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.
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