th
broad cheekbones and outstanding ears, was seamed and wrinkled
like oak-bark; his scalp was bare of its last hair, and his face
clean-shaved, but for a few tufts of grey hair by way of beard,
sprouting from the deep furrows on his cheeks and chin, like reeds from
the narrow bed of a brook; the razor could not reach them there, and
they gave him an untidy and uncared-for appearance. His dress answered
to his face--if indeed that could be called dress which consisted of
a linen apron and a white kerchief thrown over his shoulders after
sundown. Still, no one meeting him in the road could have taken him for
a beggar; for his linen was fine and as white as snow, and his keen,
far-seeing eyes, above which, exactly in the middle, his bristly
eyebrows grew strangely long and thick, shone and sparkled with clear
intelligence, firm self-reliance, and a repellent severity which would
no more have become an intending mendicant than the resolute and often
scornful expression which played about his lips. There was nothing
amiable, nothing prepossessing, nothing soft in this man's face; and
those who knew what his life had been could not wonder that the years
had failed to sweeten his abrupt and contradictory acerbity or to
transmute them into that kindly forbearance which old men, remembering
how often they have stumbled and how many they have seen fall, sometimes
find pleasure in practising.

He had been born, eighty years before, in the lovely island of Philae,
beyond the cataract in the district of the temple of Isis, and under the
shadow of the only Egyptian sanctuary in which the heathen cultus was
kept up, and that publicly, as late as in his youth. Since Theodosius
the Great, one emperor and one Praefectus Augustalis after another had
sent foot-soldiers and cavalry above the falls to put an end to idolatry
in the beautiful isle; but they had always been routed or destroyed by
the brave Blemmyes who haunted the desert between the Nile and the Red
Sea. These restless nomad tribes acknowledged the Isis of Philae as
their tutelary goddess, and, by a very ancient agreement, the image
of their patroness was carried every year by her priests in a solemn
procession to the Blemmyes, and then remained for a few weeks in their
keeping. Horapollo's father was the last of the horoscope readers, and
his grandfather had been the last high-priest of the Isis of Philae. His
childhood had been passed on the island but then a Byzantine legio