The trampling of the horses held in with difficulty, the thunder of the bronze-bound wheels, the metallic justling of weapons, imparted to the procession an imposing and formidable character well calculated to strike terror into the bravest souls. Helmets, plumes, corselets covered with green, red, and yellow scales, gilded bows, brazen swords, flashed and gleamed fiercely in the sun shining in the heavens above the Libyan chain like a great Osiris eye, and one felt that the charge of such an army must necessarily sweep the nations before it even as the storm drives the light straw. Under these numberless wheels the earth resounded and trembled as if in the throes of an earthquake. Next to the chariots came the infantry battalions marching in order, the men carrying their shields on the left arm, and a lance, a javelin, a bow, a sling, or an axe in the right hand. The soldiers wore helmets adorned with two horse-hair tails. Their bodies were protected by a cuirass of crocodile-skin; their impassible look, the perfect regularity of their motions, their coppery complexion, deepened still more by the recent expedition to the burning regions of Upper Egypt, the desert dust which lay upon their clothes, inspired admiration for their discipline and courage. With such soldiers Egypt could conquer the world. Then came the troops of the allies, easily known by the barbarous shape of their helmets, like mitres cut off, or else surmounted with a crescent stuck on a point. Their broad-bladed swords, their saw-edged axes, must have inflicted incurable wounds. Slaves carried the booty announced by the herald on their shoulders or on stretchers, and belluaria led panthers, wild-cats, crawling as if they sought to hide themselves, ostriches flapping their wings, giraffes overtopping the crowd with their long necks, and even brown bears taken, it was said, in the Mountains of the Moon. The King had long since entered his palace, yet the defile was still proceeding. As he passed the revetment on which stood Tahoser and Nofre, the Pharaoh, whose litter, borne upon the shoulders of oeris, placed him above the crowd on a level with the young girl, had slowly fixed upon her his dark glance. He had not turned his head, not a muscle of his face had moved, and his features had remained as motionless as the golden mask of a mummy, yet his eyes had turned between his painted eyelids towards Tahoser, and a flash of desire had lighted up their sombre discs, an effect as terrific as if the granite eyes of a divine simulacrum, suddenly lighted up, were to express a human thought. He had half raised one of his hands from the arm of his throne, a gesture imperceptible to every one, but which one of the servants marching near the litter noticed, and at once looked towards the daughter of Petamounoph.