, not his patrimony, for that would have been an embarrassment of
wealth, but such portion of it as might be carried in small bulk. In
mid-afternoon Senci brought him a belt of gazelle-hide and in this had
been sewed a fortune in gems. The murket had given his son his full
portion and more.

At the close of day, with his face set and colorless, Kenkenes stepped
into the narrow passage before his father's house. The great portal
closed slowly and noiselessly behind him. He did not pause, but sprang
into his chariot and was driven rapidly away.

At a landing near the northern limits of Memphis he took a punt, bade
farewell to his sad-faced charioteer and pushed off.

The broken bluffs about Memphis, the temples, the obelisks, the Sphinx,
the pyramids melted into night behind him. He kept his head down that
he might not look his last on his native city.

He had reached that point where endurance must conserve itself.

CHAPTER XXXVII

AT THE WELL

Once out of its confines the Nile divided its flood over and over again
and hunted the sea in long meanderings over the flat Delta. A few
miles above On the separation began and continued to the marshy coast
far to the north. From the summit of the great towers of Bubastis and
Sais the glistening sinuosities of its branches might be discerned for
many miles.

There was no thirst in the Delta. Nowhere did the capillary, the
irrigation canal, fail to reach, even now in the season of desolation
and loss. Half-green stubble, hail-mown and locust-eaten, showed where
a wheat-field had been. Regular, barren rows were the only evidences
of the lentil and garlic gardens in happier days, and the location of
pastures might be guessed by the skeletons that whitened the uplands.
Through fringes of leafless palm trees, stone-rimmed pools, like
splashes of quicksilver or facets of sapphire, reflected the sky.

Half-way between On and Pa-Ramesu was one of these basins, elliptical
in shape and walled with rough limestone. Moss grew in the crevices of
the masonry and about it had been a sod of velvet grass. Black beetles
slipped in and out among the stones; dragon-flies hung over the surface
of the water and large ants made erratic journeys about the rough bark
of the naked palms. Whoever came dipped his goblet deep, for there the
water was cold. If he gazed through to the bottom he detected a
convection in the sand below. This was not a reservoir, but a well.

Once