Part 2 (1/2)
The sound died away. Timokles lay listening for a long time. Once he thought he heard a creeping sound, but it was only the wind.
Sleep came upon him at last, and when he woke it was day. He dared not come out, but lay there through the torrid hours, moistening his lips now and then with a little water from the small, skin water-pouch he carried.
The sun plunged beneath the horizon at last, with the usual seeming suddenness observed in the desert. Night was welcome to Timokles, and he came forth. The lad's heart was very lonely. He looked toward the northeast, and remembered his Alexandrian home--his mother, the brother with whom Timokles' whole life had been bound up, the little sister Cocce, whom Timokles had last seen playing gleefully with a toy crocodile, and laughing at its opening mouth.
”O Severus!” whispered Timokles, ”what didst thou see, when thou visitedst Egypt five years ago, that thou shouldest decree such evil against the Egyptian Christians now?”
Softly Timokles went his way in the dark. He was hungry, yet he dared eat little of the dried dates he had with him. When would he find other food?
For a time he looked warily around, but soon his sense of loneliness overcame his fear, and he watched more for some sign of his four friends than for an indication of an enemy.
”Perhaps some Christian hath escaped, even as I have,” thought Timokles.
He started.
Outstretched before him lay a figure of a man! Timokles stood motionless, till he perceived the man be to be asleep. Then the lad bent over the sleeper to scan his face. But, as Timokles stooped, he dimly saw, in the relaxed, open palm of the man's hand, a small stone of the triangular form under which the Egyptians were wont to wors.h.i.+p Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Such are the stones found in the tombs of the Egyptians.
This was no Christian sleeper that lay at Timokles' feet! The lad turned and fled into the distance.
Through the desert there wailed a thin, plaintive cry. It was the voice of a night-wandering jackal.
Timokles was dizzy to faintness, and staggered as he was driven on.
He had been discovered and taken. His life had been spared that he might henceforth be a slave.
”I bear this for thy sake, O Lord, dear Lord!” murmured the exhausted lad, as the blows drove him through the pathless desert.
Again came the plaintive cry of the wandering jackal.
”For thy sake!” faintly repeated Timokles.
A few minutes pa.s.sed, and once more the jackal's inarticulate voice wailed through the desert, but Timokles had fallen, helpless. A man sprang forward, and the lash fell again and again on Timokles'
prostrate body, but the boy did not stir.
”Now see how the Christian would die in the desert, and cheat us of all the work he might do!” grumbled the vexed voice of a dismounted camel-rider. ”He is young. There are many years of work in him!”
”Leave him!” scornfully advised another, who held a torch. ”Some beast will find him.”
”Nay, but he shall go with me to Carthage,” a.s.serted a third, from the height of his camel's back. ”Carthage knoweth what to do with Christians!”
”Who art thou that thou shouldest own the Christian?” demanded the first, angrily gazing up at the presumptuous rider. ”Did I not find him?”
The mounted camel-rider laughed, and tossed something toward the irate speaker. The man caught the object, a ring of gold, containing a scarabaeus.
”Take it,” said the giver to the appeased rival. ”The Christian is mine.”
The unconscious Timokles was taken up at a sign from the camel-rider to one of his servants, and the cavalcade proceeded on its way. As his camel paced forward, Pentaur, the purchaser, glanced back twice or thrice.
”Truly,” he a.s.sured himself with much complacency, as he perceived Timokles being carried, ”I follow the maxim of Ptah-hotep: 'Treat well thy people, as it behooveth thee; this is the duty of those whom the G.o.ds favor.'”