asts, up the long street
bordered with tall houses set in their gardens, till he came to the
palace wall. Here more guards rolled back the brazen gates which in
his folly of a few hours gone he had thought that he could force, and
through the avenues of blooming trees he was led to the great pillared
hall of audience.

After the brightness without, that hall seemed almost dark, only a ray
of sunshine flowing from an unshuttered space in the clerestory above,
fell full on the end of it, and revealed the crowned Pharaoh and his
queen seated in state upon their thrones of ivory and gold. Gathered
round and about him also were scribes and councillors and captains, and
beyond these other queens in their carved chairs and attended, each of
them, by beautiful women of the household in their gala dress. Moreover,
behind the thrones, and at intervals between the columns, stood the
famous Nubian guard of two hundred men, the servants of the body of
Pharaoh as they were called, each of them chosen for faithfulness and
courage.

The centre of all this magnificence was Pharaoh, on him the sunlight
beat, to him every eye was turned, and where his glance fell there heads
bowed and knees were bent. A small thin man of about forty years of age
with a puckered, kindly and anxious face, and a brow that seemed to
sink beneath the weight of the double crown that, save for its royal
snake-crest of hollow gold, was after all but of linen, a man with
thin, nervous hands which played amongst the embroideries of his golden
robe--such was Pharaoh, the mightiest monarch in the world, the ruler
whom millions that had never seen him worshipped as a god.

Abi, the burly framed, thick-lipped, dark-skinned, round-eyed Abi, born
of the same father, stared at him with wonderment, for years had passed
since last they met, and in the palace when they were children a gulf
had been set between the offspring of a royal mother and the child of a
Hyksos concubine taken into the Household for reasons of state. In his
vigour, and the might of his manhood, he stared at this weakling, the
son of a brother and a sister, and the grandson of a brother and a
sister. Yet there was something in that gentle eye, an essence of
inherited royalty, before which his rude nature bowed. The body might be
contemptible, but within it dwelt the proud spirit of the descendant of
a hundred kings.

Abi advanced to the steps of the throne and knelt there, till after a
little pause