direction towards Mecca for the prayer niche
in Amru's new mosque, he was appealed to, and his decision was final.

Philippus had, some years since, been called to the old man's bedside
in sickness, and being then a beginner and in no great request, he had
given the best of his time and powers to the case. Horapollo had
been much attracted by the young physician's wide culture and earnest
studiousness; he had conceived a warm liking for him, the warmest
perhaps that he had ever felt for any fellow-human since the death of
his own family. At last the elder took the younger man into his heart
with such overflowing affection, that it seemed as though his spirit
longed to make up now for the stint of love it had hitherto shown. No
father could have clung to his son with more fervent devotion, and when
a relapse once more brought him to death's door he took Philippus wholly
into his confidence, unrolled before his eyes the scroll of his inner
and outer life from its beginnings, and made him his heir on condition
that he should abide by him to the end.

Philippus, who, from the first, had felt a sympathetic attraction to
this venerable and talented man, agreed to the bargain; and when
he subsequently became associated with the old man in his studies,
assisting him from time to time, Horapollo desired that he would help
him to complete a work he hoped to finish before he died. It was a
treatise on hieroglyphic writing, and was to interpret the various signs
so far as was still possible, and make them intelligible to posterity.

The old man disliked writing anything but Egyptian, using Greek
unwillingly and clumsily, so he entrusted to his young friend the task
of rendering his explanations into that language. Thus the two men--so
different in age and character, but so closely allied in intellectual
aims--led a joint existence which was both pleasant and helpful to both,
in spite of the various eccentricities, the harshness and severity of
the elder.

Horapollo lived after the manner of the early Egyptian priests,
subjecting himself to much ablution and shaving; eating little but
bread, vegetables, and poultry, and abstaining from pulse and the flesh
of all beasts--not merely of the prohibited animal, swine; wearing
nothing but pure linen clothing, and setting apart certain hours for
the recitation of those heathen forms of prayer whose magic power was to
compel the gods to grant the desires of those who thus appealed to th