"Mer-Amen-Ramses," asked the priest, "hast Thou found a person whose prayers reach the footstool of Him who existed before the ages?"
"I have."
"Is he a prince, a noble, a prophet, or perhaps an ordinary hermit?"
"He is a little boy, six years old, who asked Amon for nothing, he only thanked him for everything."
"But dost Thou know where he dwells?" inquired the Chaldean.
"I know, but I will not steal for my own use the virtue of his prayer. The world, Beroes, is a gigantic vortex, in which people are whirled around like sand, and they are whirled by misfortune. That child with his prayer gives people what I cannot give: a brief space of peace and oblivion. Dost understand, O Chaldean?"
Beroes was silent.
CHAPTER XLIX
AT sunrise of the twenty-first of Hator there came from Memphis to the camp at the Soda Lakes an order by which three regiments were to march to Libya to stand garrison in the towns, the rest of the Egyptian army was to return home with Ramses.
The army greeted this arrangement with shouts of delight, for a stay of some days in the wilderness had begun to annoy them. In spite of supplies from Egypt and from conquered Libya, there was not an excess of provisions; water in the wells dug out quickly, was exhausted; the heat of the sun burned their bodies, and the ruddy sand wounded their lungs and their eyeballs. The warriors were falling ill of dysentery and a malignant inflammation of the eyelids.