"'As if the open Book of Thoth lay before me! I doubt not,' I answered.
"'Wilt thou be King of Egypt?' again asked another voice. A third, in another direction, took it up, and every subterranean echo of the vaulted pyramid seemed to take up the cry. I rushed from the hall, not knowing whither I went. Doors seemed to open before me, as if by magic, and I at length found myself emerging, guided by the magician, into the open night. The granite valves of the gate closed behind me, and I was alone, in the quadrangle of the great temple of Thoth. The stars shone down upon me like mocking eyes, watching me. I fled onward, as if I would fly from myself—I feared to reflect. I passed the sphinx, the pylones, the obelisks; and ran along the avenue of the Lake of the Dead, until I reached the Nile. I crossed it in a boat that I found upon the shore, and without having formed any clear idea of what I ought to do, sought the palace, and gained my mother's ante-room. Did I say 'my mother,' Sesostris? I meant the good queen. I sent in a page to say I wished to see her. In surprise at my return, before the forty days were fulfilled, she came to the door hurriedly, in her night-robe, and opened it. I entered as calmly as I could, and did not refuse her kiss, though I knew I was but a Hebrew! One night's scenes, dreadful as they were, O Sesostris, could not wholly break the ties of a lifetime of filial love and reverence. I closed the door, secured it in silence, and then sat down, weary with what I had undergone; and, as she came near and knelt by me, and laid her hand against my forehead, and asked me 'if I were ill, and hence had left the temple,' I was overcome with her kindness; and when the reflection forced itself upon me that I could no more call her mother, or be entitled to these acts of maternal solicitude, I gave way to the strong current of emotion, and fell upon her shoulder, weeping as heartily as she had seen me weep when lying in the little ark a helpless infant.
"During this brief moment, a suspicion flashed across my mind, that the magicians might have produced this as a part of my trial as a prince;—that it was not real, but that by their wonderful arts of magic they had made it appear so to my vision. I seized upon this idea, as a man drowning in the Nile grasps at a floating flower.
"'Mother,' I said, 'I am ill. I am also very sorrowful!'
"'The tasks and toils of thy initiation, my son, have been too great for thee. Thy face is haggard and thy looks unnatural. What is thy sorrow?'
"'I have had a vision, or what was like a dream, my mother. I saw an infant, in this vision, before me, placed in an ark, and set adrift upon the Nile. Lo, after being borne by the current some ways, it was espied by a princess who was bathing, whose maids, at her command, brought it to her. It contained a circumcised Hebrew child. The princess, being childless, adopted it, and educated it, and declared it to be her son. She placed him next to her in the kingdom, and was about to resign to him the crown, when—'
"Here my mother, whose face I had earnestly regarded, became pale and trembled all over. She seized my hands and gasped—
"'Tell me, Remeses, tell me, was this a dream, or hast thou heard it?'
"'I saw it, my mother, in a vision, in the subterranean chamber of the pyramids. It was one of those scenes of magic which the arts of the magi know how to produce.'
"'Dost thou believe it?' she cried.