Menna the Overseer had little conception of the torture he had inflicted upon the mind of the youthful Renny when he forbade him his liberty. Hollow-cheeked and well nigh mad, Renny so far disobeyed his patron’s orders that he sat for hours, nay, for days at a time, huddled like a beggar at the Palace gate.
Not even the gentle Bhanar could console him whenever, as so frequently happened, a day went by without its being possible for the distracted youth to catch a glimpse of his idol.
Then, suddenly, he remembered his promise to the Princess. He sought out Khnum, the royal quarryman, who had but now moored to the western bank with a cargo consisting in the main of the precious alabaster of Hatnub. He bribed Khnum to procure him a giant block of purest alabaster, a mass of the creamiest material which the alabaster quarries could provide.
For days did master-quarryman Khnum seek a block of the unusual proportions demanded by the impatient sculptor. A week went by, an eternity to the tortured artist.
Finally, just as he was about to despatch a second expedition northward, and during the heat of one of the first days of the great sandstorm, Khnum and his sweating assistants hauled a wooden sledge before his dust-covered threshold. And there, high upon the friction-charred vehicle, stood the glossiest block of Hatnub’s finest alabaster which the distracted Renny had ever seen.
For many years men spoke of that never-to-be-forgotten sandstorm, a storm which ushered in days of blinding heat, days in which the flints that strewed the desert plateau cracked beneath the excoriating heat; days in which the ocher-hued river banks, confining a blinding reach of sluggish water, the shriveled and blasted sycamore, tamarisks and palms, nay, the very capital itself, seemed to be confined within the sun-god’s fiery furnace.
Day in, day out, those death-dealing rays shot from a changeless vault of steely blue. Down sank the tortured cattle; the birds gasped among the shriveled leaves of the trees. The very soil, by now as hard as any southern granite, yawned with wide-thrown crevices many cubits deep. Far to the south the broad-winged vultures circled slowly earthward from their lofty posts, as if they too feared the darts of the outraged Amen.
It was a sudden and appalling visitation which luckily blew itself out within but four of the customary nine days of blinding wind and sand.
Yet, throughout those four memorable days and thereafter Renny worked as he had never worked before.
Now, there came a day when Menna ordered his carrying-chair and bade his bearers set him down before the door of Renny’s workshop.