Hour after hour Yakab was compelled to sit beneath the striped awning which fronted the palace door. Hour after hour he pretended to listen to the doorkeeper’s account of his exploits amidst the Nubian goldfields, in the arid Turquoise Country, among the hills of Mitanni or beyond the Great Bend of the Euphrates. Pentaur, the Doorkeeper, had served three successive Pharaohs. Already was he popularly supposed to have exceeded the one hundred and ten years customarily prayed for by all pious Egyptians. Yet, Pentaur seemed to have the key to some mysterious _hekau_-charm, which kept his well-worn teeth in his head, his deep-set eyes clear and his head erect. Though Pentaur walked with a jackal-headed cane, it was from choice, and not necessity. Like all men, Pentaur had his failings. Next to the somewhat colored recital of his own travels and successes, Pentaur loved to recount the exploits, narrow escapes and journeyings of his famous ancestor and namesake, Pentaur, companion and histographer of that greatest of all Pharaohs, Thothmes the Great. As he listened, perforce, to this garrulous descendant of Pentaur, Yakab wondered if it had indeed been the fiery Thothmes who had crushed Nubia and the whole of Asia, or whether the first Pentaur had not in point of fact been the true instrument of Pharaoh’s worldwide successes. Yet, much of what the Doorkeeper said of his ancestor was true. Was not Pentaur the Historian’s account of Pharaoh’s exploits written in good hieroglyphic and graphically pictured upon the walls of Amen’s temple nearby? Indeed, Pentaur, the Doorkeeper, had good cause for his pride of ancestry. The weary Yakab was on the point of relinquishing his long vigil when the notes of a trumpet announced the return of the royal barge. Soon after Pentaur sent in Yakab’s crumpled note to the Queen-Mother’s apartment. Once the acknowledgment was in his hands, Yakab picked up his long staff and rose to depart. As his gaunt form passed beneath the outer pylon, Pentaur motioned him back to the ebony stool. Pentaur considered Yakab an excellent conversationalist, for the reason, perhaps, that Pentaur’s flow of anecdote had not once been interrupted. But Yakab smilingly shook his head. He could not resist following up his heart-felt expressions of farewell with a sarcastic prayer for the repose of the souls of Pentaur’s ancestry, as far as he could recall it, commencing with Den, one of the valiant “Followers of Horus” of the days of the gods. Yakab feared that he had failed a member of his race. He had been too late. Yakab loved riches; Yakab loved power. But, above all else, Yakab loved his home, his family, his people. And was not Bhanar one of his people? That night Yakab could not sleep. CHAPTER VI HOW BHANAR FOUND A HOME IN EGYPT