Dust, a foot or more in depth, had drifted against the gates of the villas, many of which seemed as if they might rather have opened upon some gloomy mortuary-garden than upon the dainty gardens of exalted nobles, with their wealth of tamarisks, acacias, myrrh, sandalwood and stately Lebanus cedars.
Not a sign of life was visible along the sloping walls of the city, not a living thing stirred in its dark and narrow streets. Covered by the same gray pall of dust, Thebes had seemingly united herself with her immense burial-ground to the westward. Thebes appeared to have become one vast city of the dead!
A swirl of the fine impalpable Egyptian dust rose into the shimmering air, a whirling and ever-widening cone—part sand, part river-silt, part human ashes. Yes, throughout the Nile Valley, an Egyptian might be said to breathe the very ashes of his ancestors.
Suddenly the sun leaped above the Eastern Hills. The city awoke. Smoke rose upon the heavy morning air and drifted slowly, like a blue-gray streamer, up the curving shores of the Theban Valley.
Kathi, the embalmer, on his way to the landing stage leading to the Temple of Karnak, paused to watch the maneuvers of the war-vessels, as they sought their berths along the western bank.
At this moment, one vessel’s huge square sail, a picturesque checker-board of green and white, flapped madly, as its head flew up suddenly in the wind. It seemed that Duādmochef, the Wind-god, was not to be cheated out of a few parting puffs from his lusty lungs!
The look-out-man, standing in the prow, pole in hand, shouted a hasty warning to the captain aft, but, before his raucous order could be understood, the heavy boat had buried its nose, with the ghastly trophies it bore, deep in a hidden sand-bar. For a time it seemed that the stiffly swaying forms of the wretched foreign chieftains lashed to the prow would break the thongs which held them in place. It availed nothing that Ranuf, the captain, cursed the look-out-man, his father and his forebears since Egypt emerged from the primordial Nu! And the unhappy Ameni suffered the irate captain’s curses in silence, as it was the sixth mishap of the kind since leaving the sandstone quays of Enet, sacred to the Goddess Hathor.
As Ranuf hurled at the bent head of his look-out-man a last fearful hekau, a potent spell intended to consign the soul of his discomfited assistant to the voracious maw of Osiris’s hound, he noticed a dark patch floating upon the water below. A white face gazed up into his:
“Abdi, quick! A drowning man; a countryman of thine; if I mistake not.”
The Syrian addressed strode quickly to the captain’s side, took one look at the slowly drifting body and, casting aside his sandals and loin-cloth, disappeared headlong into the river. Cautiously the captain extended a long pole in the direction of the swimming sailor. In another moment, Abdi was drawn safely to the deck, and, with him, the apparently lifeless figure of the man he had attempted to save.