Suddenly a raucous command rang out. At once, as if the command had been momentarily expected, twenty oars were thrust out from the vessel’s sides, twenty lusty throats called aloud upon the name of some god or beneficent demon, and at each shout the great blades took the water and the vessel sprang shoreward, a line of bubbles and swirling eddies in her wake.
A pilot stood at prow and stern. The bow pilot held a mooring-stake and mallet ready in his hand. A pair of buffers already hung over the vessel’s sides. It was often a dangerous matter to pick a path through the many barges, war-galleys, sea-going vessels and lesser river craft which were strung out as far as the eye could see along the western bank of the Nile.
“By Hathor,” said Nakht, a fieldhand, as he fixed his tired eyes upon the oncoming galley, “a man who can scull, row, and swim as can I, should have a place upon some such vessel. Think of the life those dirty Amu lead!” All foreigners were Amu to Nakht, sand-dwellers and loathed for their filthy habits and the lice that covered them.
“Aye, Nakht! Thou mayest well envy them. Think of the days and nights in port, ever with gold uten to spend. Think of Thethi’s wine, Aua’s dancing girls, a brawl with the city watchmen—more damned foreigners!
“Ai, ai! Once I knew it well! See this scar. ’Twas Thethi himself gave it me. We were young men then, both as quick as southern panthers.
“Breath of Ra! How many maidens and hapless youths think you Baltu brings to Thebes this trip?”
A sharp blow from the staff of the overseer cut short this soliloquy. Once again began the splashing of waters mingled with the droning song of the irrigation worker: “Life to this seed, O Waters, Breath of Osiris, Blood of Isis! Life to these our seedlings that we may eat and live to sing thy praises.”
The galley drifted slowly to the bank. The oars were drawn in; the great steering-oars alone guided her.
The emblem at the prow of the vessel showed her to hail from Tyre. Her freight, as Nakht had hinted, consisted in the main of hapless youths and maidens torn from the arms of their murdered parents, enveigled from their homes by false promises or bought outright in foreign slave-marts.
Among the jostling crowds gathered upon the embankment and overlooking the clustered vessels, stood Renny, the Syrian. His gaze was fixed upon the forms of two little children busily occupied in modeling dolls from the plastic Nile mud of the river bank. The children’s occupation had interested him since Renny, the Syrian, was a sculptor.