"Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!"
He lifted the axe and struck; the ponderous echo rolled through the empty, resonant air behind the gates, as though the Great Spirit himself had answered him.
"Achaeans, Achaeans, the devils!" was heard in the crowd.
Achaeans, the half-savage mercenaries from the North, had just arrived in Egypt to serve the king. They had come straight to the City of the Sun, and were hardly known at Thebes, but there were terrible rumours about their ferocity and mad courage.
Rushing out from three ambushes at once they surrounded the crowd on all sides, pressing it to the walls of the temple so that escape was impossible. And above the gates on the flat roof of the temple copper helmets and spears were glistening, too. Ethiopian slingers were ambushed there. Arrows, stones and lead fell from there like hail.
Pentaur raised his eyes and saw just above him, in a narrow window of the temple wall, a boy of fifteen, with a black monkey-like face, white teeth bared like those of a beast of prey, and two feathers, a green and a red one, stuck aslant in the black frizzy hair. Placing an arrow on the bowstring, he aimed at Pentaur slowly bending a huge bow made of rhinoceros bone.
Pentaur remembered the tame monkey on the top of the palm tree over Khnum's house, throwing the shells of the pods at the sleeping dancer, Miruit, and he smiled. He might have jumped behind the projecting wall, but he thought "what for? I shall be killed anyway, and it is good to die for Him Who has been!"
The bowstring sounded.
"Has been or will be?" he had time to ask and to answer: "Has been, is and will be," while the arrow whistled through the air. Its copper sting pierced him just under the left breast. He fell on the threshold of the closed gates. For him the gates lifted their heads, the everlasting doors were lifted up and the King of Glory came in.
Standing by the tabernacle Yubra was watching the last batch of the Lybians fighting. Suddenly the leaden bullet from a sling struck him on the temple. He fell and thought he was dying. But a minute later he propped himself up on his elbow and saw that the Achaean devils were hacking the tabernacle.