With a bound he broke through the cordon of royal guards, leaped into his chariot, and putting his horses to a gallop, drove at full speed to his place at the head of the army. There, in an instant, clear and long-drawn, his command to mount rang over the desert. Front and rear, wing and wing, the trumpets took up the call, "To horse!" A second command in the strong voice, a second winding of the many trumpets, and with a rush of air and jar of earth the great army of the Pharaoh swept like the wind toward the sea.
Kenkenes, Menes, Nechutes and those of the royal guard that had started in pursuit of the traitor, did well to save themselves from annihilation under the hoofs of twenty thousand horse. Bewildered and amazed, they were an instant realizing what was taking place.
"He is running away with the army!" they said to themselves in a daze. "He is running away with the army!" And they knew that not all the efforts of the guards and the ministers and the Pharaoh himself would avail, for the army had received its orders from its great commander and no man but he might turn it back.
So the short-poled chariots, multi-tinted and gorgeous, wheel to wheel, axle-deep in a cloud of dust, glittered out across the desert—sixty ranks, ten abreast. Far to the left moved the horsemen, the dust of their rapid passage hiding their galloping mounts up to the stirrup. To the watchers by the king they seemed like an undulant sea of quilted helmets and flying tassels, while the sunlight smote through a level and straight-set forest of spears. They were seasoned veterans, many of them heroes of a quarter-century of wars. They had followed Rameses the Great into Asia and had extended the empire and the prowess of arms to the farthest corners of the known world. They had drunk the sweets of unalloyed victory from the blue Nile to the Euphrates and had filled Egypt with booty, scented with the airs of Arabia, gorgeous from the looms of India, and heavy with the ivory and gold of Ethiopia.
Now they went in formidable array in pursuit of two millions of slaves to dye their axes in unresisting blood, to return, not as victors over a heroic foe, but as drivers of men, herders of sheep and cattle, and laden with inglorious spoil.
Behind them, in regular ranks, beaten by their drivers into an awkward run, came the sumpter-mules, and after them the rumbling carts filled with provision.
Meneptah, raging and weeping, saw his army leave him and gallop in an aureole of dust toward the Red Sea.
Thus it was that "the Pharaoh drew nigh," but came no farther after
Israel.