e under it began to move--this
was the old man's slave who had long been sleeping there.

Three lamps on the writing-table threw a bright light on the old man and
his surroundings, while the physician, who had thrown himself on a couch
in a corner of the large room, remained in the dark.

What startled the midnight student was his housemate's unwonted silence;
it disturbed him as the cessation of the clatter of the wheel disturbs a
man who lives in a mill. He looked at his friend with surprised enquiry,
but Philippus was dumb, and the old man turned once more to his rolls of
manuscript. But he had lost the necessary concentration; his brown hand,
in which the blue veins stood out like cords, fidgeted with the scrolls
and the ivory rule, and his sunken lips, which had before been firmly
closed, were now twitching restlessly.

The man's whole aspect was singular and not altogether pleasing: his lean
brown figure was bent with age, his thoroughly Egyptian face, with broad
cheekbones and outstanding ears, was seamed and wrinkled like oak-bark;
his scalp was bare of its last hair, and his face clean-shaved, but for a
few tufts of grey hair by way of beard, sprouting from the deep furrows
on his cheeks and chin, like reeds from the narrow bed of a brook; the
razor could not reach them there, and they gave him an untidy and
uncared-for appearance. His dress answered to his face--if indeed that
could be called dress which consisted of a linen apron and a white
kerchief thrown over his shoulders after sundown. Still, no one meeting
him in the road could have taken him for a beggar; for his linen was fine
and as white as snow, and his keen, far-seeing eyes, above which, exactly
in the middle, his bristly eyebrows grew strangely long and thick, shone
and sparkled with clear intelligence, firm self-reliance, and a repellent
severity which would no more have become an intending mendicant than the
resolute and often scornful expression which played about his lips. There
was nothing amiable, nothing prepossessing, nothing soft in this man's
face; and those who knew what his life had been could not wonder that the
years had failed to sweeten his abrupt and contradictory acerbity or to
transmute them into that kindly forbearance which old men, remembering
how often they have stumbled and how many they have seen fall, sometimes
find pleasure in practising.

He had been born, eighty years before, in the lovely island of Philae,
beyond