Kenkenes, with many others, looked back and saw that the pillar, illuminated, but no longer illuminating, had halted above a solitary figure of seemingly super-human stature in the morning gray, standing on an eminence, overlooking the sea.
The arm was uplifted and outstretched, tense and motionless.
From his superior height, Kenkenes saw, over the heads of the immense concourse, two lines of foam riding like the wind across the sea-bed toward each other. Between them was a great body of plunging horses; overhead a forest of fluttering banners; and faint from the commotion came shouts and wild notes of trumpets. Then the two lines of foam smote against each other with a fearful rush and a muffled report like the cannonading of surf. A mountain of water pitched high into the air and collapsed in a vast froth, which spread abroad over the churning, wallowing sea. The falling wind dashed a sheet of spray over the silent host on the eastern shore. Sharp against the white foam, dark objects and masses sank, arose, and sank again.
At that moment the sun thrust a broad shaft of light between the horizon and the lifted cloud.
It discovered only the sea, raving and stormy, and afar to the west a misty, vacant, lifeless line of shore.
"And the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen, and all the host of the Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them."
So perished Har-hat and the flower of the Egyptian army.
CHAPTER XLVI
WHOM THE LADY MIRIAM SENT
Of the ensuing day, Kenkenes had no very distinct memory. Very fair and beautiful, one recollection remained—a recollection of another figure on the eminence, and by the flash of white upthrown arms, and the blowing of a somber cloud of hair, this time it was a woman. How the morning sun glittered on the shaken timbrel; how the spotless draperies went wild in the wind; how the group of lissome maidens on the sand below wound in and out, in a mazy dance; how the multitude was swept into transports of beatification; how the men became prophets and the women, psalmists; how the vast wilderness reverberated with a great chant of exultation—all this he remembered as a sublime dream.