Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight

by Mathew Joseph Holt

Within ten days the ship rode at anchor. Then I knew that my gods had been good to me and had truly warned so I might make preparation. I determined on the morrow to seize the ship and retain it for my own use. All owners of boats had long since fled the land. The next morning when I awoke the ship was a distant speck upon the growing ocean. It seemed the gods of some few others were caring for them also.

The pyramid now was about completed and not having provisions for all, though we of the palace stinted not ourselves, having plenty for years, I directed the guards to issue only half rations to the people. They died by hundreds and were cast from the cliffs into the cold waters of the sea.

Noticing that great crowds gathered in the city and that they wept and swore and encouraged one another to assault the palace and tear their ruler to pieces, I thought it best to desert the palace and take possession of the pyramid, which was full of provisions, and had a guard of several thousand soldiers.

So we of the palace, some hundred persons, with a guard of more than three hundred, moved into the pyramid; and, with the stones prepared for that purpose, closed the entrance hall with fifty feet of solid masonry, telling the soldiers outside that we would feed them from our supplies, which we had no intention of doing, except as they might be of use. How easy it is to fool the common people.

That night it stormed and sleet and snow made the outer pyramid a thing of milky glass.

The half-naked, half-starved people came by thousands, and holding out their hands in supplication, begged for bread. But we, sheltered and fed and clothed and sitting by our fires, had no thought for and took no risk for others.

The pyramid in the winter sunlight, with its coating of milk-white ice, seemed an immense half-buried diamond; and we within its heart were not more considerate of the starving, surging mass at its base.

Through the narrow slit-like ventilators, we heard in the afternoon the sound of strife; and, climbing to the flat top, where there was a walled-in area about twenty feet square, looked down upon the soldiers struggling with and slaughtering the half-armed, starving, shivering populace.

For sport, not caring whether they killed soldiers or subjects, I had some of our guard bring a quantity of unused granite blocks about two feet square and slide them down the ice-smooth surface into the seething mass below.

After watching for some time, though clothed in a heavy woolen gown, I grew cold and tired of the sport and went below to the feast, the music and the dance. There I sat with Nefert and two other queens, not less beautiful.