I inform my mistress that thou wilt save her?" asked Nemu. "I
may?--Then all will be well, for he who will devote a fortune to love
will not hesitate to devote a reed lance with a brass point to it to his
love and his hatred together."

CHAPTER XVI.

The sun had set, and darkness covered the City of the Dead, but the moon
shone above the valley of the kings' tombs, and the projecting masses of
the rocky walls of the chasm threw sharply-defined shadows. A weird
silence lay upon the desert, where yet far more life was stirring than in
the noonday hour, for now bats darted like black silken threads through
the night air, owls hovered aloft on wide-spread wings, small troops of
jackals slipped by, one following the other up the mountain slopes. From
time to time their hideous yell, or the whining laugh of the hyena, broke
the stillness of the night.

Nor was human life yet at rest in the valley of tombs. A faint light
glimmered in the cave of the sorceress Hekt, and in front of the
paraschites' but a fire was burning, which the grandmother of the sick
Uarda now and then fed with pieces of dry manure. Two men were seated in
front of the hut, and gazed in silence on the thin flame, whose impure
light was almost quenched by the clearer glow of the moon; whilst the
third, Uarda's father, disembowelled a large ram, whose head he had
already cut off.

"How the jackals howl!" said the old paraschites, drawing as he spoke the
torn brown cotton cloth, which he had put on as a protection against the
night air and the dew, closer round his bare shoulders.

"They scent the fresh meat," answered the physician, Nebsecht. "Throw
them the entrails, when you have done; the legs and back you can roast.
Be careful how you cut out the heart--the heart, soldier. There it is!
What a great beast."

Nebsecht took the ram's heart in his hand, and gazed at it with the
deepest attention, whilst the old paraschites watched him anxiously. At
length:

"I promised," he said, "to do for you what you wish, if you restore the
little one to health; but you ask for what is impossible."

"Impossible?" said the physician, "why, impossible? You open the corpses,
you go in and out of the house of the embalmer. Get possession of one of
the canopi,

[Vases of clay, limestone, or alabaster, which were used for the
preservation of the intestines of the embalmed Egyptians, and
represented the four genii of death, Amset, Hapi, Tuamutef, and