Queen of the Dawn: A Love Tale of Old Egypt

by H. Rider Haggard

“Are they not perchance the same thing, Nurse? Are we ever happy except when we are mad? Can the sane be happy, or the wise? Is your holy Prophet Roy happy, who is the sanest of the sane and the wisest of the wise? Are all those death-awaiting Whitebeards who surround him happy? Have you ever been happy, except perhaps years ago when sometimes you were mad?”

“If you ask me, I have not,” answered Kemmah, remembering certain things and trembling beneath the thought of them. “Perchance you are right, young sir. Perchance, as drunkards think, we are only happy when we are mad. Yet if you will be guided by me, you will cease to seek a spirit in the skies, or near them, and content yourself with following after woman upon the earth.”

“Who knows, Nurse,” replied Khian with all the solemnity of one whose brain still reels, “that in seeking after the Spirit I may not find the woman, as in seeking after a woman, some have found a spirit? Who knows that they are not the same thing? I will tell you—perhaps—when I have climbed those pyramids by the light of the full moon.”

“Which has already shone,” interrupted Kemmah angrily.

“There are more full moons to come, Nurse. The sky is as peopled with full moons unborn as the sea is with oysters that will be eaten, and the pyramids will stand for a long while to welcome climbers,” answered Khian faintly.

“To Set with the pyramids and your silly talk!” burst out Kemmah, stamping her foot. Then she ceased, noting that Khian had once more swooned away.

“A fool!” she thought to herself as she ran to find help. “Indeed, the first of fools who would hunt a ghost when the loveliest of flesh and blood lies to his hand. Yet were I thirty years younger I think that I might find it in my heart to go mad with this spirit-seeking fool, as I think also another is in the way of doing. What did he say? That in searching for the Spirit he might find the woman? Well, perhaps he will; perhaps after all this moonstruck prince is not such a fool as he seems. Perhaps those who climb the pyramids find joy at the top of them, and joy is better than wisdom. So at least some come to believe when we grow old and have left it far behind.”

Very soon Khian, who was young and strong and though shaken by the shock of his fall, as the physician said, quite unhurt in his brain or his bones, rose recovered from his bed. Indeed, within five days, once more he was climbing the pyramids by the help of the Captain and his sons, for it would seem that this passion had grown upon him during his swoon. Also that swoon, when he shook off the last of it, left no memory of what he had said or done while it endured. From the moment when he set his foot upon the cord and slipped, until at last he rose from his bed, he remembered nothing, not even the visit of Nefra to his chamber or his talk with Kemmah, though it is true that these came back to him in after days. So where he had left off, there he began again, namely, on the slope of the pyramid, which very soon he mastered, as in due time he did the others, like Nefra before him.

Day by day, from dawn until the sun grew too hot for the work, he laboured at those pyramids, so hard that at last the Captain and his sons were almost outworn and declared that they had to do with a devil, not a man. Yet they spoke well of him, as did all others, holding that he who after such a fall dared to persevere and conquer, must be great-hearted. For they did not understand that, from the moment of his slip, of his fall he remembered nothing.

Meanwhile, though he knew it not, at the Court of King Apepi it was believed that he was dead. The tidings of his fall from the pyramid and, it was added, of his death, for dead he seemed to be, had overtaken that messenger, a Brother of the Dawn named Temu, who bore the answer from the Council of the Dawn and Khian’s own letter, as he embarked upon the Nile, and he had spread it abroad and carried it to the Court at Tanis. When Apepi heard this news he was grieved in a fashion, since he had loved his son a little, at least when he was younger, though not much because in his fierce and selfish heart there was small room for any love save of himself.