heart was on live coals because of me; men and women
cried 'Ah!' for every heart was disquieted for my sake, and they said:
'Is there, indeed, any valiant man who will stand up against him? Lo!
the enemy has buckler, battle-axe, and an armful of javelins.' When he
had come forth and I appeared, I turned aside his shafts from me. When
not one of them touched me, he fell upon me, and then I drew my bow
against him. When my arrow pierced his neck, he cried out and fell to
the earth upon his nose; I snatched his lance from him, I shouted my cry
of victory upon his back. While the country people rejoiced, I made
his vassals whom he had oppressed to give thanks to Montu. This prince,
Ammianshi, bestowed upon me all the possessions of the vanquished, and
I took away his goods, I carried off his cattle. All that he had desired
to do unto me that did I unto him; I took possession of all that was in
his tent, I despoiled his dwelling; therewith was the abundance of my
treasure and the number of my cattle increased." In later times, in
Arab romances such as that of Antar or that of Abu-Zeit, we find the
incidents and customs described in this Egyptian tale; there we have
the exile arriving at the court of a great sheikh whose daughter he
ultimately marries, the challenge, the fight, and the raids of one
people against another. Even in our own day things go on in much the
same way. Seen from afar, these adventures have an air of poetry and of
grandeur which fascinates the reader, and in imagination transports him
into a world more heroic and more noble than our own. He who cares to
preserve this impression would do well not to look too closely at the
men and manners of the desert. Certainly the hero is brave, but he
is still more brutal and treacherous; fighting is one object of his
existence, but pillage is a far more important one. How, indeed, should
it be otherwise? the soil is poor, life hard and precarious, and from
remotest antiquity the conditions of that life have remained unchanged;
apart from firearms and Islam, the Bedouin of to-day are the same as the
Bedouin of the days of Sinuhit.

There are no known documents from which we can derive any certain
information as to what became of the mining colonies in Sinai after the
reign of Papi II. Unless entirely abandoned, they must have lingered
on in comparative idleness; for the last of the Memphites, the
Heracleopohtans, and the early Thebans were compelled to neglect them,