses XII, who for the common crowd was a god who lived through eternity, and the all-commanding lord of this world, was really just such a person as others, only a little more weakly than ordinary old men, and very much limited in power by the priestly order.
The prince saw all this, and jeered in his soul and even la public at many things. But all his infidelity fell before the actual truth, that no one was permitted to trifle with the titles of the pharaoh.
Ramses knew the history of his country, and he remembered that in Egypt many things were forgiven the mighty. A great lord might ruin a canal, kill a man in secret, revile the gods privately, take presents from ambassadors of foreign states, but two sins were not forgiven, the betrayal of priestly secrets, and treason to the pharaoh. A man who committed one or the other disappeared, sometimes after a year, from among his friends and servants. But where he had been put or what had been done with him, no one even dared to mention.
Ramses felt that he was on an incline of this sort from the time that the army and the people began to mention his name and speak of certain plans of his, changes in the state, future wars. Thinking of this, the prince felt as if a nameless crowd of rebels and unfortunates were pushing him violently to the point of the highest obelisk, from which he must tumble down and be crushed into jelly.
Later on, when, after the longest life of his father possible, he became pharaoh, he would have the right and the means to accomplish many deeds of which no one in Egypt could even think without terror. But today he must in truth have a care, lest they declare him a traitor and a rebel against the fundamental laws of Egypt. In that state there was one visible ruler, the pharaoh. He governed, he desired, he thought for all, and woe to the man who dared to doubt audibly the all-might of the sovereign, or mention plans of his own, or even changes in general.
Plans were made in one place alone, in that hall where the pharaoh listened to advice from his aiding council, and expressed to it his own opinions. No changes could come save from that place. There burned the only visible lamp of political wisdom, the light of which illuminated Egypt. But touching that light, it was safer to be silent.
All these considerations flew through the prince's head with the swiftness of a whirlwind while he was sitting on the stone bench under the chestnut-tree in Sarah's garden, and looking at the landscape there around him.
The water of the Nile had fallen a little, and had begun to grow as transparent as a crystal. But the whole country looked yet like an arm of the sea thickly dotted with islands on which rose buildings, gardens, and orchards, while here and there groups of great trees served as ornament.