d gladly have done so, had we not excluded
every one in the Pharaoh's service.

Meantime the Nasr-Nil ran lower in her banks than ever before, and gave
no signs of rising; the nightly snows were brief and evanescent, and the
rains, which had never been copious on Ptah, now ceased entirely. Every
green thing gradually vanished from Kem, and Hotep's third crop rotted
or lay sodden in the ground as the others had done. He knew that I had
been offered the opportunity to plant the Pharaoh's fields, and that I
had not only refused, but had hoarded grain. This may have led him to
conclude that I knew some reason for the famine, and I was not surprised
when he sought me one day at the Gnomons. He begged a strictly private
interview with me, and I conducted him to a small room I had constructed
by running two thin walls of porous stone from one Gnomon to another,
and covering the enclosure with a flat roof.

"Dost thou know that thou hast linked together with thy slender walls
the monuments of two antagonistic dynasties?" he began. "This structure
to the left was built by the fifth ancestor of the present Pharaoh, in
truth the first ruler of his dynasty. The structure to the right,
however, is vastly older, and was built by the tenth Pharaoh of the
dynasty, from which I am directly descended. My ancestors were
vanquished by dint of wars, and their powers usurped by the ancestors of
this same selfish Pharaoh, who hath not so good a right to rule as I."

I think I was born without a vestige of revolutionary spirit, for I have
always felt a respect for the institutions that are, and an allegiance
to the powers that rule. I remember the distinct shock which this
utterance of Hotep's gave me. I said nothing, but he answered the
surprised look on my face.

"Thou knowest well that the entire labouring population of Kem is fed by
me in my fields on one side of the city; while all the poor and
unfortunate are fed by you here on the other side. What man of Kem
thinks of the grand palace of the Pharaoh in the midst of the city, but
to curse it? What subject who knows how the Pharaoh and his favourites
gorge themselves in luxurious plenty, while he nurses his hunger, but
would a thousand times rather pay allegiance to those who save him from
absolute starvation? And Zaphnath, in his nightly wanderings and his
daily errands of espionage, thinkest thou he overhears a public grumbler
who fails to curse him and his Pharaoh, and to extol the