"Ah, you plague of Canaan, you scorpion's sting, you snake, thief, robber, may you have no coffin for your body!" yelled the woman, striking her on the hand.
The beggar answered back, showing her teeth as the dog had done and retreating slowly, her eyes still fixed greedily on the bread.
The woman picked up a stone and threw it at her. The stone hit the beggar on the shoulder. She gave a dreadful dog-like howl and ran. The baby in the basket began to cry, but stopped at once as though realising that tears were of no avail now.
Running to Hittite Square, where there was the god Teshub's old timber chapel that looked like a log hut, she fell exhausted by a heap of sun-dried manure bricks for fuel. She leaned against them sideways uncomfortably: the basket was in the way but she had not the strength to take it off. The baby was so quiet that it did not seem to breathe; she had not the courage to see whether it was asleep or dead.
She suddenly remembered her neighbour in the province of the Black Heifer, a twelve-year-old child-mother who had stolen somebody else's baby, calmly cut its throat as though it had been a lamb, fed her own child with it and had some herself. "That's what I ought to have done," thought the beggar woman.
The pain in her stomach was gnawing her like a wild beast. She suddenly felt weak all over, melting with weakness as it were. "I shall soon die," she thought, and remembered: "may you have no coffin for your body." She smiled: "no coffin—no resurrection.... Well, so be it! Eternal death—eternal rest..."
She, too, though in a different way than Yubra, felt that the world had turned upside down.
And in the tavern Yubra was whispering with his friend:
"Has it begun?"
"Yes. The other side of the River people are assembling already and walking about with the holy tabernacle, singing glory to Amon. And I expect it won't be long before they start here," Nebra answered, and added, after a pause: "But what is it to us? The rebellion is about their god—not ours."