“Who succeeds him over Bubastis?”

“Merenra, another of the war-tried generals.  He hath been commander over Pa-Ramesu.  Atsu takes his place over the Israelites.”

“Atsu?” Kenkenes mused.  “I know him not.”

“He is a captain of chariots, and won much distinction during the Rebu invasion.  He is a native of Mendes.”

Left alone, Kenkenes crossed the court to the door his father had entered and emerged later in a street dress of mantle and close-fitting coif.  He took up the wallet and quitted the room.  Passing through the intramural park and the chamber of guests, he entered the street.  It was a narrow, featureless passage, scarcely wide enough to give room for a chariot.  The brown dust had more prints of naked than of sandaled feet, for most men of the young sculptor’s rank went abroad in chariots.

Once out of the passage, he turned across the city toward the east.  Memphis had pushed aside her screens and shaken out her tapestries after the noon rest and was deep in commerce once again.  From the low balconies overhead the Damascene carpets swung, lending festivity to the energetic traffic below.  The pillars of stacked ware flanking the fronts of pottery shops were in a constant state of wreckage and reconstruction; the stalls of fruiterers perfumed the air with crushed and over-ripe produce; litters with dark-eyed occupants and fan-bearing attendants stood before the doorways of lapidaries and booths of stuffs; venders of images, unguents, trinkets and wines strove to outcry one another or the poulterer’s squawking stall.  Kenkenes met frequent obstructions and was forced to reduce his rapid pace.  Curricles and chariots and wicker chairs halted him at many crossings.  Carriers took up much of the narrow streets with large burdens; notaries and scribes sat cross-legged on the pavement, surrounded by their patrons and clients, and beggars and fortune-tellers strove for the young man’s attention.  The crowd thickened and thinned and grew again; pigeons winnowed fearlessly down to the roadway dust, and a distant yapping of dogs came down the slanting street.  At times Kenkenes encountered whole troops of sacred cats that wandered about the city, monarchs over the monarch himself.  By crowding into doorways he allowed these pampered felines to pass undisturbed.

In the district near the lower edge of the city he met the heavy carts of rustics, laden with cages of geese and crates of produce, moving slowly in from the wide highways of the Memphian nome.  The broad backs of the oxen were gray with dust and their drivers were masked in grime.