“Consider, the scripture tells us the passage of the soul depends on the preservation of the body.”

Nebsecht looked up with his cunning little eyes and shrugging his shoulders, said: 

“Then no doubt it is so:  however these things do not concern me.  Do what you like with the souls of men; I seek to know something of their bodies, and patch them when they are damaged as well as may be.”

“Nay-Toth be praised, at least you need not deny that you are master in that art.”

[Toth is the god of the learned and of physicians.  The Ibis was sacred to him, and he was usually represented as Ibis-headed.  Ra created him “a beautiful light to show the name of his evil enemy.”  Originally the Dfoon-god, he became the lord of time and measure.  He is the weigher, the philosopher among the gods, the lord of writing, of art and of learning.  The Greeks called him Hermes Trismegistus, i.e. threefold or “very great” which was, in fact, in imitation of the Egyptians, whose name Toth or Techud signified twofold, in the same way “very great”]

“Who is master,” asked Nebsecht, “excepting God?  I can do nothing, nothing at all, and guide my instruments with hardly more certainty than a sculptor condemned to work in the dark.”

“Something like the blind Resu then,” said Pentaur smiling, “who understood painting better than all the painters who could see.”

“In my operations there is a ‘better’ and a ‘worse;’” said Nebsecht, “but there is nothing ‘good.’”

“Then we must be satisfied with the ‘better,’ and I have come to claim it,” said Pentaur.

“Are you ill?”

“Isis be praised, I feel so well that I could uproot a palm-tree, but I would ask you to visit a sick girl.  The princess Bent-Anat—­”

“The royal family has its own physicians.”

“Let me speak! the princess Bent-Anat has run over a young girl, and the poor child is seriously hurt.”

“Indeed,” said the student reflectively.  “Is she over there in the city, or here in the Necropolis?”

“Here.  She is in fact the daughter of a paraschites.”

“Of a paraschites?” exclaimed Nebsecht, once more slipping the rabbit under the table, then I will go.”

“You curious fellow.  I believe you expect to find something strange among the unclean folk.”

“That is my affair; but I will go.  What is the man’s name?”

“Pinem.”

“There will be nothing to be done with him,” muttered the student, “however—­who knows?”

With these words he rose, and opening a tightly closed flask he dropped some strychnine on the nose and in the mouth of the rabbit, which immediately ceased to breathe.  Then he laid it in a box and said, “I am ready.”

“But you cannot go out of doors in this stained dress.”

The physician nodded assent, and took from a chest a clean robe, which he was about to throw on over the other! but Pentaur hindered him.  “First take off your working dress,” he said laughing.  “I will help you.  But, by Besa, you have as many coats as an onion.”