He said it and walked along the foot of the Sphinx, followed by his shadow. He turned the corner and disappeared, and the shadow disappeared too. Only the light footprints were left on the white sand.
Issachar bent down and not daring to kiss them kissed the sand where the shadow had passed.
III
There was a riot in Busiris, a town in the Northern district.
As usual it was started by the Israelites working in the brick factories when they were no longer given any chopped straw necessary for making bricks, but were ordered to chop it themselves, while producing the usual quantity of bricks. Porters and loaders from the harbour joined them when they heard that boys younger than fifteen were to be taken for the army. The mothers said indignantly, "What is the good of bearing sons? They are no sooner grown up than they are driven to the slaughter, and you, their fathers, put up with it!" Part of the garrison of Kidjevadan mercenaries, who had received in their monthly ration nasty smelling sesame oil instead of olive oil for ointment, also joined the rioters.
Usirmar, son of Ziamon, the governor of the province of Busiris and an old soldier of the times of Tutmose the Fourth, sternly put down the rebellion. With a number of other rioters the tramp Bata, the slave Yubra and the Jew Avinoam—this was the assumed name of Issachar—denounced by the scribe Herihor, were seized as the chief culprits.
"This accursed Bata," so the denunciation ran, "a godless and seditious fellow, having gathered a band of thieves and brigands like himself, intended to cause rebellion not only in the Busiris province, but throughout Egypt, preaching that people should not obey the authorities and that they should refuse to serve in the army, that the poor ought to be equal to the rich, saying that the boundaries between fields should be effaced and the land be common property, and wealth taken from the rich and given to the poor. The said accursed man blasphemes against the gracious god-king and says in his vain talk that there is only one King in heaven and on earth—the god Ra-Aton."
The denunciation was illiterate but cleverly put together. It was a troubled time. Horemheb, the governor of the North, had just set out to the eastern province, Goshen, to put down a rising of the Israelites who were always dreaming of a second Exodus, and to repulse the attack of the Sinai nomads against the Great Wall of Egypt. Terrible rumours reached Usirmar of King Akhnaton's madness, suicide, or assassination, of a new rising in Thebes and an imminent war between the two rivals for the throne, Saakera and Tutankhaton.