Ra'hel bowed her head on Poëri's shoulder like a flower overladen with sunshine and love; the lips of the young man touched the hair of the lovely Jewess, who fell back slowly, yielding her brow and half-closed eyes to his earnest and timid caress. Their hands, which had sought each other, were now clasped and feverishly pressed together.
"Oh, why did I not surprise him in some impious and mysterious ceremony, slaying with his own hands a human victim, drinking its blood in a cup of black ware, rubbing his face with it? It seems to me that I should have suffered less than at the sight of that lovely woman whom he embraces so timidly," murmured Tahoser in a faint voice as she sank on the ground in a corner by the hut.
Twice she strove to rise, but she fell back on her knees. Darkness came over her, her limbs gave way, and she fell in a swoon.
Meanwhile Poëri issued from the hut, giving a last kiss to Ra'hel.
X
The Pharaoh, raging and anxious on hearing of the disappearance of Tahoser, had given way to that desire for change which possesses a heart tormented by an unsatisfied passion. To the deep grief of Amense, Hont-Reché, and Twea, his favourites, who had endeavoured to retain him in the Summer Palace by all the resources of feminine coquetry, he now inhabited the Northern Palace on the other side of the Nile. His fierce preoccupation was irritated by the presence and the chatter of his women; they displeased him because they were not Tahoser. He now thought ugly those beauties who had seemed to him formerly so fair; their young, slender, graceful bodies, their voluptuous attitudes, their long eyes brightened by antimony and flashing with desire, their purple lips, white teeth, and languishing smiles,—everything in them, even the perfume of their cool skin, as delicate as a bouquet of flowers or a box of scent, had become odious to him. He seemed to be angry with them for having loved them, and to be unable to understand how he could have been smitten by such vulgar charms. When Twea touched his breast with the slender, pink finger of her little hand, shaking with emotion, as if to recall the remembrance of former familiarities; when Hont-Reché placed before him the draught-board supported by two lions back to back, in order to play a game; when Amense presented him with a lotus-flower with respectful, supplicating grace, he could scarcely refrain from striking them with his sceptre, and his royal eyes flashed with such disdain that the poor women who had ventured on such boldness, withdrew abashed, their eyes wet with tears, and leaned silently against the painted wall, trying by their motionlessness to appear to be part of the paintings on the frescoes.
To avoid these scenes of tears and violence, he had withdrawn to the palace of Thebes, alone, taciturn, and sombre; and there, instead of remaining seated on his throne in the solemn attitude of the gods and of kings, who, being almighty, neither move nor make a gesture, he walked feverishly up and down through the vast halls. Strange was it to see that tall Pharaoh with imposing mien, as formidable as the granite colossi, his like, making the stone floors resound under his curved sandals. When he passed, the terrified guards seemed to be petrified and to turn to stone. They remained breathless, and not even the double ostrich-feather in their headgear dared tremble. When he had passed, they scarce ventured to whisper, "What is the matter to-day with the Pharaoh?"
Had he returned from his expedition a beaten man, he could not have been more morose and sombre. If, instead of having won ten victories, slain twenty thousand enemies, brought back two thousand virgins chosen from among the fairest, a hundred loads of gold-dust, a thousand loads of ebony and elephants' tusks, without counting the rare products and the strange animals,—if, instead of all this, Pharaoh had seen his army cut to pieces, his war chariots overthrown and broken, if he had escaped alone from the rout under a shower of arrows, dusty, blood-covered, taking the reins from the hands of his driver dead by his side,—he certainly could not have appeared more gloomy and more desperate. After all, the land of Egypt produces soldiers in abundance; innumerable horses neigh and paw the ground in the palace stables; and workmen could soon bend wood, melt copper, sharpen brass. The fortune of war is changeable, but a disaster may be atoned for. To have, however, wished for a thing which did not at once come to him, to have met with an obstacle between his will and the carrying out of that will, to have hurled like a javelin a desire which had not struck its mark,—that was what amazed the Pharaoh who dwelt in the higher plane of almightiness. For one moment it occurred to him that he was only a man.
So he wandered through the vast courts, down the avenues of giant pillars, passed under the mighty pylons, between the lofty monolithic obelisks and the colossi which gazed upon him with their great, frightened eyes. He traversed the hypostyle hall and the maze of the granitic forest with its one hundred and sixty-two pillars tall and strong as towers. The figures of gods, of kings, and of symbolic beings painted on the walls seemed to fix upon him their great eyes, drawn in black upon their profile masks, the uræus snakes to twist and swell their hoods, the bird-faced divinities to stretch out their necks, the globes to spread over the cornices their fluttering wings of stone. A strange, fantastic life animated these curious figures, and peopled with living swarms the solitudes of the vast hall, which was as large as an ordinary palace. The divinities, the ancestors, the chimerical monsters, eternally motionless, were amazed to see the Pharaoh, ordinarily as calm as themselves, striding up and down as though he were a man of flesh, and not of porphyry and basalt.