prey.  Thine aid was not, as thou hadst intended, given to the Lydians and Babylonians against the enemy, but to the Greeks in the building of temples to their false gods.  At last resistance seemed hopeless; a whole hemisphere with its rulers lay in submission at the feet of Persia; but even then the gods willed Egypt a chance of deliverance.  Cambyses desired thy daughter in marriage.  Thou, however, too weak to sacrifice thine own flesh and blood for the good of all, hast substituted another maiden, not thine own child, as an offering to the mighty monarch; and at the same time, in thy soft-heartedness, wilt spare the life of a stranger in whose hand he the fortunes of this realm, and who will assuredly work its ruin; unless indeed, worn out by internal dissension, it perish even sooner from its own weakness!”

Thus far Amasis had listened to these revilings of all he held dearest in silence, though pale, and trembling with rage; but now he broke forth in a voice, the trumpet-like sound of which pealed through the wide hall:  “Know’st thou not then, thou boasting and revengeful son of evil, thou future destroyer of this ancient and glorious kingdom, know’st thou not whose life must be the sacrifice, were not my children, and the dynasty which I have founded, dearer to me than the welfare of the whole realm?  Thou, Psamtik, thou art the man, branded by the gods, feared by men—­the man to whose heart love and friendship are strangers, whose face is never seen to smile, nor his soul known to feel compassion!  It is not, however, through thine own sin that thy nature is thus unblessed, that all thine undertakings end unhappily.  Give heed, for now I am forced to relate what I had hoped long to keep secret from thine ears.  After dethroning my predecessor, I forced him to give me his sister Tentcheta in marriage.  She loved me; a year after marriage there was promise of a child.  During the night preceding thy birth I fell asleep at the bedside of my wife.  I dreamed that she was lying on the shores of the Nile, and complained to me of pain in the breast.  Bending down, I beheld a cypress-tree springing from her heart.  It grew larger and larger, black and spreading, twined its roots around thy mother and strangled her.  A cold shiver seized me, and I was on the point of flying from the spot, when a fierce hurricane came from the East, struck the tree and overthrew it, so that its spreading branches were cast into the Nile.  Then the waters ceased to flow; they congealed, and, in place of the river, a gigantic mummy lay before me.  The towns on its banks dwindled into huge funereal urns, surrounding the vast corpse of the Nile as in a tomb.  At this I awoke and caused the interpreters of dreams to be summoned.  None could explain the vision, till at last the priests of the Libyan Ammon gave me the following interpretation ’Tentcheta will die in giving birth to a son.  The cypress, which strangled its mother, is this gloomy, unhappy man.  In his days a people shall come from the East and shall make of the Nile, that is of the Egyptians, dead bodies, and of their cities ruinous heaps; these are the urns for the dead, which thou sawest.”