the night in his boat.

After leaving Khu-aten, the Nile wound through wild country, the hills
approaching its course so closely as to suggest the confines of a
gorge. The narrow strip of level land on the eastern side lay under a
receding shadow cast by the hills, but the river and the western shore
were in the broad brilliance of the moon. The night promised to be one
of exceeding brightness and Kenkenes shared the resulting wakefulness
of the wild life on land.

The half of his up-journey was done and the conflict of hope and doubt
marshaled feasible argument for and against the success of his mission.
In some manner the destruction of Khu-aten offered, in its example of
Egypt's fury against progress, a parallel to his own straits.

In his boyhood he had heard the Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten anathematized by the
shaven priests, and in the depths of his heart he had been startled to
find no sympathy for their rage against the artist-king.

Ritual-bound Egypt had resented liberty of worship--a liberalism that
lacked naught in zeal or piety, but added grace to the Osirian faith.
In his beauty-worship, Kenkenes was not narrow. He would not confine
it to glyptic art, nor indeed to art alone--all the uses of life might
be bettered by it. His appreciation of Khu-n-Aten's ambition had been
passive before, but when his own spirit experienced the same fire and
the same reproach, his sympathy became hearty partizanship.

His mind wandered back again to the ruin. How fiercely Egypt had
resented the schism of a Pharaoh, a demi-god, the Vicar of Osiris! The
words of Rachel came back to him like an inspiration:

"Thou hast nation-wide, nation-old, nation-defended prejudice to
overcome, and thou art but one, Kenkenes."

But one, indeed, and only a nobleman. Could he hope to change Egypt
when a king might not? Behold, how he was suffering for a single and
simple breach of the law. At the thought he paused and asked himself:

"Am I suffering for the sacrilege?"

The admission would entail a terrifying complexity.

If he were suffering punishment for the statue, what punishment had
been his for the sacrilegious execution of the Judgment of the Dead in
the tomb of Rameses II? What, other than the reclamation of the signet
by the Incomparable Pharaoh, even as Mentu had said? If the hypothesis
held, he had committed sacrilege, he had offended the gods, and might
not the accumulated penalty be--O unspeakable--the loss of Rachel