He retraced his steps to the wharves and drew away, prepared to spend the night in his boat.
After leaving Khu-aten, the Nile wound through wild country, the hills approaching its course so closely as to suggest the confines of a gorge. The narrow strip of level land on the eastern side lay under a receding shadow cast by the hills, but the river and the western shore were in the broad brilliance of the moon. The night promised to be one of exceeding brightness and Kenkenes shared the resulting wakefulness of the wild life on land.
The half of his up-journey was done and the conflict of hope and doubt
marshaled feasible argument for and against the success of his mission.
In some manner the destruction of Khu-aten offered, in its example of
Egypt's fury against progress, a parallel to his own straits.
In his boyhood he had heard the Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten anathematized by the shaven priests, and in the depths of his heart he had been startled to find no sympathy for their rage against the artist-king.
Ritual-bound Egypt had resented liberty of worship—a liberalism that lacked naught in zeal or piety, but added grace to the Osirian faith. In his beauty-worship, Kenkenes was not narrow. He would not confine it to glyptic art, nor indeed to art alone—all the uses of life might be bettered by it. His appreciation of Khu-n-Aten's ambition had been passive before, but when his own spirit experienced the same fire and the same reproach, his sympathy became hearty partizanship.
His mind wandered back again to the ruin. How fiercely Egypt had resented the schism of a Pharaoh, a demi-god, the Vicar of Osiris! The words of Rachel came back to him like an inspiration:
"Thou hast nation-wide, nation-old, nation-defended prejudice to overcome, and thou art but one, Kenkenes."
But one, indeed, and only a nobleman. Could he hope to change Egypt when a king might not? Behold, how he was suffering for a single and simple breach of the law. At the thought he paused and asked himself:
"Am I suffering for the sacrilege?"
The admission would entail a terrifying complexity.