Better than Siddharta, He deserves the name of the Awakened one. How can He sleep in the stable, where the donkey brays, precursor of all donkeys who will bray against Him: where the ox lows, waiting until the other oxen speak at His presence; where the shepherds question Him; where the wise men give Him their blessing? How can He sleep when the shuffling steps of Herod’s assassins draw near? How can He ever sleep up to that last night when He will agonize under the olive trees, amid the sleeping bodies of the Eleven? And Mary cannot sleep. In the evening as soon as the houses of Bethlehem disappear in the darkness and the first lamps are lighted, the mother steals away like a fugitive. She is snatching a life away from the King, she is saving a hope for the people as she presses upon her breast her man-child, her hope, her sorrow. She goes towards the west, she crosses the old land of Canaan and comes by easy stages—the days are short—to the Nile, to that country of Mizraim which had cost so many tears to her ancestors fourteen centuries before. Jesus, who carried on the work of Moses and at the same time demolished the work of Moses, goes back over the route taken by the first redeemer. When the Jews were under the whip of the Egyptian slaves, oppressed, mistreated, ill-used, the Shepherd of Median made himself the Shepherd of Israel, and led his hard-headed people across the desert till they were in sight of the Jordan and of the miraculous vineyards. The people of Jesus left Chaldea with Abraham and came with Joseph into Egypt. Moses led them from Egypt toward Canaan. Now the greatest of the liberators, in danger of his life, went back to the banks of that river where the first Saviour had been saved from the water and had saved his brothers. Egypt, the rich spawning-bed of all the infamies and all the magnificences of the first epoch, that African India, where the waves of history broke and died, where but a few years before, Pompey and Antony had finished the dream of Empire and of life, this prodigious country, born of water, burned by the sun, covered with the blood of many peoples, inhabited by many animal-gods, this country, paradoxical and supernatural, was by contrast the predestined asylum for the fugitive. The wealth of Egypt was in mud, in the rich snake-breeding mud which the Nile rolled out each year upon the desert. Death was the obsession of Egypt. The soft, prosperous people of Egypt would not accept death, denied death, thought they could conquer death with graven images, with embalmings, with sculptured representation of flesh-and-blood bodies. The rich, portly Egyptian, son of mud, adorer of the sacred bull, and the dog-headed god, could not resign himself to dying. He manufactured for his second life immense necropolises full of bandaged and perfumed mummies, of images of wood and marble, and raised up pyramids over his corpses, as if stone and mortar might save them from decay.