Oh, if only he could have been permitted to stay with his benefactor instead of this sullen man! How carefully he would have removed the stones from his darkened pathway!
During the voyage he was obliged to undergo severe struggles to keep the oath of secrecy imposed upon him; but perjury threatened him with the most horrible tortures, not to mention the sorceress Tabus, whom he was to meet.
So Myrtilus’s abode remained unknown to Hermon.
Bias approved his master’s intention of going into the desert. He had often seen the oracle of Amon tested, and he himself had experienced the healthfulness of the desert air. Besides, it made him proud to see that Hermon was disposed to follow his suggestion of pitching his tent in a spot which he designated. This was at the end of the arm of the sea at Clysma. Several trees grew there beside small springs, and a peaceful family of Amalekites raised vegetables in their little garden, situated on higher ground, watered by the desert wells.
When a boy, before the doom of slavery had been pronounced upon him and his father, his mother, by the priest’s advice, took him there to recover from the severe attack of fever which he could not shake off amid the damp papyrus plantations surrounding his parents’ house. In the dry, pure air of the desert he recovered, and he would guide Hermon there before returning to Myrtilus.
From Tanis they reached Tennis in a few hours, and found shelter in the home of the superintendent of Archias’s weaving establishments, whose hospitality Myrtilus and Hermon had enjoyed before their installation in the white house, now burned to the ground. The Alexandrian bills of exchange were paid in gold by the lessee of the royal bank, who was a good friend of Hermon. Toward evening, both rowed to the Owl’s Nest, taking the five talents with which the runaway wife intended to purchase freedom from her husband.
As the men approached the central door of the pirates’ house, a middy-aged Biamite woman appeared and rudely ordered them to leave the island. Tabus was weak, and refused to see visitors. But she was mistaken; for when Bias, in the dialect of his tribe, shouted loudly that messengers from the wife of her grandson Hanno had arrived, there was a movement at the back of the room, and broken sentences, gasped with difficulty, expressed the old dame’s wish to receive the strangers.
On a sheep’s-wool couch, over which was spread a wolfskin, the last gift of her son Satabus, lay the sorceress, who raised herself as Hermon passed through the door.
After his greeting, she pointed to her deaf ear and begged him to speak louder. At the same time she gazed into his eyes with a keen, penetrating glance, and interrupted him by the question: “The Greek sculptor whose studio was burned over his head? And blind? Blind still?”
“In both eyes,” Bias answered for his master.