The season of toil had been unusually severe. The native convicts had more to endure than the lash, the bitter fare, the terrible sun by day, and a bed of dust by night, for the afflictions that befell all Egypt were theirs also. The strange prisoner among them suffered these things and had further the drawback of his own physical strength to combat. The plagues overcame the weaker convicts and decimated the number of laborers, so Kenkenes was put, alone, to the work that two men had done before.
However, the accumulation of toil came upon him gradually and his supple frame toughened as the demand upon it increased. Nor was he sensible of pain or great weariness, for his mind was far away from the sun-heated desert of the eastern Thebaid. He spoke seldom, and held himself aloof from his fellow prisoners. He regarded his taskmasters as if they were written authority no more animate than watered scrolls of papyrus. No one doubted from the beginning that he was high-born, and this mark of a great fall might have exposed him to abuse; but his great strength and unusual deportment did not invite mistreatment. In short, he was looked upon as mildly mad.
When Kenkenes had rejected the gods, hope, sundered from faith, groped wildly and desperately. In his rare moments of cheer he could not anticipate freedom without trusting to something, and in his misanthropy his doubt had placed no limit on its scope, questioning the honor of king or slave. In these better moments he wanted to believe in something.
So constantly had his sorrows attended him that he had come to dread the night, when there was neither event nor labor to interrupt their dominance over his mind. He caught eagerly at any less troublous problem that might suggest itself, for he felt that he had been conquered by his plight.
As he lay by night, apart from the rest of the prisoners, he gazed at one glittering star that stood in the north. About it were scintillating clusters, single stars and faint streaks of never-dissipated mists. Night after night that one brilliant point had remained unmoved in its steady gaze from the uppermost, but the clusters rotated about it; the single stars were westward moving; the mists shifted. And a question began to trouble him: What hand had marshaled the stars? Seb,[1] whom Toth had supplanted? Osiris, whom Set destroyed? The young man put them aside. They were feeble. Nothing so weak had created the mighty hosts of heaven. So he began to weigh the question.
What hand had marshaled the stars? An accident? Since man must worship something supernal, what more tremendous than the cataclysm, if such it were, that evolved the stars. Had the same or a series of such events brought forth the earth and man? Was the accident continuously attendant? Did it spread the Nile over Egypt and call it again within its banks every year? Did it clothe the fields and bring them to harvest every revolution of the sun? Did it hang the moon like a sickle in the west or lift it over the Arabian hills like a bubble of silver every eight and twenty days?
If it were omnipotent, infinite and omnipresent, could it be an accident? If it were, why not worship it and call it God?
The reasoning led him again in the direction of the gods, but he saw no reason for a multiplicity of deities. Each member of the Egyptian Pantheon presided over some special field of human interest or human environment. To him, who had lived next to nature till her study had become a worship, there were no flaws in her chronology, no shortcomings or plethora. The earth responded to the skies; the waters were in harmony with the earth, the harvests with all. There was unity in the control over the universe and the hand that was powerful enough to swing the moon was mighty enough to flood the Nile, was tender enough to nourish the harvests, was wise enough to govern men. Where, then, was any need of a superfluity of powers?
But behold, something had thrust a dread hand between the tender ministrations of this other Thing and the benefits to men. By this time it had reached the remotenesses of Egypt that it was the God of the Hebrews. The young man arrived at this alternative in his reasoning: There was a minister of good and another of evil—two powers presiding over the earth,—or,—the sole minister was offended and had deserted its charge, or had loosed upon Egypt the evil at its command. Here Kenkenes paused. He could not arrive at any conclusion on the matter or convince himself that he had not reasoned well.
Night after night, he fell asleep upon his ponderings, but they returned to him with fresh food for thought after every sunset. The reconstruction of something worshipful was more fascinating than had been the demolition of the gods. It took many a night's meditation for the evolution of any fixed idea from the bewildering convection of thought. And at last he had concluded only that there was one thing—Power—Purpose, which was greater than man.