s.

Such was his thought, and he raised himself to curse the Seven Sisters,
and growing reckless, he included the unhelpful gods in his
maledictions. The blasphemy comforted him strangely, and he persisted
till his heated brain was cooled.

At dawn the next day he laid aside his fillet of gold, his trappings
and noble dress, and donning the kilt or shenti of the prisoners, was
handcuffed to another malefactor and taken forth to the sun-white plain
between Thebes Diospolis and the Arabian, hills, to labor in the canals
of the nome.

Here, looking continually upon crime, brutality and misery, he asked
himself the divine motive in creating man, and having found no answer,
he began to question man's debt to the gods.

He was going the way of all the weak in faith. He had pleaded with his
deities, and they had not heard him. He asked himself what he had done
to deserve their disfavor. The sacrilege of Athor was too slight an
offense--if offense it were--and here again he paused, set his teeth
and swore that he had done no wrong and the god or man that accused him
was impotent, unjust and ignorant. Once again he asked himself what he
had done to deserve ill-use at the hands of the Pantheon. They had
turned a deaf ear to him, and why should he render them further homage?
The doctrine of divine Love, displayed through chastisement, was not in
the Osirian creed.

His eyes grew bold through rebellion and he attacked the wild
inconsistencies of the faith with the destructive instrument of reason.
Each deduction led him on, fascinated, in his apostasy. Each crumbling
tenet started another toward ruin. Finding no sound obstacle to stay
him, he fell with avidity to rending the Pantheon.

But he found no cheer nor any hope that day when he told himself
bitterly, "There is no God."

CHAPTER XXIX

THE PLAGUES

The court was gone and Masanath was making the most of each day of her
freedom. Memphis was in a state of apathy, worn out by revel and
emptied of her luminaries, Ta-meri, intoxicated with the importance of
her position as lady-in-waiting to the queen, had departed with her
husband, the cup-bearer. Io had returned to her home in On, with an
ache in her brave little heart that outweighed even Masanath's for
heaviness. The last of Seti's lover-like behavior toward her dated
back to a time before the court had gone to Thebes--long, long ago.

Ta-user, also, had gone, but the fan-bearer's daughter did not