There was a King in Egypt

by Norma Lorimer

"Have another whisky before you go?"

"No thanks. I think one has been more than enough—it's made me confoundedly tired."

They were standing at the open front of the tent.

"Good-bye," Michael said. "And thanks most awfully for your hospitality. I suppose you won't settle on the work here until next season?"

"No, it will be hot enough at the end of three weeks, though it's cooler here than with Lampton in the Valley. If the money is forthcoming, we shall take up work again next October."

They parted abruptly, as Englishmen do. Two fellahin, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, would have gone through a set formula of graceful words before they separated. They are ever mindful of the teachings of the Koran, which says:

"If you are greeted with a greeting, then greet ye with a better greeting. God taketh account of all things."

Michael had turned his back on the stranger and the waving flag. Mechanically he put his hand to his belt-pouch. Yes, the crimson amethyst was still there. He felt for it as though he were in a dream. The bright light made him giddy. The stone was his link with and his tangible assurance that the life which he had led for the past weeks was a reality; it was his sacred token that the vision of Akhnaton was no mere phantom of an over-imaginative brain. Yet, even as he felt its hard substance between his thumb and forefinger, he wondered if it was really there. He knew that imagination can create strange things; phantom tumours have been produced by imagination, tumours which are visible to a physician's eye while the patient is conscious and his mind obsessed with the conviction that it is there; he knew that such swellings disappear when the patient is asleep. He felt dazed, and as if he himself were unreal; his feet refused to tread firmly on the earth; they never managed to reach it. When he looked for Abdul and the camels, they were floating in the heavens above the horizon, miles and miles away; there was a belt of sky between them and the desert sand. If his legs had been paralysed, they could not have felt heavier or more useless.

He struggled on, but very soon the desert and the sky became one; the world in front of him rose suddenly up and stood on end. It was quite impossible to reach Abdul—he was receding as the horizon recedes when a clear atmosphere foreshortens the distance. In his brain there was a confused jumble; it was full of things which had no meaning or cohesion. Millicent was the centre of the absurd medley, Millicent, naked and unashamed, her slender figure as thickly covered with uncut jewels of huge dimensions as the statues of Diana of Ephesus are covered with breasts. The jewelled vision of Millicent dominated every other picture in his brain. It was clearer than the village of flies, or the African's cell in far-off el-Azhar, or the procession of white figures returning from the burial of the desert saint. It moved along in the clear air in front of him. He had no reasoning powers left, or he would have asked himself why his subconscious brain had fashioned this vision of Millicent wearing the sacred jewels when he still believed in her innocence. The clear voice, man's divine messenger, had kept him assured of the truth of his conviction.

Everything was dreadfully confused. He wished that the horizon would not come right forward and almost throw him off his balance. He seemed to be constantly hitting up against it. And Abdul, why was he floating further and further away? The harder he tried to get to him, the further he went. And yet he could actually hear him reciting his prayers. He was telling his rosary. Why did he tantalize him by coming so near and then floating off again? Sometimes he came so near that he could see his fine fingers automatically pulling the beads along the string; a tassel of red silk hung from the end of it. There were ninety-nine small red beads and one large one. He had reached the fifty-ninth. Michael could tell that, because the words "O Giver of Life" came to him sonorously across the desert stillness. The next one would be "O Giver of Death," but Abdul had floated away again. Now he had come back; he had said "O Living One," "O Enduring," "O Source of Discovery."