When the gate had closed, the priest took Ramses by the hand, and in the gloom amid the immense columns of the forecourt he led him to the dwelling assigned to him. It was a small cell lighted by a lamp. On the stone pavement lay a bundle of dry grass; in a corner stood a pitcher of water, and near it was a barley cake.
"I see that here I shall have rest indeed after my occupations with the nomarchs," said Ramses, joyously.
"Think of eternity," replied the priest; and he withdrew.
This answer struck Ramses disagreeably. Though he was hungry, he did not wish to eat a cake or drink water. He sat on the grass, and looking at his feet wounded from the journey, asked himself why he had come, why he had put himself voluntarily out of his office.
Seeing the walls of the cell and its poverty, he recalled the years of his boyhood passed at a priests' school. How many blows of sticks he had received there, how many nights he had passed on a stone floor as punishment! Even then Ramses felt the hatred and fear which he had felt before toward that harsh priest who to all his prayers and questions answered only with, "Think of eternity."
After some months of uproar to drop into such silence, to exchange the court of a prince for obscurity and loneliness, and instead of feasts, women, and music, to feel around and above him the weight of walls! "I have gone mad! I have gone mad!" muttered Ramses.
There was a moment when he wished to leave the temple at once; but afterward he thought that they might not open the gate to him. The sight of his dirty legs, of the ashes falling out of his hair, the roughness of his penitential rags, all this disgusted him. If he had had his sword even! But would he, dressed as he was in that place, dare to use it?
He felt an overpowering dread, and that sobered him. He remembered that the gods in temples send down fear on men, and that this fear must be the beginning of wisdom.
"Moreover, I am the viceroy and the heir of the pharaoh," thought he; "who will harm me in this temple?"
He rose and went out of the cell. He found himself in a broad court surrounded by columns. The stars were shining brightly; hence he saw at one end of the court an immense pylon, at the other an open entrance to the temple.