ized by such
a violent attack of his old illness, that he was forced to keep his room
for two days and nights, ill in mind and body; at times raging like a
madman, at others weak and powerless as a little child.

On the third day he recovered consciousness and remembered the awful
charge he had laid on Prexaspes, and that it was only too possible he
might have executed it already. At this thought he trembled, as he
had never trembled in his life before. He sent at once for the envoy's
eldest son, who was one of the royal cup-bearers. The boy said his
father had left Memphis, without taking leave of his family. He then
sent for Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges, knowing how tenderly they loved
Bartja, and enquired after their friend. On hearing from them that he
was at Sais, he sent the three youths thither at once, charging them,
if they met Prexaspes on the way, to send him back to Memphis
without delay. This haste and the king's strange behavior were quite
incomprehensible to the young Achaemenidae; nevertheless they set out on
their journey with all speed, fearing that something must be wrong.

Cambyses, meanwhile, was miserably restless, inwardly cursed his habit
of drinking and tasted no wine the whole of that clay. Seeing his mother
in the palace-gardens, he avoided her; he durst not meet her eye.

The next eight days passed without any sign of Prexaspes' return; they
seemed to the king like a year. A hundred times he sent for the young
cup-bearer and asked if his father had returned; a hundred times he
received the same disappointing answer.

At sunset on the thirteenth day, Kassandane sent to beg a visit from
him. The king went at once, for now he longed to look on the face of his
mother; he fancied it might give him back his lost sleep.

After he had greeted her with a tenderness so rare from him, that it
astonished her, he asked for what reason she had desired his presence.
She answered, that Bartja's wife had arrived at Memphis under singular
circumstances and had said she wished to present a gift to Cambyses. He
gave Sappho an audience at once, and heard from her that Prexaspes had
brought her husband an order to start for Arabia, and herself a summons
to Memphis from the queen-mother. At these words the king turned very
pale, and his features were agitated with pain as he looked at his
brother's lovely young wife. She felt that something unusual was passing
in his mind, and such dreadful forebodings arose in he