"It is not the prince who is offended with our lord, but our lord with the prince, and he has reproached him. He has done well; for it seems to the young prince, at present, that he is to be a second Menes." "Or a Rameses the Great," put in the adjutant. "Rameses the Great obeyed the gods; for this cause there are inscriptions praising him in all the temples. But Menes, the first pharaoh of Egypt, was a destroyer of order, and thanks only to the fatherly kindness of the priests that his name is still remembered,--though I would not give one brass uten on this, that the mummy of Menes exists." "My Pentuer," added the adjutant, "thou art a sage, hence knowest that it is all one to us whether we have ten lords or eleven." "But it is not all one to the people whether they have to find every year a mountain of gold for the priests, or two mountains of gold for the priests and the pharaoh," answered Pentuer, while his eyes flashed. "Thou art thinking of dangerous things," said the adjutant, in a whisper. "But how often hast thou thyself grieved over the luxuries of the pharaoh's court and of the nomarchs?" inquired the priest in astonishment. "Quiet, quiet! We will talk of this, but not now." In spite of the sand the military engines, drawn each by two bullocks, moved in the desert more speedily than along the highway. With the first of them marched Eunana, anxiously. "Why has the minister deprived me of leadership over the vanguard? Does he wish to give me a higher position?" asked he in his own mind. Thinking out then a new career, and perhaps to dull the fears which made his heart quiver, he seized a pole and, where the sands were deeper, propped the balista, or urged on the Greeks with an outcry. They, however, paid slight attention to this officer. The retinue had pushed on a good half hour through a winding ravine with steep naked walls, when the vanguard halted a second time. At this point another ravine crossed the first; in the middle of it extended a rather broad canal. The courier sent to the minister of war with notice of the obstacle brought back a command to fill the canal immediately. About a hundred soldiers with pickaxes and shovels rushed to the work. Some knocked out stones from the cliff; others threw them into the ditch and covered them with sand. Meanwhile from the depth of the ravine came a man with a pickaxe shaped like a stork's neck with the bill on it. He was an Egyptian slave, old and entirely naked. He looked for a while with the utmost amazement at the work of the soldiers; then, springing between them on a sudden, he shouted,-- "What are ye doing, vile people? This is a canal." "But how darest thou use evil words against the warriors of his holiness?" asked Eunana, who stood there.