They felt as if in the realm of miracles, and fancied they had now seen the rarest of all Egyptian rarities.  In silence they took their way back to the handsomer streets of Sais, without noticing how many mutilated Egyptians crossed their path.  These poor disfigured creatures were indeed no unusual sight for Asiatics, who punished many crimes by the amputation of a limb.  Had they enquired however, they would have heard that, in Egypt, the man deprived of his hand was a convicted forger, the woman of her nose, an adulteress; that the man without a tongue had been found guilty of high treason or false witness; that the loss of the ears denoted a spy, and that the pale, idiotic-looking woman yonder had been guilty of infanticide, and had been condemned to hold the little corpse three days and three nights in her arms.  What woman could retain her senses after these hours of torture?—­[Diodorus I. 77.]

The greater number of the Egyptian penal laws not only secured the punishment of the criminal, but rendered a repetition of the offence impossible.

The Persian party now met with a hindrance, a large crowd having assembled before one of the handsomest houses in the street leading to the temple of Neith.  The few windows of this house that could be seen (the greater number opening on the garden and court) were closed with shutters, and at the door stood an old man, dressed in the plain white robe of a priest’s servant.  He was endeavoring, with loud cries, to prevent a number of men of his own class from carrying a large chest out of the house.

“What right have you to rob my master?” he shrieked indignantly.  “I am the guardian of this house, and when my master left for Persia (may the gods destroy that land!) he bade me take especial care of this chest in which his manuscripts lay.”

“Compose yourself, old Hib!” shouted one of these inferior priests, the same whose acquaintance we made on the arrival of the Asiatic Embassy.  “We are here in the name of the high-priest of the great Neith, your master’s master.  There must be queer papers in this box, or Neithotep would not have honored us with his commands to fetch them.”

“But I will not allow my master’s papers to be stolen,” shrieked the old man.  “My master is the great physician Nebenchari, and I will secure his rights, even if I must appeal to the king himself.”

“There,” cried the other, “that will do; out with the chest, you fellows.  Carry it at once to the high-priest; and you, old man, would do more wisely to hold your tongue and remember that the high-priest is your master as well as mine.  Get into the house as quick as you can, or to-morrow we shall have to drag you off as we did the chest to-day!” So saying, he slammed the heavy door, the old man was flung backward into the house and the crowd saw him no more.

The Persians had watched this scene and obtained an explanation of its meaning from their interpreter.  Zopyrus laughed on hearing that the possessor of the stolen chest was the oculist Nebenchari, the same who had been sent to Persia to restore the sight of the king’s mother, and whose grave, even morose temper had procured him but little love at the court of Cambyses.