avy sleep had mastered him in such wise that his slaves had
to carry their lord to the litter.

After the departure of Tutmosis, which resembled a flight, the heir
fell to thinking deeply; he even felt fear.

Ramses was a skeptic. As a pupil of the priests, and a member of the
highest aristocracy, he knew that when certain priests had fasted many
months and mortified their senses they summoned spirits, while others
spoke of spirits as a fancy, a deception. He had seen, too, that Apis,
the sacred bull before which all Egypt fell prostrate, received at
times heavy blows of a cane from inferior priests, who gave the beast
food and brought cows to him.

He understood, finally, that his father, Ramses XII, who for the common
crowd was a god who lived through eternity, and the all-commanding lord
of this world, was really just such a person as others, only a little
more weakly than ordinary old men, and very much limited in power by
the priestly order.

The prince saw all this, and jeered in his soul and even la public at
many things. But all his infidelity fell before the actual truth, that
no one was permitted to trifle with the titles of the pharaoh.

Ramses knew the history of his country, and he remembered that in Egypt
many things were forgiven the mighty. A great lord might ruin a canal,
kill a man in secret, revile the gods privately, take presents from
ambassadors of foreign states, but two sins were not forgiven, the
betrayal of priestly secrets, and treason to the pharaoh. A man who
committed one or the other disappeared, sometimes after a year, from
among his friends and servants. But where he had been put or what had
been done with him, no one even dared to mention.

Ramses felt that he was on an incline of this sort from the time that
the army and the people began to mention his name and speak of certain
plans of his, changes in the state, future wars. Thinking of this, the
prince felt as if a nameless crowd of rebels and unfortunates were
pushing him violently to the point of the highest obelisk, from which
he must tumble down and be crushed into jelly.

Later on, when, after the longest life of his father possible, he
became pharaoh, he would have the right and the means to accomplish
many deeds of which no one in Egypt could even think without terror.
But today he must in truth have a care, lest they declare him a traitor
and a rebel against the fundamental laws of Egypt. In that state there
was one v