Her figure seemed robust and healthy, but was rendered hideous by glaring streaks of paint and devices of unclean animals branded on the skin. Still more horrible was her head. She was evidently young, but she had no ears, no eyebrows, no hair. Her mouth had been distended, and her teeth were sharpened to fine points. She grovelled on the ground, as if awaiting torture, and Daphne’s heart stood still with horror and indignation.
Suddenly Thoth addressed the creature in an unknown tongue, and after repeating the same thing over and over again, apparently made the woman understand and believe what he said, for suddenly she gave a sobbing laugh and crouched to kiss his feet.
“I have told her,” said Thoth, “that she need labour no more at her appointed tasks, and will never again be punished. But the thing which pleased her most, and which she could not believe, was that without her request she would never see any of the masked rulers.”
“What were her tasks?” Daphne asked.
“It would be difficult to explain,” said Thoth. “They were all most irksome, most useless, most trifling, but they were exacted with dreadful punishments. She had to count grains of sand, to unravel tangled knots, to learn by rote strings of meaningless sounds, and to discover all kinds of intricate puzzles.”
To confirm his words, Thoth destroyed the various instruments of labour, scattered the sand, tore up the parchments, and stamped upon the fragments of the broken toys. The woman seemed stupefied with incredulous surprise, like a dazed child just recovered from a fit of terror.
They passed on, and Thoth drew the curtain of another cell. Here again the occupant was a woman, but she was exquisitely clothed, and both face and form were extremely beautiful. She shuddered when the masks entered, and hastily began to arrange in a harmonious manner various shades of coloured stuffs. She looked anxiously, too, at the walls of the cell, which were covered with pictures. To Daphne the pictures were perfectly unintelligible, and yet they seemed excellent both in colour and drawing. They were such pictures as might be painted by a great artist whose reason had been destroyed by some calamity.
“Her task,” said Thoth, “is to live entirely for colour and form—in all other respects she is less intelligent than a butterfly.”
Daphne looked into her eyes, and saw at once that she was quite distraught.
Again Thoth repeated the same gibberish, and at last seemed to make the woman understand in a blinking manner that her life would no longer be made a burden. To Daphne, however, it seemed that the message of release had come too late—like longed-for rain after the tree has perished with drought.