Egypt was swept into a tremendous and
beautiful heresy by a homely king, whose word was law.
But at his death the reaction was vast and vindictive. The orthodox
faith reasserted itself with a violence that carried every monument to
the apostasy and the very name of the apostate into dust. Now the
remaining houses of Khu-ayen were the homes of the fishers--its ruins
the habitation of criminals and refugees.
The hand of the insulted zealot, of the envious successor, of the
invader and conqueror, had done what the reluctant hand of nature might
not have accomplished in a millennium. The ruins showed themselves,
stretching afar toward and across the eastern sky, in ragged and
indefinable lines. The oblique rays of the newly risen moon slanted a
light that was weird and ghostly because it fell across a ruin.
Kenkenes climbed over a chaos of prostrate columns, fallen architraves
and broken colossi, and the sounds of his advance stirred the rat, the
huge spider, the snake and the hiding beast from the dark debris. Here
and there were solitary walls standing out of heaps of wreckage, which
had been palaces, and frequent arid open spaces marked the site of
groves. In complex ramifications throughout the city sandy troughs
were still distinguishable, where canals had been, and in places of
peculiarly complete destruction the strips of uneven pavement showed
the location of temples.
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