white robes came up to him.
The sight seemed to fill Nebenchari with terror; he started as if the
gaunt old man had been a ghost. Seeing, however, a friendly and familiar
smile on the face of the other, he quickened his steps, and, holding out
his hand with a heartiness for which none of his Persian acquaintances
would have given him credit, exclaimed in Egyptian: "Can I believe my
eyes? You in Persia, old Hib? I should as soon have expected the sky to
fall as to have the pleasure of seeing you on the Euphrates. But now, in
the name of Osiris, tell me what can have induced you, you old ibis,
to leave your warm nest on the Nile and set out on such a long journey
eastward."

While Nebenchari was speaking, the old man listened in a bowing posture,
with his arms hanging down by his side, and when he had finished,
looked up into his face with indescribable joy, touched his breast with
trembling fingers, and then, falling on the right knee, laying one hand
on his heart and raising the other to heaven, cried: "Thanks be unto
thee, great Isis, for protecting the wanderer and permitting him to see
his master once more in health and safety. Ah, child, how anxious I have
been! I expected to find you as wasted and thin as a convict from the
quarries; I thought you would have been grieving and unhappy, and here
you are as well, and handsome and portly as ever. If poor old Hib had
been in your place he would have been dead long ago."

"Yes, I don't doubt that, old fellow. I did not leave home of my own
will either, nor without many a heartache. These foreigners are all the
children of Seth. The good and gracious gods are only to be found in
Egypt on the shores of the sacred, blessed Nile."

"I don't know much about its being so blessed," muttered the old man.

"You frighten me, father Hib. What has happened then?"

"Happened! Things have come to a pretty pass there, and you'll hear of
it soon enough. Do you think I should have left house and grandchildren
at my age,--going on for eighty,--like any Greek or Phoenician vagabond,
and come out among these godless foreigners (the gods blast and destroy
them!), if I could possibly have staid on in Egypt?"

"But tell me what it's all about."

"Some other time, some other time. Now you must take me to your own
house, and I won't stir out of it as long as we are in this land of
Typhon."

The old man said this with so much emphasis, that Nebenchiari could not
help smiling and saying: