CHAPTER XV

A STATUE OF HATHOR, GODDESS OF LOVE

Menna the Overseer had little conception of the torture he had inflicted upon the mind of the youthful Renny when he forbade him his liberty. Hollow-cheeked and well nigh mad, Renny so far disobeyed his patron’s orders that he sat for hours, nay, for days at a time, huddled like a beggar at the Palace gate.

Not even the gentle Bhanar could console him whenever, as so frequently happened, a day went by without its being possible for the distracted youth to catch a glimpse of his idol.

Then, suddenly, he remembered his promise to the Princess. He sought out Khnum, the royal quarryman, who had but now moored to the western bank with a cargo consisting in the main of the precious alabaster of Hatnub. He bribed Khnum to procure him a giant block of purest alabaster, a mass of the creamiest material which the alabaster quarries could provide.

For days did master-quarryman Khnum seek a block of the unusual proportions demanded by the impatient sculptor. A week went by, an eternity to the tortured artist.

Finally, just as he was about to despatch a second expedition northward, and during the heat of one of the first days of the great sandstorm, Khnum and his sweating assistants hauled a wooden sledge before his dust-covered threshold. And there, high upon the friction-charred vehicle, stood the glossiest block of Hatnub’s finest alabaster which the distracted Renny had ever seen.

For many years men spoke of that never-to-be-forgotten sandstorm, a storm which ushered in days of blinding heat, days in which the flints that strewed the desert plateau cracked beneath the excoriating heat; days in which the ocher-hued river banks, confining a blinding reach of sluggish water, the shriveled and blasted sycamore, tamarisks and palms, nay, the very capital itself, seemed to be confined within the sun-god’s fiery furnace.

Day in, day out, those death-dealing rays shot from a changeless vault of steely blue. Down sank the tortured cattle; the birds gasped among the shriveled leaves of the trees. The very soil, by now as hard as any southern granite, yawned with wide-thrown crevices many cubits deep. Far to the south the broad-winged vultures circled slowly earthward from their lofty posts, as if they too feared the darts of the outraged Amen.

It was a sudden and appalling visitation which luckily blew itself out within but four of the customary nine days of blinding wind and sand.

Yet, throughout those four memorable days and thereafter Renny worked as he had never worked before.

Now, there came a day when Menna ordered his carrying-chair and bade his bearers set him down before the door of Renny’s workshop.

At the Overseer’s repeated knocks the bolts were slowly drawn. Through the barely opened door Renny, blinded by the glare, gazed unseeingly toward the extended hand of his smiling patron:

“How now, Syrian? Hast turned magician? Bar tells me thou must needs have conned the _hekau_-spell that bringeth food and drink, since all the food that is brought thee stands untasted. Breath of the Goddess! Why hast sulked behind barred doors these weeks and more?” Menna made as if to step within.

“Ah, master, most noble lord, I do beseech thee, go not within! Bethink thee, Splendor of Thebes, when first I came to thee, thou didst assure to me that privacy which, far more than thy golden _uten_, I did ask of thee! Continue now thy favor some little time, I pray. Thy statue of the Goddess Hathor is...!”

“Amemet eat me! Days, nay weeks, have we waited for a sight of it! Now is our sore-tried patience at an end.”

With a firmness unexpected in the customarily indolent Menna, the Overseer pushed the trembling Renny aside and entered the workshop.

At first, so sudden was the change from the glare of noonday to the murky shadows of the room, that Menna could distinguish nothing. When at last his eyes grew somewhat accustomed to the gloom, he found himself staring at the tinted statue of a regally robed woman, a life-sized figure so startlingly realistic that for a moment he instinctively drew back.

Upon a pedestal festooned with drooping lotus and fragrant mimosa stood the smiling figure of the Princess Sesen. So lifelike did the statue appear to the bewildered noble, that for a space of a full minute, he waited, expecting her lips to part, her tongue to utter the customary greetings.

Once his jeweled fingers had assured him that the figure was but tinted stone, Menna burst into voluble exclamations of wonder and delight.

“Verily, said I not that thou hadst learned some potent charm, some mighty _hekau_, known but to the blessed gods alone?

“Breath of Hathor! ’Tis the work of Ptah, nay, of Khnum himself, Fashioner of Mankind! None but a god could thus turn stone to flesh, put breath in the nostrils, life in the eye!

“Ah Syrian! if this be Syrian art, my heated arguments were but wasted breath! Compared to our Egyptian figures, shackled, mummified, as lifeless as the granite they are carved in, here stands grace and freedom, life itself!

“By the Theban Triad, the very blind would know this figure for the Princess, the Lady Sesen...!”

Menna broke off abruptly. Sesen?

Suddenly Menna’s face flamed in anger. Could there indeed be something between the Princess and this slave, this nobody?

Nay, as far as the Princess was concerned, Menna felt sure that Bar’s reports of Renny’s heedless temerity were false. At the moment Menna felt sure that he had good cause to trust the Princess. He fingered a scented note tucked in his jeweled belt.

But Renny...?

Menna shook his perfumed wig, and turning, spoke the young man’s name. Thrice he called, then strode to the half opened door.

Renny had vanished.

With a threatening imprecation the irate Overseer turned once more to the statue.

Yes, here was Hathor, Goddess of Beauty, Goddess of Love, as none in Egypt had ever conceived her!

Menna’s brain worked fast. The statue he vowed to make his own. Bar and his minions were despatched to do away with Renny!

What a sensation would this work produce at Court, and especially upon the mind of the art-loving Pharaoh! Menna allowed himself visions of a naturalistic school modeled upon the Syrian, an essentially realistic school which should utterly banish the hieratic canons imposed upon the Egyptian craftsmen by the dictates of precedent and the will of an all-powerful priesthood.

Meantime, thought the Overseer, the statue must be kept from sight, at least, until Renny was safely out of the way.

He sent off a chairman to bring clay, string and his signet ring. With his own hands he covered the statue with the quarryman’s mats which still clustered in one corner of the little chamber.

In less time than it takes to tell it the tinted figure of the little Princess disappeared from sight. Menna closed the door and, slipping to the bronze bolt, bound it with cord and set his scarab-seal upon a clay pellet which he fastened thereto. This done, he hurried home. To-day was a momentous day with Menna, Overseer of the King’s Estates.