?

On the other hand, if the signet were still in the tomb, Rameses had
not reclaimed it--Rameses had not been offended. The ritual condemned
his act, but if Rameses in the realm of inexorable justice and supernal
wisdom did not, how should he reconcile the threats of the ritual and
the evident passiveness of the royal soul? If he found the signet and
achieved his ends, aside from its civil power over him, what weight
would the canonical thunderings have to his inner heart?

Once again he paused. The deductions of his free reasoning led him
upon perilous ground. They made innuendoes concerning the stability of
the other articles of hieratical law. He was startled and afraid of
his own arguments.

"Nay, by the gods," he muttered to himself, "it is not safe to reason
with religion."

But every stroke of his oar was active persistence in his heresy.

He believed he should find the signet.

Thereafter he could turn a deaf ear to any renegade ideas such an event
might suggest.

It was an unlucky chance that befell the theological institutions of
Egypt as far as this devotee was concerned, that Kenkenes had landed at
the capital of the hated Pharaoh.

But he shook himself and tried to fix his attention on the night. The
stars were few--the multitude obliterated by the moon, the luminaries
abashed thereby. The light fell through a high haze of dust and was
therefore wondrously refracted and diffused. The hills made high
lifted horizons, undulating toward the east, serrated toward the west.
In the sag between there was no human companionship abroad.

Throughout great lengths of shore-line the tuneless stridulation of
frogs, the guttural cries of water-birds and the general movement in
the sedge indicated a serene content among small life. But sometimes
he would find silence on one bank for a goodly stretch where there was
neither marsh-chorus nor cadences of insects. The hush would be
profound and an affrighted air of suspense was apparent. And there at
the river-brink the author of this breathless dismay, some lithe
flesh-eater, would stride, shadow-like, through the high reeds to
drink. Now and then the woman-like scream of the wildcat, or the harsh
staccato laugh of the hyena would startle the marshes into silence.
Sometimes retiring shapes would halt and gaze with emberous eyes at the
boat moving in midstream.

Kenkenes admitted with a grim smile that the great powers of the world
and the wild were