“Which perhaps was better for you, Master, than to stop to watch the lady Amada acquire learning.  Still, I wonder whether the holy Tanofir is always right.  You see, Master, he thinks a great deal of priests and priestesses, and is so very old that he has forgotten all about love and that without it there never would have been a holy Tanofir.”

“The holy Tanofir thinks of souls, not of bodies, Bes.”

“Yes, Master.  Still, oil is of no use without a lamp, or a soul without a body, at least here underneath the sun, or so we were taught who worship the Grasshopper.  But, Master, when you came back from all your hunting, what happened then?”

“Then I found, Bes, that the lady Amada, having acquired all the learning possible, had taken her first vows to Isis, which she said she would not break for any man on earth although she might have done so without crime.  Therefore, although I was dear to her, as a brother would have been had she had one, and she swore that she had never even thought of another man, she refused so much as to think of marrying who dreamed only of the heavenly perfections of the lady Isis.”

“Ump!” said Bes.  “We Ethiopians have Priestesses of the Grasshopper, or the Grasshopper’s wife, but they do not think of her like that.  I hope that one day something stronger than herself will not cause the lady Amada to break her vows to the heavenly Isis.  Only then, perhaps, it may be for the sake of another man who did not go off to the East on account of such fool’s talk.  But here is a village and the horses are spent.  Let us stop and eat, as I suppose even the lady Amada does sometimes.”

On the following afternoon we crossed the Nile, and towards sunset entered the vast and ancient city of Memphis.  On its white walls floated the banners of the Great King which Bes pointed out to me, saying that wherever we went in the whole world, it seemed that we could never be free from those accursed symbols.

“May I live to spit upon them and cast them into the moat,” I answered savagely, for as I drew near to Amada they grew ten times more hateful to me than they had been before.

In truth I was nearer to Amada than I thought, for after we had passed the enclosure of the temple of Ptah, the most wonderful and the mightiest in the whole world, we came to the temple of Isis.  There near to the pylon gate we met a procession of her priests and priestesses advancing to offer the evening sacrifice of song and flowers, clad, all of them, in robes of purest white.  It was a day of festival, so singers went with them.  After the singers came a band of priestesses bearing flowers, in front of whom walked another priestess shaking a sistrum that made a little tinkling music.

Even at a distance there was something about the tall and slender shape of this priestess that stirred me.  When we came nearer I saw why, for it was Amada herself.  Through the thin veil she wore I could see her dark and tender eyes set beneath the broad brow that was so full of thought, and the sweet, curved mouth that was like no other woman’s.  Moreover there could be no doubt since the veil parting above her breast showed the birth-mark for which she was famous, the mark of the young moon, the sign of Isis.