Perhaps that protracted famine, which wasted other countries, and for which the wise and high-minded stranger whom Pharaoh had made his regent provided so skilfully, may have enhanced her relative resources as it weakened her neighbours; perhaps the balance in which nations are weighed was so adjusted by that Supreme Power, to whom worlds are but as grains of sand, through other means; but it came to pass that the more Southern and less warlike people contended with varying success against their ancient enemy; and to proud Assyria the very name of Egypt was as an offence that stunk in her nostrils, a wound that spread and festered in her flesh.
It was a day of triumph, therefore, in great Babylon when her fiery old monarch returned victorious from his Egyptian campaign, and the common multitude rejoiced to tell each other how their hereditary foes had been humbled, how Memphis and Thebes had seen the banners of Ashur flaunting defiance at their gates, his horsemen encompassing their walls; but wiser heads reflected on the small amount of real gain represented by all this glory, of real damage inflicted on the enemy by an invasion that had obtained no concession of dominion, no increase of national power. What were a few herds of cattle, a drove of captives, a heap or two of gold, garments, armour, and common spoil. Like the subsiding of their own river, this ebbing wave of war left, perhaps, increased fertility where it had passed, in the stern lessons of experience learned by those who were honourably worsted in hard-won fight. Egypt was little weaker in numerical force than when the Great King entered her territories; in skill, confidence, and spirit, she was actually stronger than before.
These considerations were not overlooked by the wisdom of Semiramis; while to Assarac's far-seeing eye, the sapping of Egyptian strength, by every means at home and abroad, seemed the surest and safest policy for the attainment of his one paramount object—the aggrandisement of his country, and through her supremacy, his own.
It did not escape his penetration, that Assyria's great rival was vexed with a sore at her very heart, to prove a constant drain on her resources, an object of daily anxiety and alarm. By a flagrant breach of faith, an unscrupulous desecration of the rites of hospitality, she had converted a race of exiles into a nation of slaves. Those who came to her for bread had indeed received a stone, and the hand she once stretched to them in friendship was now clenched in menace, or fell heavily in blows of tyranny and oppression. As the Israelites increased in numbers, like certain herbs that spring into growth and vitality more profusely, the more they are trampled under foot, the wiser Pharaohs began to realise the danger they incurred. No state, however powerful, could be safe having a numerous race of aliens mixed, yet not mingling, with its native population, strangers in thought, feelings, usages, above all, in creed and worship. They might be tamed with hard work, disheartened by ill-usage, coerced and kept down in every mode that a remorseless policy could suggest, still nothing less than their absorption or extinction could give security to their conquerors; and Providence permitted neither the one nor the other.
They lived, a people apart, dogged, unresisting, suffering with but little complaint, yet preserving, apparently for consolation under the bitterest hardships, some strange confidence in their future, some mysterious trust in a Power before which Pharaoh and his bowmen should be swept away like locusts in an east wind. They worked in sad suggestive silence, they earned their morsel of bread with sweat and blood and tears; but they had no voluntary dealings with their task-masters—neither ate nor drank with them, married nor gave in marriage, bought nor sold.
Much of this Assarac had already learned from intercourse with the many strangers who crowded to the great mart of Babylon out of the South; much from his conversation with Sadoc, whom he had liberated, not without a purpose. By the Israelite's narrative, he verified his own information concerning the captive people, and won the other's confidence in his sympathy with their sufferings, his desire to right them by the unanswerable arguments of sword and spear. His plan, he thought, was not unworthy of his own intellect and the glory of the Great Queen.
To send back this venerable Israelite, as an emissary to his countrymen, promising them the powerful aid of Assyria at the time when they should see fit to cast off the Egyptian yoke; exhorting them to rise unanimously from within, while all the force of Ashur pressed on the enemy from without; thus to obtain complete conquest, to extend unbounded dominion over the land of the South; and, finally, when the sway of the Great Queen should extend from the sands of the Libyan desert to the farthest mountains of Armenia, to place this strange people in some district suited to their habits, there to become hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Assyrian nation. What matter? They would have served his purpose, and might be cast aside like a frayed bowstring or the shaft of a broken spear.
But the wily eunuch was perplexed by the coldness with which the Israelite received, while he accepted, these warlike overtures. Sadoc seemed to have but little confidence even in the mighty resources of Assyria; little faith in chariots of iron, and horsemen countless as the sands by the Red Sea.
"Our fathers," said he, "came down into Egypt, directed by the finger of our God. When he thinks fit, he will lead us out of the house of our captivity into a land of corn and wine and oil, where we shall worship him in freedom, teaching our children, and our children's children, that he only is mighty, and that the gods of the nations are in his sight but as chaff winnowed from the threshing-floor, as smoke from a burnt-offering, that melts into empty air."
Nevertheless, he was satisfied to take with him to his captive people the good tidings of promised assistance at their need, and journeyed back to Egypt, pondering deeply on the prospect of a path to freedom thus opened out by the assurances of a priest of Baal.