Out of the Triangle | Page 4

eyes to the ground! Keep your eyes to the
ground!"
The white-robed priestesses of Ceres, carrying a sacred basket, walked
in procession through the Alexandrian street, and as they walked they
cried aloud their warning.
So, for four centuries, since the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, had
priestesses of Ceres walked and called aloud their admonitions through
this city; though of late years men had come to know that what the
sacred basket held was a live snake, supposed to be the author of sin
and death.
Before the great temple of Ceres in the southeast quarter of the city, the
crier stood on the steps of the portico, and proclaimed his invitation:
"All ye who are clean of hands and pure of heart, come to the sacrifice!
All ye who are guiltless in thought and deed, come to the sacrifice!"
Among the passing people, the lad Heraklas shrank back. When the

sacred basket of Ceres had met him, he had bent his eyes downward,
deeming himself unworthy of the sight. And now, as the crier's
invitation rang from the portico, "All ye who are guiltless in thought
and deed, come to the sacrifice!" Heraklas trembled.
Swiftly he hurried away and passed down the broad street that led to
the Gate of the Moon on the south of Alexandria.
At length he reached the gate, but swiftly yet he pushed forward a short
distance along the vineyard-fringed banks of Lake Mareotis. Heraklas
lifted up his eyes, and marked how the vines by the lake's side
contrasted with the burning whiteness of the desert beyond. The glaring
sand shimmered in the heat of the flaming Egyptian sun. A thin, vapory
mist seemed to move above the heated, barren surface of the grim sea
of sand. Heraklas stretched out his hands in agony toward the desert,
and cried aloud, "O my brother, my brother Timokles! How shall I live
without thee?"
The soft ripple of the lake beside him seemed like mockery. The tears
rolled slowly down his cheeks, as he looked toward the pitilessly
unresponsive desert of the west and southwest. Then Heraklas, helpless
in his misery, raised his hands with the palms outward before him, after
the custom of an Egyptian in prayer, and addressed him whom the
Egyptians thought the maker of the sun, the god Phthah, "the father of
the beginnings," "the first of the gods of the upper world."
"Hail to thee, O Ptahtanen," began Heraklas, "great god who concealeth
his form, . . thou art watching when at rest; the father of all fathers and
of all gods. . . Watcher, who traversest the endless ages of eternity."
The familiar words brought no comfort. Between him and the
shimmering desert came the memory of his brother's face, and Heraklas
forgot Ptahtanen, and cried out again in desperation.
His eyes strained toward the desert. Somewhere in its depths, his twin
brother Timokles, the being whom of all on earth Heraklas most loved,
lived,--or perhaps, in the brief week that had elapsed since he was
snatched from his Alexandrian home, had died. Timokles had forsaken

the gods of his own family, the gods his own dead father had adored,
Egypt's gods. The lad would not even worship the gods of Rome.
Timokles had become one of the Christians, and had, in consequence,
been falsely accused of having, during a former inundation, cut one of
the dykes near the Nile. This offense, in the days of Roman rule, was
punishable by condemnation to labor in the mines, or by branding and
transportation to an oasis of the desert.
Timokles, innocent of the crime charged upon him,--having been at
home in Alexandria during the time when he was accused of having
been abroad on the evil errand,--was dragged away to exile, for was he
not a Christian? Living or dead, the desert held him. The Roman
emperor, Septimius Severus, who ruled Egypt, had lately issued an
edict that no one should become a Christian. What hope was there for
Timokles?
"He will never come back!" said Heraklas now, with a low sob, as the
desert swam before his tear-filled eyes. "O Timokles!"
There was a rustle among the leaves not far away. Heraklas turned
hastily.
But it was no person who disturbed his solitude. Heraklas saw only the
head of an ibis, called "Hac" or "Hib" by the Egyptians, and the lad,
mindful of the honor due the bird as sacred to the god Thoth, the
Egyptian deity of letters and of the moon, made a gesture of
semi-reverence. He remembered what the Egyptians were wont to say,
when on the nineteenth day of the first month, they ate honey and eggs
in honor of Thoth: "How sweet a thing is truth!"
Heraklas murmured with a heavy sigh, "Timokles told me he had