ssengers
departed ere midnight.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE IDOLS CRUMBLE

Meanwhile Kenkenes seldom saw a human face. Food and water in red clay
vessels, bearing the seal of Thebes, were set inside his door by
disembodied hands. At intervals he saw the keeper, always attended by
the inevitable scribe, but the visit was a matter of inspection and
rarely was the prisoner addressed.

Though he grew to expect these visits, each time the bar rattled down
he trembled with the hope that the jailer brought him freedom. Each
successive disappointment was as acute as the last, made more poignant
by the torturing certainty that his hopes were vain. The effect of one
was not at all counteracted by the other.

Some time after dawn the sun thrust a golden bar, full of motes, across
the door, a foot above his head. In a space the beam was withdrawn.
The heat and dust of the midday came, instead. Gnats wove their mazes
in the narrow casement that opened on the outside world, and now and
then the twitter of birds sounded very close to it. Kenkenes knew how
they flashed as they flew in the sun. They were prodigal of freedom.
At nightfall, if he stood at full height against the door, he could see
a thread of cooling sky with a single star in its center.

This was all his knowledge of the world. Hour after hour he paced the
narrow length of the cell, till the circumscribed round made him dizzy.
If he flung himself on his straw pallet, he did not rest. The mind has
no charity for the body. If there is to be no mental repose it is vain
to hope for physical. When the inactivity of his uneasy pallet became
intolerable, he resumed his pace.

He expected the return of his messenger in twenty days after the man's
departure. At the expiration of that time his suspense and
apprehension became more and more desperate at the passing of each new
day. In rapid succession he accepted and rejected the thought that the
messenger had played him false, had been assassinated and robbed; that
Meneptah had recalled the signet, or had added the penalty of suspense
to his indorsement of Har-hat's fiat of imprisonment.

When the climax of his sensations was reached, his self-sufficiency
collapsed and he entered into ceaseless supplication of the gods. He
vowed costly sacrifices to them, adding promises of self-abnegation
which became more comprehensive as his distress increased. At the end
of a month he had consecrated everything at his