An Egyptian Princess — Complete, Georg Ebers [best ereader for academics txt] 📗

Bartja parted from his friend with a heavy heart, advising him to be very prudent with regard to Atossa. The secret had been confided to Kassandane, and she had promised to take Darius’ part with the king.

If any one might venture to raise his eyes to the daughter of Cyrus, assuredly it was the son of Hystaspes; he was closely connected by marriage with the royal family, belonged like Cambyses to the Pasargadae, and his family was a younger branch of the reigning dynasty. His father called himself the highest noble in the realm, and as such, governed the province of Persia proper, the mother-country, to which this enormous world-empire and its ruler owed their origin. Should the family of Cyrus become extinct, the descendants of Hystaspes would have a well-grounded right to the Persian throne. Darius therefore, apart from his personal advantages, was a fitting claimant for Atossa’s hand. And yet no one dared to ask the king’s consent. In the gloomy state of mind into which he had been brought by the late events, it was likely that he might refuse it, and such an answer would have to be regarded as irrevocable. So Bartja was obliged to leave Persia in anxiety about the future of these two who were very dear to him.

Croesus promised to act as mediator in this case also, and before Bartja left, made him acquainted with Phanes.

The youth had heard such a pleasant account of the Athenian from Sappho, that he met him with great cordiality, and soon won the fancy of the older and more experienced man, who gave him many a useful hint, and a letter to Theopompus, the Milesian, at Naukratis. Phanes concluded by asking for a private interview.

Bartja returned to his friends looking grave and thoughtful; soon, however, he forgot his cause of anxiety and joked merrily with them over a farewell cup. Before he mounted his horse the next morning, Nebenchari asked to be allowed an audience. He was admitted, and begged Bartja to take the charge of a large written roll for king Amasis. It contained a detailed account of Nitetis’ sufferings, ending with these words: “Thus the unhappy victim of your ambitious plans will end her life in a few hours by poison, to the use of which she was driven by despair. The arbitrary caprices of the mighty can efface all happiness from the life of a human creature, just as we wipe a picture from the tablet with a sponge. Your servant Nebenchari is pining in a foreign land, deprived of home and property, and the wretched daughter of a king of Egypt dies a miserable and lingering death by her own hand. Her body will be torn to pieces by dogs and vultures, after the manner of the Persians. Woe unto them who rob the innocent of happiness here and of rest beyond the grave!”

Bartja had not been told the contents of this letter, but promised to take it with him; he then, amid the joyful shouts of the people, set up outside the city-gate the stones which, according to a Persian superstition, were to secure him a prosperous journey, and left Babylon.

Nebenchari, meanwhile, prepared to return to his post by Nitetis’ dying-bed.

Just as he reached the brazen gates between the harem-gardens and the courts of the large palace, an old man in white robes came up to him. The sight seemed to fill Nebenchari with terror; he started as if the gaunt old man had been a ghost. Seeing, however, a friendly and familiar smile on the face of the other, he quickened his steps, and, holding out his hand with a heartiness for which none of his Persian acquaintances would have given him credit, exclaimed in Egyptian: “Can I believe my eyes? You in Persia, old Hib? I should as soon have expected the sky to fall as to have the pleasure of seeing you on the Euphrates. But now, in the name of Osiris, tell me what can have induced you, you old ibis, to leave your warm nest on the Nile and set out on such a long journey eastward.”

While Nebenchari was speaking, the old man listened in a bowing posture, with his arms hanging down by his side, and when he had finished, looked up into his face with indescribable joy, touched his breast with trembling fingers, and then, falling on the right knee, laying one hand on his heart and raising the other to heaven, cried: “Thanks be unto thee, great Isis, for protecting the wanderer and permitting him to see his master once more in health and safety. Ah, child, how anxious I have been! I expected to find you as wasted and thin as a convict from the quarries; I thought you would have been grieving and unhappy, and here you are as well, and handsome and portly as ever. If poor old Hib had been in your place he would have been dead long ago.”

“Yes, I don’t doubt that, old fellow. I did not leave home of my own will either, nor without many a heartache. These foreigners are all the children of Seth. The good and gracious gods are only to be found in Egypt on the shores of the sacred, blessed Nile.”

“I don’t know much about its being so blessed,” muttered the old man.

“You frighten me, father Hib. What has happened then?”

“Happened! Things have come to a pretty pass there, and you’ll hear of it soon enough. Do you think I should have left house and grandchildren at my age,—going on for eighty,—like any Greek or Phoenician vagabond, and come out among these godless foreigners (the gods blast and destroy them!), if I could possibly have staid on in Egypt?”

“But tell me what it’s all about.”

“Some other time, some other time. Now you must take me to your own house, and I won’t stir out of it as long as we are in this land of Typhon.”

The old man said this with so much emphasis, that Nebenchiari could not help smiling and saying: “Have they treated you so very badly then, old man?”

“Pestilence and Khamsin!” blustered the old man.

[The south-west wind, which does so much injury to the crops in the Nile valley. It is known to us as the Simoom, the wind so perilous to travellers in the desert.]

“There’s not a more good-for-nothing Typhon’s brood on the face of the earth than these Persians. I only wonder they’re not all red-haired and leprous. Ah, child, two whole days I have been in this hell already, and all that time I was obliged to live among these blasphemers. They said no one could see you; you were never allowed to leave Nitetis’ sick-bed. Poor child! I always said this marriage with a foreigner would come to no good, and it serves Amasis right if his children give him trouble. His conduct to you alone deserves that.”

“For shame, old man!”

“Nonsense, one must speak one’s mind sometimes. I hate a king, who comes from nobody knows where. Why, when he was a poor boy he used to steal your father’s nuts, and wrench the name-plates off the house-doors. I saw he was a good-for-nothing fellow then. It’s a shame that such people should be allowed to....”

“Gently, gently, old man. We are not all made of the same stuff, and if there was such a little difference between you and Amasis as boys, it, is your own fault that, now you are old men, he has outstripped you so far.

“My father and grandfather were both servants in the temple, and of course