“But it may have caught on thy chisel and broken from its fastening.  Thou dost remember that the floor was checkered with deep black shadows.”

“The hand of the insulted Pharaoh reached out of Amenti[3] and stripped it off my neck,” Mentu replied sternly.  “And consider what I and all of mine who come after me lost in that foolish act of thine.  It was a token of special favor from Rameses, a mark of appreciation of mine art, and, more than all, a signet that I or mine might present to him or his successor and win royal good will thereby.”

“That I know right well,” Kenkenes interrupted with an anxious note in his voice, “and for that reason am I possessed to go after it to Tape.”

The sculptor lifted a stern face to his son and said, with emphasis:  “Wilt thou further offend the gods, thou impious?  It is not there, and vex me no further concerning it.”

Kenkenes lifted one of his brows with an air of enforced patience, and sauntered across the room to another table similarly equipped for plan-making.  But he did not concern himself with the papyrus spread thereon.  Instead he dropped on the bench, and crossing his shapely feet before him, gazed straight up at the date-tree rafters and palm-leaf interbraiding of the ceiling.

Though the law of heredity is not trustworthy in the transmission of greatness, Kenkenes was the product of three generations of heroic genius.  He might have developed the frequent example of decadence; he might have sustained the excellence of his fathers’ gift, but he could not surpass them in the methods of their school of sculpture and its results.  There was one way in which he might excel, and he was born with his feet in that path.  His genius was too large for the limits of his era.  Therefore he was an artistic dissenter, a reformer with noble ideals.

Mimetic art as applied to Egyptian painting and sculpture was a curious misnomer.  Probably no other nation of the world at that time was so devoted to it, and certainly no other people of equal advancement of that or any other time so wilfully ignored the simplest rules of proportion, perspective and form.  The sculptor’s ability to suggest majesty and repose, and at the same time ignore anatomical construction, was wonderful.  To preserve the features and individual characteristics of a model and obey the rules of convention was a feat to be achieved only by an Egyptian.  There was no lack of genius in him, but he had been denied liberty of execution until he knew no other forms but those his fathers followed generations before.

All Egypt was but a padding that the structural framework of religion supported.  Science, art, literature, government, commerce, whatever the member, it was built upon a bone of religion.  The processes and uses of sculpture were controlled by the sculptor’s ritual and woe unto him who departed therefrom in depicting the gods!  The deed was sacrilege.