THE IDOLS CRUMBLE
Meanwhile Kenkenes seldom saw a human face. Food and water in red clay
vessels, bearing the seal of Thebes, were set inside his door by
disembodied hands. At intervals he saw the keeper, always attended by
the inevitable scribe, but the visit was a matter of inspection and
rarely was the prisoner addressed.
Though he grew to expect these visits, each time the bar rattled down
he trembled with the hope that the jailer brought him freedom. Each
successive disappointment was as acute as the last, made more poignant
by the torturing certainty that his hopes were vain. The effect of one
was not at all counteracted by the other.
Some time after dawn the sun thrust a golden bar, full of motes, across
the door, a foot above his head. In a space the beam was withdrawn.
The heat and dust of the midday came, instead. Gnats wove their mazes
in the narrow casement that opened on the outside world, and now and
then the twitter of birds sounded very close to it. Kenkenes knew how
they flashed as they flew in the sun. They were prodigal of freedom.
At nightfall, if he stood at full height against the door, he could see
a thread of cooling sky with a single star in its center.
This was all his knowledge of the world. Hour after hour he paced the
narrow length of the cell, till the circumscribed round made him dizzy.
If he flung himself on his straw pallet, he did not rest. The mind has
no charity for the body. If there is to be no mental repose it is vain
to hope for physical. When the inactivity of his uneasy pallet became
intolerable, he resumed his pace.
He expected the return of his messenger in twenty days after the man's
departure. At the expiration of that time his suspense and
apprehension became more and more desperate at the passing of each new
day. In rapid succession he accepted and rejected the thought that the
messenger had played him false, had been assassinated and robbed; that
Meneptah had recalled the signet, or had added the penalty of suspense
to his indorsement of Har-hat's fiat of imprisonment.
When the climax of his sensations was reached, his self-sufficiency
collapsed and he entered into ceaseless supplication of the gods. He
vowed costly sacrifices to them, adding promises of self-abnegation
which became more comprehensive as his distress increased. At the end
of a month he had consecrated everything at his command. Then he
subsided into a numb endurance till what time his prayers should be
answered.
Eight days later, about mid-afternoon, while he lay on his pallet, the
door was flung open and his messenger stood without. With a cry,
Kenkenes leaped to his feet and wrenched the scroll from the man's
hand. With unsteady fingers he ripped off the linen cover and read.
The letter was from Hotep, conveying such information regarding his
imprisonment as we already know. If was couched in the gentlest terms,
and contained that essence of hope which loving spirits can extract
from the most desperate situation, for another's sake. But for all the
kindly intent of the scribe, his news was none the less unhappy. The
dreaded had come to pass, and the war between hope and fear was at an
end. Kenkenes read the missive calmly, and paid the messenger
according to his promise. The jailer, who had come with the man, read
the sentence and bade the prisoner make his choice of labor.
"Anything, so it will but give me a glimpse of the horizon," he said.
"Thou wilt pay dearly for thy sky," the keeper cautioned him. "The
softest labor is within doors."
"Give me my wish according to the command of the prince."
The jailer shrugged his shoulders. "As thou wilt. Make ready to
follow the canal-workers, to-morrow."
When the door fell shut again, Kenkenes returned to his pallet and
re-read the scroll.
A year's imprisonment! The sentence defined was the sum of daily
shame, sorrow, homesickness and misanthropy. Shame in the proud man
admits of no degrees of intensity. If it exist at all, it is
superlative. To this was added the loss of Rachel. How little it
would take to satisfy him, now that she was wholly denied to his eyes!
Only to look down on her again, unseen, from his aery in the rocks over
the valley!
Hotep had offered him hope, based on circumstantial evidence and fact.
Har-hat could not add to his sentence. That was the only indisputable
cheer he could give. But would Rameses stay the chief adviser's hand,
seeing that the winning of Masanath depended on the prince's
neutrality, as Hotep had explained? If Rachel fled to Mentu, as
Kenkenes had bidden her, could the murket protect her, even at his own
peril? Might not the heavy hand of the powerful favorite fall also on
the head of the king's architect? Wherein was the murket more immune
than his son? Rachel's destruction seemed to be decreed by the Hathors.
Such was his thought, and he raised himself to curse the Seven Sisters,
and growing reckless, he included the unhelpful gods in his
maledictions. The blasphemy comforted him strangely, and he persisted
till his heated brain was cooled.
At dawn the next day he laid aside his fillet of gold, his trappings
and noble dress, and donning the kilt or shenti of the prisoners, was
handcuffed to another malefactor and taken forth to the sun-white plain
between Thebes Diospolis and the Arabian, hills, to labor in the canals
of the nome.
Here, looking continually upon crime, brutality and misery, he asked
himself the divine motive in creating man, and having found no answer,
he began to question man's debt to the gods.
He was going the way of all the weak in faith. He had pleaded with his
deities, and they had not heard him. He asked himself what he had done
to deserve their disfavor. The sacrilege of Athor was too slight an
offense--if offense it were--and here again he paused, set his teeth
and swore that he had done no wrong and the god or man that accused him
was impotent, unjust and ignorant. Once again he asked himself what he
had done to deserve ill-use at the hands of the Pantheon. They had
turned a deaf ear to him, and why should he render them further homage?
The doctrine of divine Love, displayed through chastisement, was not in
the Osirian creed.
His eyes grew bold through rebellion and he attacked the wild
inconsistencies of the faith with the destructive instrument of reason.
Each deduction led him on, fascinated, in his apostasy. Each crumbling
tenet started another toward ruin. Finding no sound obstacle to stay
him, he fell with avidity to rending the Pantheon.
But he found no cheer nor any hope that day when he told himself
bitterly, "There is no God."