While Nebenchari was speaking, the old man listened in a bowing posture, with his arms hanging down by his side, and when he had finished, looked up into his face with indescribable joy, touched his breast with trembling fingers, and then, falling on the right knee, laying one hand on his heart and raising the other to heaven, cried:  “Thanks be unto thee, great Isis, for protecting the wanderer and permitting him to see his master once more in health and safety.  Ah, child, how anxious I have been!  I expected to find you as wasted and thin as a convict from the quarries; I thought you would have been grieving and unhappy, and here you are as well, and handsome and portly as ever.  If poor old Hib had been in your place he would have been dead long ago.”

“Yes, I don’t doubt that, old fellow.  I did not leave home of my own will either, nor without many a heartache.  These foreigners are all the children of Seth.  The good and gracious gods are only to be found in Egypt on the shores of the sacred, blessed Nile.”

“I don’t know much about its being so blessed,” muttered the old man.

“You frighten me, father Hib.  What has happened then?”

“Happened!  Things have come to a pretty pass there, and you’ll hear of it soon enough.  Do you think I should have left house and grandchildren at my age,—­going on for eighty,—­like any Greek or Phoenician vagabond, and come out among these godless foreigners (the gods blast and destroy them!), if I could possibly have staid on in Egypt?”

“But tell me what it’s all about.”

“Some other time, some other time.  Now you must take me to your own house, and I won’t stir out of it as long as we are in this land of Typhon.”

The old man said this with so much emphasis, that Nebenchiari could not help smiling and saying:  “Have they treated you so very badly then, old man?”

“Pestilence and Khamsin!” blustered the old man.

     [The south-west wind, which does so much injury to the crops in the
     Nile valley.  It is known to us as the Simoom, the wind so perilous
     to travellers in the desert.]

“There’s not a more good-for-nothing Typhon’s brood on the face of the earth than these Persians.  I only wonder they’re not all red-haired and leprous.  Ah, child, two whole days I have been in this hell already, and all that time I was obliged to live among these blasphemers.  They said no one could see you; you were never allowed to leave Nitetis’ sick-bed.  Poor child!  I always said this marriage with a foreigner would come to no good, and it serves Amasis right if his children give him trouble.  His conduct to you alone deserves that.”

“For shame, old man!”

“Nonsense, one must speak one’s mind sometimes.  I hate a king, who comes from nobody knows where.  Why, when he was a poor boy he used to steal your father’s nuts, and wrench the name-plates off the house-doors.  I saw he was a good-for-nothing fellow then.  It’s a shame that such people should be allowed to...”