If love followed the dictates of reason, Tahoser would certainly have preferred the Pharaoh to Poeri. The King was endowed with supreme beauty. His great, clean, regular features seemed to be chiselled, and not the slightest imperfection could be detected in them. The habit of command had given to his glance that penetrating gleam which makes divinities and kings so easily recognisable. His lips, one word from which would have changed the face of the world and the fate of nations, were of a purple red, like fresh blood upon the blade of a sword, and when he smiled, they possessed that grace of terrible things which nothing can resist. His tall, well proportioned, majestic figure presented the nobility of form admired in the temple statues; and when he appeared solemn and radiant, covered with gold, enamels, and gems, in the midst of the bluish vapour of the censers, he did not seem to belong to that frail race which from generation to generation falls like leaves, and is stretched, sticky with bitumen, in the dark depths of the mummy pits. What was poor Poeri by the side of this demigod? Nevertheless, Tahoser loved him. The wise have long since given up attempting to explain the heart of woman. They are masters of astronomy, astrology, and arithmetic; they know the origin of the world, and can tell where were the planets at the very moment of creation; they are sure that the moon was then in the constellation of Cancer, the sun in that of the Lion, Mercury in that of the Virgin, Venus in the Balance, Mars in the Scorpion, Jupiter in Sagittarius, Saturn in Capricorn; they trace on papyrus or granite the direction of the celestial ocean, which goes from the east to the west; they have summed up the number of stars strewn over the blue robe of the Goddess Neith, and make the sun travel in the lower or the superior hemisphere with the twelve diurnal and the twelve nocturnal baris under the conduct of the hawk-headed pilot and of Neb Wa, the Lady of the Bark; they know that in the second half of the month of Tobi, Orion influences the left ear, and Sirius the heart; but they are absolutely ignorant why a woman prefers one man to another, a wretched Israelite to an illustrious Pharaoh. After having traversed several halls with Tahoser, whom he led by the hand, the King sat down on a seat in the shape of a throne in a superbly decorated room. Golden stars gleamed in the blue ceiling, and against the pillars which supported the cornice were placed the statues of kings wearing the pschent, their legs merging into the block of stone and their arms crossed on their chest, looking into the room with frightful intensity out of their black-lined eyes. Between every two pillars burned a lamp placed upon a pedestal, and on the base of the walls was represented a sort of ethnographic procession: the nations of the four quarters of the world were represented there with their particular faces and their particular dress.