He went into the next room, carefully shut the door after him, but did not lock it; put the lamp on a stand, took from the shelf by the wall two bleached cedar tablets and writing a few lines upon them hid them in his bosom. Then he took out of the box at the head of the bed the ring with the carbuncle, Amon's eye, and put it on his finger.
He paced up and down the room, muttering something under his breath, quickly and inaudibly as in delirium.
Two chairs of honour, one for the host and another for the visitor, stood according to Egyptian custom on a carpeted brick platform, one step high, in the middle of the room between four lotos-shaped, painted and gilded columns.
Every time that Merira walked past these chairs he slowed down his step and, without turning his head, looked at one of them out of the corner of his eye. His face was sleepy and immovable and he kept muttering to himself.
He spent more than an hour in this fashion. The moonlit sky through the clink-like windows with a stone grating under the very ceiling, turned darker and darker, and at last the grating was no longer visible: the moon must have set.
Merira lingered by the platform longer and longer each time. Suddenly he stopped and smiled, looking intently at one of the chairs. He stepped on to the platform, sat down in the other chair, stretched himself and yawned.
"Forgive me, sire," he said aloud, as though speaking to someone who sat on the chair opposite him. "I know it is unseemly to yawn in the presence of a king, especially of a dead one. But I am fearfully sleepy. And it wouldn't be so bad if I were awake, but this is a dream. Does it ever happen to you? To be asleep and yet to feel sleepy at the same time? Issachar now wouldn't yawn in your presence. I confess I envied him last night. He is shaking with fear but he would give his soul to see you! It is he you ought to visit. But evidently the dead are like women: you only love those who don't put too much trust in you.... By the way, I ought to have locked the door into his room, I forgot to do it. He would be frightened to death if he came in, poor fellow! .... But perhaps I left it open on purpose so that he might come in and I should know whether he could see you.... This is what I am driven to in my dreariness! It is dreary, Enra, very dreary. Can it be as bad in your world? Always the same thing—rotten fish in eternity.... Or is it rather different with you? Is it worse or better? You are silent? I don't like it when you are silent and look at me with pity as though to say 'it's better for such as I and worse for such as you'.... Well, aren't you going to speak? Tell me, what have you come for? Do you remember, Enra, how you said when I wanted to kill you, 'I love you, Merira'.... And just now who is it has said it, you or I?"
He paused as though listening to an answer and then spoke again.
"You love your enemy? He has taught you this? You come from Him to try and save me? No, Enra, you cannot save a man who does not want to be saved. You died for what you loved; let me too die for what I love—not for the world beyond the grave but for this one, for this life—for living and not for rotten fish. The world already smells of putrefaction because of Him and one day it will stifle in its own stench. He lies that the world kills Him; He kills the world. He calls Himself the Son of God in order to kill the true Son—the world. I know it is hard to go against Him, but I don't care, I don't seek for what is easy: I am the first but not the last to rise against Him. There will be men like me when He comes: they will kill Him and destroy His work; they will perish but will not save the world; this is how it will be, Enra!"
He paused again and smiled suddenly, as he did in the Maru-Aton garden that afternoon when looking at Maki's birch tree he recalled Dio.