Rita was in a deep swoon. She was saved in the end, but for several weeks she was at death's door as in childhood when she had eaten 'spiders' eggs.'
The same night Maki's labour pains began and by the morning she was safely delivered of a son.
VI
There was brilliant sunshine outside, but it was dark as night in the bedchamber of the Maru-Aton palace, with the shutters closed and the windows curtained; only the gilded columns glimmered faintly in the dim lamplight.
A bed of carved ebony and ivory, painted and gilded, stood in the middle of the room on a platform with four steps. It was shaped like a fantastic monster, a mixture of crocodile and hippopotamus, with lion's feet and open jaws: it guarded the sleeper; the more fearful the bed, the sweeter the sleep. Strangely convex, round and hard, with a wooden crescent for a pillow, it seemed uncomfortable, but was in truth better than any other bed, for it was cool to sleep on in the hot nights when feather beds and pillows were unendurable.
Princess Makitatona lay on the bed. On the fourth day after her delivery she had been attacked with child-bed fever.
The dark, stuffy room smelt of drugs. Pentu, the physician, was pounding in a mortar of stone a complicated remedy, composed of forty-six ingredients, corresponding to the same number of blood vessels in the human body. In addition to medicinal herbs it contained lizard's blood, sulphur from pigs' ears, powder from the head and wings of the sacred beetle, Kheper, a pregnant woman's milk, a hippopotamus's tooth and flies' dirt.
In another corner of the room a Babylonian sorcerer, Assursharatta, was boiling in a cauldron the blood of a freshly slain lamb with magical herbs and muttering a spell against the seven demons of fever: