Ere he closed his eyes again, he saw a sheet of flame quiver in the sky. It flared above the city where his gods had come down in chariots of fire to take back with them the person of the Great King.
Ashtaroth, Queen of Heaven
CHAPTER XXI
WHO IS MY BROTHER?
Sarchedon, stretched senseless in the desert, bled so freely, that he must have bled to death but for the sand on which he lay. Its fine particles served to stanch the wound ere life was quite extinct; and though very faint and feeble, the mysterious spark was not so wholly quenched but that a tender hand might nurse it into flame once more.
Sadoc and his little band of Israelites, journeying peaceably on, so long as their asses seemed to travel without fatigue, and finding their course through the wilderness by the stars, were about to halt for the night, when they came across the prostrate form of the Assyrian, very white and death-like in the moonlight, lying near the lion's skeleton in their path. Those were patriarchal times, and it was not the nature of a son of Abraham, witnessing such a calamity, to "pass by on the other side." Sadoc was down by the helpless figure in an instant with his hand on its breast, rejoiced to trace the feeble flutterings of its heart. What little skill of surgery he possessed came into practice forthwith. He forced some drops of wine between the clenched teeth; he drew the arrow, and poured oil into the gaping wound; he tore his linen garment into strips for a bandage; and lifting the wounded man on his own beast, walked patiently by its side, until they reached a fitting spot of encampment for the night.
That Sadoc should have been thus journeying in freedom and honour, while his Egyptian fellow-captives were bewailing their bondage in the heart of Babylon, was due to one of those strokes of policy in which Assarac the eunuch took especial pride.
Ever since her subjection under an Eastern people of wandering and warlike habits, counting their possessions by their flocks, but showing rather the rapacious instincts of the wolf than the meek and gentle nature of those creatures they loved to tend, Egypt had learned to hate, even more than she feared, all races of mankind that lay nearer the land of Morning than herself. She had not long shaken off the loathed supremacy of the Shepherd Kings ere she employed her new-found strength in making war on the nations of her eastern border—the formidable Philistines, the terrible sons of Anak, and the mighty empire of which Nimrod was the founder, ruled in succession by a line of heroic kings. As her victories increased, so she enlarged her territories, until she became powerful enough to contest with her Assyrian rival the supremacy of the Eastern world.