Night had fallen. Ramses commanded his servants to admit no one, and walked in loneliness on the terrace of his villa, thinking,
"A wonderful thing! Down there at Pi-Bailos the invincible regiments of Nitager opened before me, while in Memphis an overseer of prisons, an investigating official, and a scribe bar the way to me. What are they? Mere servants of my father, may he live through eternity! who can cast them down to the rank of slaves at any moment and send them to the quarries. But why should not my father pardon the innocent? The state does not wish him to do so. And what is the state? Does it eat? where does it sleep? where are its hands and its sword, of which all are in terror?"
He looked into the garden, and among the trees on the summit of an eminence he saw two immense silhouettes of pylons, on which sentry lights were burning. The thought came to him that that watch never slept, those pylons never ate, but still they existed. Those pylons had existed for ages, mighty, like Ramses the Great, that potentate who had reared them.
Could he lift those edifices and hundreds of similar grandeur; could he escape those guards and thousands of others who watch over the safety of Egypt; could he disobey laws established by Ramses the Great and other preceding pharaohs still greater, laws which twenty dynasties had consecrated by their reverence?
In the soul of the prince for the first time in life a certain idea, dim but gigantic, began to fix itself in outline, the idea of the state. The state is something more magnificent than the temple in Thebes, something grander than the pyramid of Cheops, something more ancient than the subterranean temple of the Sphinx, something more enduring than granite in that immense though invisible edifice people are like ants in some cranny of a cliff, and the pharaoh a mere traveling architect who is barely able to lay one stone in the wall of the edifice and then go on farther. But the walls increase from generation to generation and the edifice continues.
He, the son of the pharaoh, had never felt yet his littleness as in that moment, when his glance in the midst of the night was wandering beyond the Nile among pylons of the pharaoh's palace, and the indefinite but imposing outlines of the Memphis temples.
At that moment from among the trees whose branches touched the terrace, he heard a voice.
"I know thy anxiety and I bless thee. The court will not free the prisoners. But the case will drop, and they may return to their houses if the overseer of thy land does not support the complaint of attack."
"Then did my overseer make the charge?" asked the astonished prince.
"Thou hast spoken truth. He made the charge in thy name. But if he does not go to the court, there will be no injured person; and there is no offence if there is no injured person."