d her gaze rested on the lustreless waning
disk of the moon. She thought of the torturing night, during which she
had vainly waited here for Hermon, and a triumphant smile hovered around
her lips; but soon the heavy eyebrows of the girl who was thus leaving
her home contracted in a frown--she again fancied she saw, where the moon
was just fading, the body of a gigantic, hideous spider. She banished the
illusion by speaking to the boy--spiders in the morning mean misfortune.

The early dawn, which was now crimsoning the east, reminded her of the
blood which, as an avenger, she must yet shed.

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Camels, which were rarely seen in Egypt

ARACHNE

By Georg Ebers

Volume 5.

CHAPTER I.

While the market place in Tennis was filling, Archias's white house had
become a heap of smouldering ruins. Hundreds of men and women were
standing around the scene of the conflagration, but no one saw the statue
of Demeter, which had been removed from Hermon's studio just in time. The
nomarch had had it locked up in the neighbouring temple of the goddess.

It was rumoured that the divinity had saved her own statue by a miracle;
Pamaut, the police officer, said that he had seen her himself as,
surrounded by a brilliant light, she soared upward on the smoke that
poured from the burning house. The strategist and the nomarch used every
means in their power to capture the robbers, but without the least
success.

As it had become known that Paseth, Gula's husband, had cast off his wife
because she had gone to Hermon's studio, the magistrates believed that
the attack had been made by the Biamites; yet Paseth was absent from the
city during the assault, and the innocence of the others could also be
proved.

Since, for two entire years, piracy had entirely ceased in this
neighbourhood, no one thought of corsairs, and the bodies of the
incendiaries having been consumed by the flames with the white house, it
could not be ascertained to what class the marauders belonged.

The blinded sculptor could only testify that one of the robbers was a
negro, or at any rate had had his face blackened, and that the size of
another had appeared to him almost superhuman. This circumstance gave
rise to the fable that, during the terrible storm of the previous clay,
Hades had opened and spirits of darkness had rushed into the studio of
the Greek betrayer.

The strategist, it is true, did not believe such tales, b