The Pillar of Fire; or, Israel in Bondage

by J. H. Ingraham

LETTER XVIII.

City of Memphis, Palace of the Hierarch.

My dear Mother:

I have received from the Prince Remeses a letter informing me of the arrival of each division of his army, chariots, horse, and footmen, with the fleets under the viceroy Mœris, at the city of the Thebaïd. They entered it, however, as conquerors, for the Ethiopian king had already taken possession of it with his advanced guard.

I will quote to you from the letter of the prince:

"I trust, my dear Sesostris," he writes, "that you are passing your time both with pleasure and profit, in visiting places of interest in the valley of the Lower Nile, and in studying the manners and usages of the people. You will find the pyramids an exhaustless source of attraction. From the priests, who are the most intelligent and learned class in Egypt, you will obtain all the information respecting those mysterious monuments of the past, which is known, besides many legends.

"The idea of their antediluvian origin is by no means an unlikely one. As we travel down the past, at every epoch we find the pyramids uplifting their lofty heads into the skies! Still we move down the path of ages, and see the throne of the first mortal king overshadowed by their hoary tops! Farther back, against their bases, beat the receding waves of the deluge; for between the king of the first dynasty and the flood, there seems to be no interval in which they could have been upreared, even if there were time for a nation to rise and advance in power, civilization, art, and wealth, adequate to the product of such gigantic geometric works. Either our chronology is at fault, or the pyramids must have been constructed by the antediluvian demigods, and have outstood the strength of the surging seas which rolled over the earth. You will, however, no doubt, hear all that is to be said, and judge for yourself.

"My army is in fine order. You already have learned, by my courier to the queen, how the dark-visaged, barbaric King Occhoris entered Thebes the day of our arrival in the suburbs. Upon receiving intelligence that the van of my forces, which was cavalry, had just reached the sepulchres of the Pharaohs below the city, I pushed forward, joined them, and, at their head, entered the city; while the main body of the troops of the Ethiopian king was moving on from Edfu. But Occhoris had already been driven from his position in the palace of the Pharaohs, by an infuriated and insulted populace. The barbarian monarch, after entering the city without opposition, at the head of two hundred chariots, six hundred horse, and his gigantic body-guard of Bellardines, consisting of a thousand men in iron helmets, round shields, and heavy short-swords, in order to show his contempt of our national religion, here in what has been called both its cradle and its throne, commanded to be led into the temple of the sacred Bull, a wild African buffalo,—a bull of a species as ferocious as the lion,—and ordered him to be let loose against the god. The fierce animal charged upon him as he stood in the holy adytum with his curators, and, overthrowing him, gored him to death in a few moments. Thereupon the priests raised the wild cry of vengeance for sacrilege. It was caught up by the people, and borne from tongue to tongue through the city in a few moments of time. Fearless, indifferent to the arms of the soldiers, the three hundred and seventy priests of the temple, armed only with their sacrificial knives, rushed upon the barbarian and his guard. The Ethiopians rallied about their monarch, and for ten priests they slew, ten-score filled their places. The floor of the temple became a battle-field. Occhoris, and the sixty men who entered the temple with him, formed themselves into a solid phalanx, facing their furious assailants, who seemed to think they could not die. Gaining at length the door, the king received reinforcements. But by this time the whole city was in an uproar and under arms, and the people, who feared Occhoris in the morning, and refused to oppose him, now knew no fear. The issue of this fearful combat was, that the sacrilegious king was forced to retire with the loss of two thirds of his body-guard, and nearly every chariot and rider; for the avenging people with knives crept beneath the horses and stabbed them to death; while others, leaping upon horsemen and chariots, dragged them to the ground, and put them to death. Not less than four thousand of the citizens of Thebes perished in the act of pious vengeance. Before I entered the city I heard the cries, the shouts, the ringing of weapons, and the whole tumult of war; and, making my way over heaps of slain that lay in the great 'avenue of the gods,' I pursued the retiring monarch beyond the gates. He regained the head of his army, and came to a halt near the ancient temple of Amun on the Nile. My whole army are now in advance of Thebes, in order of battle, awaiting a threatened attack from the Ethiopian king. My headquarters are at the palace of Amunophis I., from which he departed nearly a century ago to drive the foreign kings from Memphis. I felt a deep interest in being in the house of my great ancestor. I have also visited the palace of my father, the Prince of Thebes, who was slain, not long before my birth, in battle with the Ethiopians. I have paid a visit to his tomb; and as I stood gazing upon the reposing dead in the royal mausoleum hewn from the solid mountain, I wondered if his soul were cognizant that a son, whom he had never seen to bless with a father's benediction, was bending sorrowfully over the stone sarcophagus that held his remains.

"To-morrow we join battle with the barbaric king. From the tower of the pylon which looks towards the south, I see his vast army, with its battalion of elephants, its host of brazen chariots, its horsemen and footmen as numerous as the leaves. But I feel confident of victory. Prince Mœris has moved his galleys on the opposite side, in order to ascend secretly by night and gain the rear of the enemy, who are without boats. My chariots, some five hundred in number, have been crossed over in safety to this side, to co-operate with the Prince of Thebes. They are now drawn up in the wide, superb serpentine avenue the 'sacred way' of Thebes, lined with sphinxes and statues which adorn this vast circle of temples to the gods.