"Nothing."
He stood at the prow of the boat with a double-edged harpoon in his hands and she sat at the helm, rowing with a short oar, or pushing off in shallow places with a long pole. The flat-bottomed boat for two, made of long stems of papyrus, tied together and covered with coal tar, was so unstable that one could hardly move in it without risk of upsetting it. Merira wore the ancient hunting dress: a two-lobed apron—shenti of white linen, a broad necklace of turquoise and carnelian beads, a small beard of black horsehair and a 'tiled' closely curled wig; all the rest of the body was naked. In such dress the dead, after the resurrection, hunted in the blessed fields of Ialu in the papyrus thickets of the heavenly Nile.
The milky-white sky of the early morning was changing to blue, as innocent as the smile of a child asleep. The waters of the Nile were still as a pond; the morning breath was so gentle that the mirror-like surface of the river was not yet broken with ripples, though boats with full sails were already flitting upon it like birds. The rafts of pines and cedars from Lebanon slowly floated along. Men, tiny as ants, dragged by a rope a huge barge with a granite obelisk, singing a mournful song; it made the stillness seem more still and the expanse of the river more limitless. The white houses of the City of the Sun, scattered about like dice in the narrow green strip of palm groves, were disappearing in the distance.
"What is the matter with you?" Dio asked Merira. "Happy? in good spirits? No, that's not it.... I have never seen you like this."
"I had a good night," Merira answered. "I slept for quite six hours on end."
He took a deep, eager breath. He was glad when he felt the smell of bats and not of dead rats or rotten fish; and to-day—what joy! he smelt nothing but morning freshness.
"And everything is good," he said, still more joyfully. "See how high the water is! Isn't it fine?"
"Very fine," she agreed.
"Just think, sixteen and a half cubits! The water hasn't risen so high for the last ten years!" Merira went on. "The country is saved if the rebels in the south do not destroy the canals. Look, a little ass in the field doesn't dare to put its foot in the ditch—ah, now he has done it, clever creature—and men are more stupid than asses!"
He added, after a pause: