tial
demolishment, Kenkenes hoped that there might be an inn. He tied his
boat to a stake and entered Khu-aten,[1] the destroyed capital of
Amenophis IV, self-styled Khu-n-Aten.

Here under a noble king, who loved beauty and had it not, the barbarous
rites of the Egyptian religion were overthrown and sensuous and
esthetic ceremonies were established and made obligatory all over the
kingdom. In his blind groping after the One God, the king had directed
worship to the most fitting symbol of Him--the sun.

He appeased the luminous divinity by offerings of flowers, regaled it
with simmerings from censers, besought it with the tremulous harp and
had it pictured with grace and vested with charm. And since the power
of the national faith was all-permeating, its reconstruction was
far-reaching in effect. Egypt was swept into a tremendous and
beautiful heresy by a homely king, whose word was law.

But at his death the reaction was vast and vindictive. The orthodox
faith reasserted itself with a violence that carried every monument to
the apostasy and the very name of the apostate into dust. Now the
remaining houses of Khu-ayen were the homes of the fishers--its ruins
the habitation of criminals and refugees.

The hand of the insulted zealot, of the envious successor, of the
invader and conqueror, had done what the reluctant hand of nature might
not have accomplished in a millennium. The ruins showed themselves,
stretching afar toward and across the eastern sky, in ragged and
indefinable lines. The oblique rays of the newly risen moon slanted a
light that was weird and ghostly because it fell across a ruin.
Kenkenes climbed over a chaos of prostrate columns, fallen architraves
and broken colossi, and the sounds of his advance stirred the rat, the
huge spider, the snake and the hiding beast from the dark debris. Here
and there were solitary walls standing out of heaps of wreckage, which
had been palaces, and frequent arid open spaces marked the site of
groves. In complex ramifications throughout the city sandy troughs
were still distinguishable, where canals had been, and in places of
peculiarly complete destruction the strips of uneven pavement showed
the location of temples.

There was not a house at which Kenkenes dared to ask hospitality.
Those that lived so precariously would have little conscience about
stripping him of his possessions.

He retraced his steps to the wharves and drew away, prepared to spend