Poor little Tuta
Moans in his cabin.
His cheek is swollen,
Toothache very bad.
He warmed himself that night
By the Charuk palace fire,
Then exposed his heated cheek
To a draught in terror dire.
"Well, he hasn't had his way this time, but he will the next," Dio thought. "You will be king over the mice, you cat."
The City of the Sun, Akhetaton, Egypt's new Capital, was built in the province of Hares, half-way between Memphis and Thebes, four hundred aters or five days' journey from Thebes.
They sailed in the day-time only and spent the nights in harbours: sailing at night was dangerous because of the many shallows and whirlpools. The bed of the Nile changed continually, especially in winter when the water was shallow. The pilot, standing on the ship's prow, was all the time feeling the bottom with a pole.
They passed the big commercial harbour, Copt, which lay on the caravan route leading through the desert to the Red Sea; the town of Dendera, with the great temple of Isis-Hathor; the town of Abt, where the body of the god-man, Osiris, was buried, and the most ancient of the Egyptian cities, Tinis, the capital of Men, the first king of Egypt.
But the cities were few; poor villages with huts made of the dried mud of the Nile were more frequent. The yellow streak of dead sand and the black streak of fertile earth—Black Earth, Kemet, was the name of Egypt—stretched on either side of the river, peaceful, simple and monotonous; the black of the Nile mud, humid and shining like the living 'pupil of Isis' and the yellow of the desert—life and death—were side by side, in an eternal union, eternal peace.
It was winter—sowing time. Men were ploughing, harrowing, sowing. Oxen slowly walked along drawing rich furrows with the plough. Here and there the first crops already showed their bright spring green. And the melancholy singing of the ploughman echoed far in the stillness of the fields.
The dull white waters of the Nile now flowed fast, pressed in by rocky banks; now widened out in pools and backwaters still as a pond, with impassable jungles of papyrus and green carpets of floating lotus leaves; only a hippopotamus, waddling ashore, and a lion or a leopard, coming down to drink, cut narrow paths in those thickets.
A long-legged ibis strode along the humid slime measuring the ground like the wise god Tot, the land-measurer. Crocodiles lay on the sandbanks, like slimy logs, and the birds benu—a kind of heron—walked along their backs picking off the water fleas or, fearlessly thrusting their heads into the open jaws, cleaned the monsters' teeth.