s if they were written authority no more animate than watered scrolls
of papyrus. No one doubted from the beginning that he was high-born,
and this mark of a great fall might have exposed him to abuse; but his
great strength and unusual deportment did not invite mistreatment. In
short, he was looked upon as mildly mad.

When Kenkenes had rejected the gods, hope, sundered from faith, groped
wildly and desperately. In his rare moments of cheer he could not
anticipate freedom without trusting to something, and in his
misanthropy his doubt had placed no limit on its scope, questioning the
honor of king or slave. In these better moments he wanted to believe
in something.

So constantly had his sorrows attended him that he had come to dread
the night, when there was neither event nor labor to interrupt their
dominance over his mind. He caught eagerly at any less troublous
problem that might suggest itself, for he felt that he had been
conquered by his plight.

As he lay by night, apart from the rest of the prisoners, he gazed at
one glittering star that stood in the north. About it were
scintillating clusters, single stars and faint streaks of
never-dissipated mists. Night after night that one brilliant point had
remained unmoved in its steady gaze from the uppermost, but the
clusters rotated about it; the single stars were westward moving; the
mists shifted. And a question began to trouble him: What hand had
marshaled the stars? Seb,[1] whom Toth had supplanted? Osiris, whom
Set destroyed? The young man put them aside. They were feeble.
Nothing so weak had created the mighty hosts of heaven. So he began to
weigh the question.

What hand had marshaled the stars? An accident? Since man must
worship something supernal, what more tremendous than the cataclysm, if
such it were, that evolved the stars. Had the same or a series of such
events brought forth the earth and man? Was the accident continuously
attendant? Did it spread the Nile over Egypt and call it again within
its banks every year? Did it clothe the fields and bring them to
harvest every revolution of the sun? Did it hang the moon like a
sickle in the west or lift it over the Arabian hills like a bubble of
silver every eight and twenty days?

If it were omnipotent, infinite and omnipresent, could it be an
accident? If it were, why not worship it and call it God?

The reasoning led him again in the direction of the gods, but he saw no
reason