Your affectionate
Sesostris
LETTER VIII.
Palace of Amense.
My honored and beloved Mother:
My last letter closed with the narration of a history of the Hebrews, from the lips of Prince Remeses, to which I listened as we walked to and fro on the terrace of the temple. I will in this letter continue, or rather conclude, the subject, feeling that it will have interested you quite as deeply as it has engaged my attention.
The governor of the queen's granaries having arrived, mounted upon a handsomely caparisoned horse, and attended by runners, the prince at once gave him the orders for which he came, and then, dismissing him with a wave of his hand, turned to me, as I was watching the majestic flight of several eagles of prey, which, circling above my head at a great height, with seemingly immovable wings, through cutting the air so swiftly, gradually diminished the circles of their flight, and descended upon some object not far distant, on the road leading to another treasure-city, called Pithom, many leagues up the Nile, which the Hebrews had built for Amunophis I., threescore years and more ago.
"I will now resume my history of the Hebrews, my dear Sesostris," said the prince, "and will be brief, as we must return to On. The Prince Joseph, as I have said, obtained for his father and brethren all this fair plain, the heart and beauty of Egypt. Here they dwelt when the old man died, after seventeen years' residence in Egypt; and the Hebrew prime minister of the king made for his father a funeral such as few kings receive. It is said to have been more magnificent than that of Osirtasen I., of which our poets have sung. By Pharaoh's command, as his favorite wished to bury his father in Palestine, a vast army went up with the body,—chariots, horsemen, and footmen,—so that to this day the splendor and pomp of the funeral is a tradition throughout the lands they traversed. Joseph then returned to Egypt, and ruled sixty-one years, until both he and Apophis the king were waxed in years. At length he died, and was embalmed, and his body placed in the second pyramid, which you behold a little to the right of Memphis. There his body does not now rest, for, after the expulsion of the Phœnician dynasty, the Hebrews secretly removed it, and its place of concealment is known only to themselves. There is a saying among them that the bones of this prince shall rise again, and that he shall go with them forth from Egypt to a new and fair country beyond Arabia."
"Then they have a hope of being one day delivered from their present condition?" I asked.