dicated, and saw with admiration
how unfailingly the bolt sprang forward when one half of the door closed
upon the other, and how easily the key pushed it back again; then, after
conducting Krates back to the Sphinx near which she had met him, she
went on her way at her quickest pace, for the sun was already very low,
and it seemed scarcely possible to reach Memphis before it should set.

As she approached a tavern where soldiers and low people were accustomed
to resort, she was met by a drunken slave. She went on and past him
without any fear, for the knife in her girdle, and on which she kept her
hand, kept up her courage, and she felt as if she had thus acquired
a third hand which was more powerful and less timid than her own. A
company of soldiers had encamped in front of the tavern, and the wine of
Kbakem, which was grown close by, on the eastern declivity of the Libyan
range, had an excellent savor. The men were in capital spirits, for at
noon today--after they had been quartered here for months as guards of
the tombs of Apis and of the temples of the Necropolis--a commanding
officer of the Diadoches had arrived at Memphis, who had ordered them
to break up at once, and to withdraw into the capital before nightfall.
They were not to be relieved by other mercenaries till the next morning.

All this Klea learned from a messenger from the Egyptian temple in
the Necropolis, who recognized her, and who was going to Memphis,
commissioned by the priests of Osiris-Apis and Sokari to convey a
petition to the king, praying that fresh troops might be promptly sent
to replace those now withdrawn.

For some time she went on side by side with this messenger, but soon she
found that she could not keep up with his hurried pace, and had to fall
behind. In front of another tavern sat the officers of the troops,
whose noisy mirth she had heard as she passed the former one; they were
sitting over their wine and looking on at the dancing of two Egyptian
girls, who screeched like cackling hens over their mad leaps, and who
so effectually riveted the attention of the spectators, who were beating
time for them by clapping their hands, that Klea, accelerating her step,
was able to slip unobserved past the wild crew. All these scenes,
nay everything she met with on the high-road, scared the girl who was
accustomed to the silence and the solemn life of the temple of Serapis,
and she therefore struck into a side path that probably also led t