"Very true! Prophets are no use to poor people," Anupu, an old peasant, confirmed. Rough and shaggy he looked like a tree-stump dug out of the ground and covered with earth. He had been silent, eating bread soaked in water and wrapping his sheepskin closer round him, but suddenly he grew lively and began talking as though he had recalled something.
"I have dragged the plough myself for forty years—never had any money to buy oxen; and you know how little land we have. And the summer before last part of the bank was washed away during the overflow and a quarter of my field had fallen into the river and the house very nearly went, too. Tax collectors came: 'You are in great arrears, Anupu,' they said, 'sixty bushels of wheat, sixty of spelt and a hundred and seventy of barley.' 'I have nothing at all,' I said, 'have patience with me, fathers!' 'No,' they said, 'the treasury cannot wait, lie down.' And one made a sign behind the other's back to give him a bribe, but I had nothing to do it with. So they laid me out and gave me a flogging, and to my wife, too—she had stood up for me and abused them. And they sent me to clean the canals in Set's salt marshes during the very fierce heat. I had to stand up to my knees in water, devoured by midges, shaking with fever. I still get a shivering fit when the night comes on. And a neighbour told me the other day that my wife is dead, my house has tumbled down, my two sons have been taken for the army, and my daughter has been led astray by some Midian merchants. I have nothing now to return to.... And so I say, what is the use of prophets to me?"
Merik added some straw to the bonfire. The flames leapt up, lighting the face of the Sphinx in the black starry sky. Tabitha, with a baby in her arms, was sleeping between the Sphinx's lion paws.
Tabitha means 'gazelle.' She had the eyes of a gazelle, the long, dark eyelashes of a child, and such a smile that Merik's son User, a young man with a sad and girlishly charming face, wanted to cry with happiness at the sight of her. He looked at her as though he were praying: he fancied that she was Mother Isis with the baby Horus and that the Shining Terror fixed its stony eyes into the starlit darkness merely so that it might watch over the Mother and the Babe.
"It goes ill with peasants, but soldiers are no better off," said a thin little old man, rather like a grasshopper—a retired centurion, Aziri. "A soldier climbs up the hills carrying burdens like a donkey, drinks water out of pools like a dog; when he sees the enemy he trembles like a bird in a net; and when he comes home he is covered with wounds, cankered with illness, like an old wormeaten tree; he cannot work and is ashamed to beg—he may as well lie down and die."
He did not say it, but all understood "prophets are no use to a soldier."
"Come, friends, don't be so gloomy," Merik said, looking round at them all with a serene smile. "I have lived in the world for forty years, I have seen much evil, but also a great deal of good. One can't say of a man's life that it is quite good, nor that it is quite bad either; it's all mixed up; to-day is bad, to-morrow will be better."
"No, it won't be better," Mermose retorted. "It is bad now but it will be worse. It is written in the ancient scrolls: 'the Lord will give men a tremulous heart, their eyes shall melt away, their souls shall pine and they shall tremble night and day; in the day they shall say, 'oh, if it were night!' and at night 'oh, if it were day!' 'The sky over their head shall be brass and the earth under their feet shall be iron and dust shall fall upon them till they all perish.'"
"No, they will not perish: the Saviour will come and save the perishing," Yubra said, simply and quietly.
"How will he save them, by the sword or by the word?" asked a puny little man, with a spotty face, a sharp red little nose and squinting, shifty eyes. He was a scribe, dismissed from the service, Herihor or Heri, a quarrelsome, debauched and backbiting man, as one could see from his face.