Joshua | Page 3

cried the youth, a grandson of the
astrologer of Amon-Ra, to whom he was lending his aid. They were
standing in the observatory of the temple of this god in Tanis, the
Pharaoh's capital in the north of the land of Goshen. He moved away,
depriving the old man of the support of his shoulder, as he continued:
"There, there! Is the sea sweeping over the land? Have the clouds
dropped on the earth to heave to and fro? Oh, grandfather, look yonder!
May the Immortals have pity on us! The under-world is yawning, and
the giant serpent Apep has come forth from the realm of the dead. It is
moving past the temple. I see, I hear it. The great Hebrew's menace is
approaching fulfilment. Our race will be effaced from the earth. The
serpent! Its head is turned toward the southeast. It will devour the sun
when it rises in the morning."
The old man's eyes followed the youth's finger, and he, too, perceived a
huge, dark mass, whose outlines blended with the dusky night, come
surging through the gloom; he, too, heard, with a thrill of terror, the
monster's loud roar.
Both stood straining their eyes and ears to pierce the darkness; but
instead of gazing upward the star-reader's eye was bent upon the city,
the distant sea, and the level plain. Deep silence, yet no peace reigned
above them: the high wind now piled the dark clouds into shapeless
masses, anon severed that grey veil and drove the torn fragments far
asunder. The moon was invisible to mortal eyes, but the clouds were
toying with the bright Southern stars, sometimes hiding them,
sometimes affording a free course for their beams. Sky and earth alike
showed a constant interchange of pallid light and intense darkness.
Sometimes the sheen of the heavenly bodies flashed brightly from sea
and bay, the smooth granite surfaces of the obelisks in the precincts of
the temple, and the gilded copper roof of the airy royal palace, anon sea

and river, the sails in the harbor, the sanctuaries, the streets of the city,
and the palm-grown plain which surrounded it vanished in gloom. Eye
and ear failed to retain the impression of the objects they sought to
discern; for sometimes the silence was so profound that all life, far and
near, seemed hushed and dead, then a shrill shriek of anguish pierced
the silence of the night, followed at longer or shorter intervals by the
loud roar the youthful priest had mistaken for the voice of the serpent
of the nether-world, and to which grandfather and grandson listened
with increasing suspense.
The dark shape, whose incessant motion could be clearly perceived
whenever the starlight broke through the clouds, appeared first near the
city of the dead and the strangers' quarter. Both the youth and the old
man had been seized with terror, but the latter was the first to regain his
self-control, and his keen eye, trained to watch the stars, speedily
discovered that it was not a single giant form emerging from the city of
the dead upon the plain, but a multitude of moving shapes that seemed
to be swaying hither and thither over the meadow lands. The bellowing
and bleating, too, did not proceed from one special place, but came now
nearer and now farther away. Sometimes it seemed to issue from the
bowels of the earth, and at others to float from some airy height.
Fresh horror seized upon the old man. Grasping his grandson's right
hand in his, he pointed with his left to the necropolis, exclaiming in
tremulous tones: "The dead are too great a multitude. The under-world
is overflowing, as the river does when its bed is not wide enough for
the waters from the south. How they swarm and surge and roll onward!
How they scatter and sway to and fro. They are the souls of the
thousands whom grim death has snatched away, laden with the curse of
the Hebrew, unburied, unshielded from corruption, to descend the
rounds of the ladder leading to the eternal world."
"Yes, yes, those are their wandering ghosts," shrieked the youth in
absolute faith, snatching his hand from the grey-beard's grasp and
striking his burning brow, exclaiming, almost incapable of speech in
his horror: "Ay, those are the souls of the damned. The wind has swept
them into the sea, whose waters cast them forth again upon the land,

but the sacred earth spurns them and flings them into the air. The pure
ether of Shu hurls them back to the ground and now--oh look,
listen--they are seeking the way to the wilderness."
"To the fire!" cried the old astrologer. "Purify them, ye flames; cleanse
them, water."
The youth joined his grandfather's form of exorcism, and while still
chanting together, the