Chapter XI: Revolutionist and Eavesdropper

In Kem, where agriculture was almost the only occupation, and where the ox was helpful both in planting and threshing the grain, it was quite natural that he should be revered, or at least respected as a partner in the toil, and that a strong prejudice should prevail against his being slaughtered for food. In fact, it was not the practice of the Kemish to eat any large animals, but they confined themselves to fish and small fowl for meats. Nevertheless, I urged upon Hotep the necessity of killing some of his cattle to provide food for his miserable and poorly-fed labourers. But he stubbornly refused to do so, saying his men would rather eat the flesh of mules than of cattle.

Without being pressed for it, he paid me the second hundred thousand cargoes of wheat, which he bought from the Pharaoh with gold, as he had done before. But I divided this entire quantity of grain among Hotep’s labourers, which eked out their half-rations for almost a year. I stipulated that none of this grain should be used for seed, for I firmly believed it would be wasted. But Pharaoh again lent the seed for planting a third crop, insisting that the discouraged Hotep should put it in the ground, and reminding him that the only way he could get grain to pay his heavy debts was to raise a crop.

Thenocris had not been long in learning the location of our house near her favourite gate, and it was her habit to call on us every day at the time of the noon-day meal. She always carried and caressed her white rabbit, and they came to us like two dumb animals to be fed. Her tall, stately figure, traversing the city on her daily journey to our house, soon became a familiar sight; and when the people began to be oppressed by hunger, they gradually overcame their early fear of us, and followed her to our door for food. We had never turned any away, for beggary was rare enough in Kem, and no sane person ever resorted to it except in the sorest extremes of need.

Zaphnath doubtless looked with an evil eye upon the crowds that daily thronged our door to secure food. The Pharaoh rarely left his palace, and bothered little about affairs outside, and Zaphnath must have been at the bottom of an edict which was shortly issued. Nothing that I remember in Kem better illustrated the absolute power of the Pharaoh and the unrestrained enforcement of his merest whim. The edict referred to the scarcity of bread and the multitude of foreigners who were flocking to the city to secure it, and provided (ostensibly for the good of the Kemish people) that no man in the city of Kem should give bread or any sort of food to any but the members of his own household. Moreover, no man should sell grain or bread at a less price than that established by the Pharaoh for the sale of his own.

The doctor and I realized that this was aimed at no one but us. They were jealous of our charity, and wished to turn everybody’s need to their own profit. We scoffed at the tyranny of such an edict, but it was the arbitrary sort of law to which the Kemish were accustomed. Yet if we gave up our undertaking, and the unfortunate multitude went unfed for a few days, bread riots were certain to break out, and they might result in the death or overthrow of the short-sighted Pharaoh, and the seizure of his grain. Even this would not settle the question, for the victors might enforce a worse monopoly of it, if that were possible.

“We must continue to feed them all outside the city, --at the Gnomons, for instance,” I suggested.

“Yes, we must feed them there in a large chamber, and eat with them, so that they may be considered members of our household,” added the doctor.

Thus it happened that the paths which Hotep’s mules had worn so deeply were now thronged by a great multitude of the city’s poor in their daily pilgrimage to the Gnomons. In an enormous chamber which we fitted up for that purpose, we served to each comer one generous meal, and there were so many who came that this meal was going on almost all day long. The Pharaoh fed no one but his favourites and his soldiers, and of these last he discharged a large number, reducing his army to a hungry, ill-fed thousand men. Those who were discharged came to eat with us, and many of those retained would 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.”