So we of the palace, some hundred persons, with a guard of more than three hundred, moved into the pyramid; and, with the stones prepared for that purpose, closed the entrance hall with fifty feet of solid masonry, telling the soldiers outside that we would feed them from our supplies, which we had no intention of doing, except as they might be of use. How easy it is to fool the common people. That night it stormed and sleet and snow made the outer pyramid a thing of milky glass. The half-naked, half-starved people came by thousands, and holding out their hands in supplication, begged for bread. But we, sheltered and fed and clothed and sitting by our fires, had no thought for and took no risk for others. The pyramid in the winter sunlight, with its coating of milk-white ice, seemed an immense half-buried diamond; and we within its heart were not more considerate of the starving, surging mass at its base. Through the narrow slit-like ventilators, we heard in the afternoon the sound of strife; and, climbing to the flat top, where there was a walled-in area about twenty feet square, looked down upon the soldiers struggling with and slaughtering the half-armed, starving, shivering populace. For sport, not caring whether they killed soldiers or subjects, I had some of our guard bring a quantity of unused granite blocks about two feet square and slide them down the ice-smooth surface into the seething mass below. After watching for some time, though clothed in a heavy woolen gown, I grew cold and tired of the sport and went below to the feast, the music and the dance. There I sat with Nefert and two other queens, not less beautiful. One of the guards from the pinnacle came down and reported that the soldiers had ceased fighting the populace and, joining cause with them, were attempting to scale the pyramid by cutting steps in the icy surface. So again I went above and Nefert went with me. Our guards collected small stone blocks and with them bowled off our desperate, slowly-climbing assailants. The boulders slid over the glazed surface with the speed of a swift-winged water fowl and when they found a victim precipitated him, a death-dealing catapultic charge upon the heads of his comrades. The effort to reach us was utterly futile. For several days we found it great sport to shoot loaves of bread and a few tempting morsels of food down to the starving mass and watch them fight and struggle for possession. At my suggestion, to make the game of greater interest, we took the bread from the crusts and stuffed the loaves with stones. Occasionally, one snatching for the bread lost his life from the stone loaf. So the days passed, not wholly without amusement. The whole land was now white with snow and ice. Great white bears came out of the mountains of the north and feasted on the dead at the base of the pyramid. Nowhere in the land could we see a living man.