"Begin war?" the king asked.
Ramose made no answer; he knew that the king would perish and ruin his kingdom rather than begin war.
The king was silent, too; he seemed lost in thought. Suddenly he raised his head and said:
"I cannot!"
He paused again, thinking, and repeated:
"I cannot; no, I cannot! 'Peace, peace to the far and the near,' says my heavenly father, Aton. 'Peace is better than war; let there be no war, let there be peace!' This is all I know, all I have, Ramose. If you take this from me, there will be nothing left: I shall be destitute, naked, dead. Better kill me outright!"
He spoke simply and quietly; but Dio's heart throbbed again as on the day before in the joy of the heavenly dream. She suddenly recalled the huge pale phantom of Cheop's pyramid shimmering in the rosy sunlight mist over the yellow sands of the desert: the perfect triangles—"I began to be as one god, but three gods were in Me," in the words of the ancient wisdom—divine triangles getting narrower and narrower, more and more pointed as they rose to heaven and in the very last point the same frenzied ecstacy as in Akhnaton's quiet word 'Peace'!
"O, how sweet is thy teaching, Uaenra," Tuta thrust himself forward again—like the poodle Dang licking the king in the face. "You are the second Osiris, conquering the world by peace and not by sword. If you say to the water 'let there be peace'—there shall be peace."
"Listen, Ramose," the king began, "I am not such a scoundrel as Ribaddi thought, and I am not such a fool as Tuta takes me to be...."
The poodle Dang got a flip on the nose: he was alarmed and upset. But he was soon comforted by Ay—an old dignitary with intelligent, cold and cynical eyes, who sat next to him.