y see him arise in his bark,
having overturned his enemies in his own time!" They accompany him from
hour to hour, they fight the good fight with him against Apopi, they
shout aloud as he inflicts each fresh wound upon the monster: they
do not even abandon him when the west has swallowed him up in its
darkness.* Some parts of the hymn remind us, in the definiteness of
the imagery and in the abundance of detail, of a portion of the poem
of Pentauirit, or one of those inscriptions of Ramses III. wherein he
celebrates the defeat of hordes of Asiatics or Libyans.

* The remains of Egyptian romantic literature have been
collected and translated into French by Maspero, and
subsequently into English by Flinders Petrie.

The Egyptians took a delight in listening to stories. They preferred
tales which dealt with the marvellous and excited their imagination,
introducing speaking animals, gods in disguise, ghosts and magic. One
of them tells of a king who was distressed because he had no heir, and
had no sooner obtained the favour he desired from the gods, than the
Seven Hathors, the mistresses of Fate, destroyed his happiness by
predicting that the child would meet with his death by a serpent, a dog,
or a crocodile. Efforts were made to provide against such a fatality by
shutting him up in a tower; but no sooner had he grown to man's estate,
than he procured himself a dog, went off to wander through the world,
and married the daughter of the Prince of Naharaim. His fate meets him
first under the form of a serpent, which is killed by his wife; he is
next assailed by a crocodile, and the dog kills the crocodile, but as
the oracles must be fulfilled, the brute turns and despatches his master
without further consideration. Another story describes two brothers,
Anupu and Bitiu, who live happily together on their farm till the wife
of the elder falls in love with the younger, and on his repulsing her
advances, she accuses him to her husband of having offered her violence.
The virtue of the younger brother would not have availed him much,
had not his animals warned him of danger, and had not Phra-Harmakhis
surrounded him at the critical moment with a stream teeming with
crocodiles. He mutilates himself to prove his innocence, and announces
that henceforth he will lead a mysterious existence far from mankind; he
will retire to the Valley of the Acacia, place his heart on the topmost
flower of the tree, and no one will be