“Many of the latter, and amongst them the perfidious palace-servant, rushed at once into the Nile, and there, to our confusion, found the bag with its twelve little corpses, hanging entirely uninjured among the Papyrus-reeds and bean-tendrils.  The cotton coffin was opened before the eyes of the high-priest, a troop of lower priests, and at least a thousand of the inhabitants of Memphis, who had hurried to the spot, and when the miserable contents were disclosed, there arose such fearful howls of anguish, and such horrible cries of mingled lamentation and revenge, that I heard them even in the palace.

“The furious multitude, in their wild rage, fell on my poor servant, threw him down, trampled on him and would have killed him, had not the all-powerful high-priest-designing to involve me, as author of the crime, in the same ruin—­commanded them to cease and take the wretched malefactor to prison.

“Half an hour later I was in prison too.

“My old Mus took all the guilt of the crime on himself, until at last, by means of the bastinado, the high-priest forced him to confess that I had ordered the killing of the kittens, and that he, as a faithful servant, had not dared to disobey.

“The supreme court of justice, whose decisions the king himself has no power to reverse, is composed of priests from Memphis, Heliopolis and Thebes:  you can therefore easily believe that they had no scruple in pronouncing sentence of death on poor Mus and my own unworthy Greek self.  The slave was pronounced guilty of two capital offences:  first, of the murder of the sacred animals, and secondly, of a twelve-fold pollution of the Nile through dead bodies.  I was condemned as originator of this, (as they termed it) four-and-twenty-fold crime.

   [According to the Egyptian law, the man who was cognizant of a crime
   was held equally culpable with the perpetrator.]

“Mus was executed on the same day.  May the earth rest lightly on him!  I shall never think of him again as my slave, but as a friend and benefactor!  My sentence of death was read aloud in the presence of his dead body, and I was already preparing for a long journey into the nether world, when the king sent and commanded a reprieve.

[This court of justice, which may be compared with the Areopagus at Athens, and the Gerusia at Sparta, (Diod.  I, 75.), was composed of 30 judges taken from the priestly caste, (10 from Heliopolis, 10 from Memphis, 10 from Thebes).  The most eminent from among their number was chosen by them as president.  All complaints and defences had to be presented in writing, that the judges might in no way be influenced by word or gesture.  This tribunal was independent, even of the king’s authority.  Much information concerning the administration of justice has been obtained from the Papyrus Abbott, known by the name of the ‘Papyrus judiciaire’.  Particulars and an account of their literature may be found in Ebers “Durch Gosen zum Sinai,” p. 534 and following.]

“I was taken back to prison.  One of my guards, an Arcadian Taxiarch, told me that all the officers of the guard and many of the soldiers, (altogether four thousand men) had threatened to send in their resignation, unless I, their commander, were pardoned.