while the gleam of amber still edges the night-blue sky behind the black horizon. Then the silent fields lie under the brightening moon, glittering with dew, untrodden and deserted. It is not cold or climate that leads men to this custom, but the unsafety of a country bordered by unseen deserts, whence untold men may suddenly appear and ravage all the plain.
The ploughing scene next follows, on "the land coming out from the water"; as the inundation goes down the well-known banks and ridges appear, "the back-bones of the land," as they were so naturally called; and when the surface is firm enough to walk on—with many a pool and ditch still full—the ploughing begins on the soft dark clay
The catastrophe of the story—the black gulf of deceit that suddenly opens under Bata's feet—has always been seen to be strikingly like the story of Joseph. And—as we have noticed—there is good reason for the early part of this tale belonging to about the beginning of the XVIIIth Dynasty, so it
72 ANPU AND BATA
is very closely allied in time as well as character to the account of Joseph. In this part again is one of those pointed touches, which show the power of the poet—for a poem in prose this is—"her heart knew him with the knowledge of youth."
On reaching the mistaken revenge of Anpu, we see the sympathy of Bata with his cattle, and his way of reading their feelings, returned to him most fittingly by the cows perceiving the presence of the treachery. "He heard what his first cow had said; and the next entering she also said likewise."
After this we find a change; instead of the simple and natural narrative, full of human feeling, and without a touch of impossibility, every subsequent episode involves the supernatural; Ra creating a wide water, the extraction of the soul of Bata, his miraculous wife, and all the transformations—these have nothing in common with the style or ideas of the earlier tale.
Whence this later tangle came, and how