"Seeing is indeed believing, as you even now averred. See, then, my son, and believe!"
With that, he cast his mantle from his shoulders, and stood forth erect, letting its folds wind about his feet, and showing in the pure white robe that enveloped his person like a pillar of alabaster on a black pedestal. His features were still shrouded; but his eyes gleamed with a mocking fire.
Once more, while he passed his hand over the lamp, a cloud obscured the dungeon as before, but for a somewhat longer space. When it cleared away, he lifted his dark cloak from the floor, and there at the prisoner's very feet, springing, as it seemed, from the hard brickwork, bloomed a fresh lotus, the flower that every son of Ashur deemed specially sacred to his country and his gods.
Sarchedon was a brave man in battle; braver, indeed, than the average of his countrymen, whose courage, perhaps, was their noblest quality. Had a score of Pharaoh's archers been bending bows all round him, he would have died like a lion in their midst, without a sign of weakness or fear; but it was no part of his creed to set at defiance the powers of another world, and he fell prostrate before his visitor in abject humility, covering his face with his hands.
CHAPTER XXV
THE WISDOM OF THE EGYPTIANS
The magician raised him kindly, tempered to a pale mild light the lamp he had set down, and wrapping his cloak around him as before, fixed his eyes on the prisoner with that calm scrutinising gaze which had dominated the fiery spirit of the warrior from the first.
"Have no fear," said he. "I came not hither through the solid earth that I might destroy you, or I had created but now the greedy monster of the river, the deadly serpent of the brake, rather than a fruitful branch from our Egyptian orchards and the sacred flower of your own Assyrian plains. Is it enough? or shall I show you here in this deep dark cell greater and more terrible examples of my power?"
"No more, my lord!" answered the Assyrian, who felt his courage, though beginning to reassert itself, unequal to farther trials of a like nature. "No more, I entreat you; for although I fear not mortal enemies, I have no wish to meet the sons of Seth in all the terrors they bring with them from the South; nor has Baal befriended me so stoutly, that I would trust to his assistance in an encounter with Abitur face to face."