On the second night after the coming of Ochus, Bagoas waited on me and I commanded that he should enter, but alone. So his Eastern rabble of gorgeous servitors was turned back from the gates and he came in unattended, splendid in gold-embroidered silk and jewels. Where he had left me, there I received him, seated veiled in the chair of state before the alabaster statue of the goddess, at the entrance to the outer sanctuary that overlooked the great hall.
“Hail! Bagoas,” I said, “how goes it with you? Has that amulet of power which I gave to you protected you from harm?”
“Prophetess,” he answered, bowing, “it has protected me. It has lifted me up so that now, save for the King of kings, my master most august,” he added with a sneer in every word, “I am now the greatest one in the whole world. I give life, I decree death. I lift up, I cast down; satraps and councillors crawl about my feet; generals beg my favour; gold is showered upon me. Yea, I might build my house of gold. There is nought left for me to desire beneath the sun.”
“Except certain things to which, thanks to the cruelty of the King of kings, or those who went before him, you cannot attain? For example, children to inherit all this glory and all this gold, Bagoas, although you live among so many of those who might be mothers.”
He heard, and his face, that I noted had grown thinner and more fierce since last I saw him, became like to that of the devil.
“Prophetess,” he hissed, “surely you are one who knows how to pour acid into an open wound.”
“That thereby it may be cleansed, Bagoas.”
“Yet your words are true,” he went on, unheeding. “All this splendour, all this wealth and power I would give, and gladly, to be as my fathers were before me, gently bred but humbly owners of a patch of land between Thebes and Philæ. There they sat for a score of generations with their women and their children. But where, thanks to the Persians, are my women and my children? In the western cliff yonder there is a sepulchre. In the chapel of that sepulchre above the coffins of those who lie beneath is an image of him who dug it. He lived some fourteen hundred years ago in the days of Aahmes, he who won back Egypt from the Hyksos kings, the invaders who held it as the Persians do to-day. For he was one of the captains of the troops of Aahmes who, when he conquered, gave him that patch of land in guerdon for his service.”
Here Bagoas paused like to one overwhelmed by unhappy memories, then continued,
“From age to age, Prophetess, it has been the custom for the children of the children of this soldier upon a certain day to make offerings to that statue, wherein, as we hold, dwells the Ka of him whose face and form it pictures; to set a golden crown, that of Osiris, upon its head, to wind a golden chain about its neck; to give it food, to give it flowers. Such is the sacred duty, from generation to generation, of the descendants of that captain who served Aahmes and helped to free Egypt from the barbarian foe. Myself I have fulfilled that duty, aye, when Ochus the Destroyer first came to Memphis, I travelled up Nile and placed the crown upon the head and wound the chain about the neck, and offered the flowers and the food. But, Prophetess, of this blood I am the last, for because of my beauty as a child the Persian seized me and made of me a dry tree, so that never again will there be one to make offering in the tomb of my forefather, the captain of Aahmes, or to read the story of his deeds that fourteen hundred years ago, while yet living, he caused to be recorded upon his funeral tablet.”