Jesus did not lie down again on the soft cushions, he rested on the cool floor and thought.  The king weeps!  Arabia and India, Greece and Rome have sent their costliest treasures to Memphis.  Phoenician ships cruise off the coasts of Gaul, Albion, and Germany in order to obtain treasure for the great Pharaoh.  His people surround him day after day with homage, his life is at its prime.  And he weeps?  Was it not perhaps that he sobbed in his dreams, or it may be laughed?  But the watchers think he weeps.

CHAPTER VII

And the days passed by.  As the king had said, the boy was free.  But he stayed on at the palace because he hoped one day to find the room in which the manuscripts were kept.  He often strolled through the town and the palm-grove down to the river to see his parents.  Thousands of slaves were working at the sluices of the stream which fertilised the land.  The overseer scourged them lustily, so that many of them fell down exhausted and even dying.  Jesus looked on and denounced such barbarity, until he, too, received a blow.  Then he went out to the Pyramids where the Pharaohs slept, and listened if they were not weeping.  He went into the Temple of Osiris and looked at the monster idols, fat, soulless, ugly, between the rounded pillars.  He searched the palace untiringly for the hall in which the writings were kept, and at last he came upon it.  But it was closed:  its custodians were hunting jackals and tigers in the desert.  They found it dark and dreary there among the great minds of old; the splendour and luxury of the court did not penetrate to the hall of writings.

Then nights came again when whispers ran through the halls, “Pharaoh weeps.”  And the reason, too, was whispered.  He had caused the woman he loved best to be strangled, and now the astrologers declared that she was innocent.  One day the king lay on his couch and desired that the boy from the Nile should be summoned to fan him.  As the king was sick, Jesus agreed to go.  Pharaoh was ill-humoured and impatient, neither fan nor fanning was right, and when the boy left off that was not right either.

Then Jesus said suddenly:  “Pharaoh, you are sick.”

The king stared at him in astonishment.  A page dare to open his mouth and speak to the Son of Light!  When, however, he saw the sad, sincere expression of sympathy in the boy’s countenance ho became calmer, and said; “Yes, my boy, I am sick.”

“King,” said Jesus, “I know what is the matter with you.”

“You know!”

“You keep shadows within and light without.  Reverse it.”

Directly the boy had said that Pharaoh got up, thinner and taller than he usually appeared to be, and haughtily pointed to the door, an angry light in his eyes.

The boy went out quietly, and did not look back.

But his words were not forgotten.  In the noise and tumult of the daytime Pharaoh did not hear them; in the night, when all the brilliance was extinguished and only the miserable and unhappy waked, he heard softly echoed from wall to wall of his chamber, “Reverse it!  Bring the light inside!”