Egypt -- History -- To 332 B.C. -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English
"For three days after you left us Tachot wept incessantly. Neither our
comforting words nor your father's good advice--neither offerings nor
prayers--could avail to lessen her grief or divert her mind. At last on
the fourth day she ceased to weep and would answer our questions in a low
voice, as if resigned; but spent the greater part of every day sitting
silently at her wheel. Her fingers, however, which used to be so
skilful, either broke the threads they tried to spin, or lay for hours
idle in her lap, while she was lost in dreams. Your father's jokes, at
which she used to laugh so heartily, made no impression on her, and when
I endeavored to reason with her she listened in anxious suspense.
"If I kissed her forehead and begged her to control herself, she would
spring up, blushing deeply, and throw herself into my arms, then sit down
again to her wheel and begin to pull at the threads with almost frantic
eagerness; but in half an hour her hands would be lying idle in her lap
again and her eyes dreamily fixed, either on the ground, or on some spot
in the air. If we forced her to take part in any entertainment, she
would wander among the guests totally uninterested in everything that was
passing.
"We took her with us on the great pilgrimage to Bubastis, during which
the Egyptians forget their usual gravity, and the shores of the Nile look
like a great stage where the wild games of the satyrs are being performed
by choruses, hurried on in the unrestrained wantonness of intoxication.
When she saw thus for the first time an entire people given up to the
wildest and most unfettered mirth and enjoyment, she woke up from her
silent brooding thoughts and began to weep again, as in the first days
after you went away.
"Sad and perplexed, we brought our poor child back to Sais.
"Her looks were not those of a common mortal. She grew thinner, and we
all fancied, taller; her complexion was white, and almost transparent,
with a tender bloom on her cheek, which I can only liken to a young rose-
leaf or the first faint blush of sunrise. Her eyes are still wonderfully
clear and bright. It always seems to me as if they looked beyond the
heaven and earth which we see.
"As she continued to suffer more and more from heat in the head and
hands, while her tender limbs often shivered with a slight chill, we sent
to Thebes for Thutmes, the most celebrated physician for inward
complaints.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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