Yubra was tired; his legs ached with the stocks that he had been wearing. He sat down to rest on a heap of stones on the quay.
The sun was setting behind the bare yellow rocks of the Lybian Mountains, honeycombed with tombs. The low-lying meadows beyond the river and the City of the Dead, where the embalmers' cauldrons were perpetually boiling and black clouds of asphalt smoke rose in the air, were already in shadow; only by the funeral temple of Amenhotep, at the end of the sacred Road of the Jackals, the golden points of two obelisks shone with a dull glow like smouldering candles.
The left bank was in shadow, but the right still lay in the evening sun, which threw a coppery red glow on the dark-skinned, naked bargemen who carried from the boats down the planks earthenware pots and sacks of styrax and balm from Gilead, Arabian sandal and myrrh, fragrant incense from Punt, and cloves—burnt offerings to the gods and ointments for the dead. The quay was saturated with the fragrant odours, but through the fragrance came the smell of a carcass thrown up by the river and lying on the bank. An emaciated dog, with ribs that stood out under the skin, was devouring it.
Suddenly two white eagles pounced on the carcass with loud flapping of wings and greedy cries. The dog, frightened, jumped away with a squeal, and watched them from a distance, its tail between its legs, its teeth bared in an angry growl, its body shaking with hungry envy.
But a still greater envy glittered in the eyes of a starving beggar woman, who had come in search of food from the province of the Black Heifer, where men were devouring each other in their hunger.
She put her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breast to the lips of the baby perched in a wicker basket behind her. It was biting and chewing it furiously with its toothless gums but could not suck out a single drop of milk, and, no longer able to cry, it only moaned.
"Bread, please, sir; I have had no food for three days!" the beggar woman moaned in a voice as small as her baby's, stretching out her hand to Yubra.
"I have none, my poor woman, forgive me," he said, and he thought 'soon the hungry will be filled.'
He got up and walked on. The woman followed him at a distance as a stray dog follows a passer-by with a kind face.
Alongside of them on the smooth road, specially made for carrying heavy weights from the harbour to the town, some fifteen hundred convicts and prisoners of war were dragging, by four thick cables, something like an enormous sledge with a huge granite statue of King Akhnaton that had just been brought down the river. The superintendent of works, an old man with a stern and intelligent face, looked like a dwarf as he stood on the knees of the giant statue seated on its throne; he clapped his hands, beating the measure of the song the men were singing and sometimes he shouted at them and waved his stick, driving all this mass of men as a ploughman drives a pair of oxen. In front of them a man was watering the road with a watering can so that the runners should not be set on fire by the friction.