The black, parched, withered earth, deathlike and terrible was aching under the terrible sun; the waters of the Nile barely covered its slimy bed. Men, animals, and plants were perishing with the heat. Had the heat lasted, everything, it seemed, would have been burnt up as with the fire of a conflagration or of the Sheheb.
But at the exact day, at the exact hour, God's miracle took place: Mother Isis wept over her dead son—the dried-up Nile; her tear—the star Sirius, the forerunner of the sun—fell into it and the ram-headed Khnum unsealed the springs of water.
Frogs croaked joyfully; herons paced about the black mud as though measuring the earth like the wise god Tot, the Measurer; the clerks of the Water Department measured the height of the water from the Waterfalls to the Delta by the marks on the stone walls of the measuring wells, while simple folk did it by the crocodile eggs and ant-heaps: the water never rose above these. Twelve cubits meant the ruin, sixteen cubits the salvation of Egypt.
At that time Merira went to Nut-Amon, Thebes, to see Ptamose who was at death's door and implored him not to delay. But even when Merira had arrived in Thebes he kept putting off the meeting, as though he feared it.
He, too, was ill; he could not sleep at night and in the daytime he wandered about the town, not knowing what to do with himself. A grimace of disgust was constantly upon his face as though he smelt an evil stench. This was one of the curious torments of his illness: he was everywhere pursued by bad smells—of dead rats as in a granary, of bats as in the burials caves, or of rotten fish as on the banks of the Nile where fish is cleaned, salted and dried in the sun. No perfumes were of any use: they only made the stench worse.
Some three days after his arrival he was sitting by the eastern gates of the Apet-Oisit enclosure, among the ruins of the tomb-sanctuary of King Tutmose the Third.
The sun was in the zenith: its rays came down straight almost without casting any shadow. The dreadful light poured down like molten tin. Merira sat in the narrow shadow cast by the crown of the giant pillar that had fallen—the double head of the Heifer-Hather. The shadow at his feet diminished so rapidly that one could almost see it: only a minute before he had been all in the shadow and now the sun was burning his feet. He saw a scorpion running in the dusty grass but he did not stir, he seemed spellbound. There was a dull pain in his left temple, as though a fishbone had pierced the eyeball. He felt rather sick, and there was a taste of death in his mouth.
Black dots like flies, swam about in the air, that quivered with the heat, and turning into transparent glassy maggots melted away. One of them began to grow and became an ancient Sphinx, with the face of Akhnaton; if a man had suffered for a thousand years in hell and then came to earth again he would have a face like that. He slowly swam past and melted away, then came back again, turned thick and heavy and stood on all fours; his hind legs were those of a lion but the front were human arms. He ran along making a hideous clatter with his claws.
As though breaking with a terrible effort invisible bonds on his arms and legs, Merira regained consciousness, got up and walked away.
By the same subterranean passages which Dio had trodden, he descended into the large, low-pitched sepulchral chamber, or sanctuary, supported by low quadrangular columns. A couch stood in the middle; a corpse lay upon it.