"Let not that delay thee," answered Zaphnath, "for I am sure he will gladly lend to such a man as Hotep the seed thou needest until thy next harvest be gathered." So the matter was thus finally concluded, and I was a witness to the compact. Then Hotep's Chief of Harvests worked early and late to finish planting before the Month of Midnight Snows, when the Nasr-Nil usually overflows its banks and waters the harvest. But, as if to oblige a man so industrious in preparing the way for it, the great river did not rise at its customary time, and Hotep was able to finish his seeding on both banks. The black loam along the shores parched and crumbled, and borrowed the look of the great desert; the feathers of darkness fell later and later, until they began to appear with the dawn, and yet the river failed to rise; the priests went through their perfunctory rites to placate the god of the Overflow, and made their impotent sacrifices to tempt him to bless the harvest; but Hotep saw the Snowless Month, which should have ripened his grain, dawn upon fields that were dried to seas of drifting dust and void of all vegetation. His army of men, augmented by the Pharaoh's thousands, and his ten thousand cattle and mules, all ate and waited and waited and ate, and yet there was no work for them. The following spring there was no need to plough the fields, and no seed to plant them. When Zaphnath learned that Hotep must deliver a hundred thousand mule-cargoes of wheat to me, or forfeit a hundred gold pieces, he sent for him, and sold to him for the hundred pieces enough of the Pharaoh's grain already on the plateau to pay me, and lent him the seed to plant all the land again. But aside from this, the Pharaoh sold not a bag of wheat, and during the first year all the small stores of grain throughout Kem were consumed, and the price rose to three times its former value. Therefore, Hotep consoled himself with the thought that he could make more out of one crop after a failure than he could have made out of two crops without it, and he happily sowed his fields anew.