"Haggard, H Rider- Morning Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haggard H. Rider)

in war, also the chests of salted heads and hands, offerings to
Pharaoh.

The white-robed rowers bent to their oars, and the swift boat shot
forward up the Nile through a double line of ships of war, all of them
crowded with soldiers. Abi looked at these ships which Pharaoh had
gathered there to meet him, and thought to himself that Kaku had given
wise counsel when he prayed him to attempt no rash deed, for against
such surprises clearly Pharaoh was well prepared. He thought it again
when on reaching the quay of cut stones he saw foot and horse-men
marshalled there in companies and squadrons, and on the walls above
hundreds of other men, all armed, for now he saw what would have
happened to him, if with his little desperate band he had tried to
pierce that iron ring of watching soldiers.

At the steps generals met him in their mail and priests in their full
robes, bowing and doing him honour. Thus royally escorted, Abi passed
through the open gates and the pylons of the splendid temple dedicated
to the Trinity of Thebes, "the House of Amen in the Southern Apt,"
where gay banners fluttered from the pointed masts, up the long street
bordered with tall houses set in their gardens, till he came to the
palace wall. Here more guards rolled back the brazen gates which in
his folly of a few hours gone he had thought that he could force, and
through the avenues of blooming trees he was led to the great pillared
hall of audience.

After the brightness without, that hall seemed almost dark, only a ray
of sunshine flowing from an unshuttered space in the clerestory above,
fell full on the end of it, and revealed the crowned Pharaoh and his
queen seated in state upon their thrones of ivory and gold. Gathered
round and about him also were scribes and councillors and captains,
and beyond these other queens in their carved chairs and attended,
each of them, by beautiful women of the household in their gala dress.
Moreover, behind the thrones, and at intervals between the columns,
stood the famous Nubian guard of two hundred men, the servants of the
body of Pharaoh as they were called, each of them chosen for
faithfulness and courage.

The centre of all this magnificence was Pharaoh, on him the sunlight
beat, to him every eye was turned, and where his glance fell there
heads bowed and knees were bent. A small thin man of about forty years
of age with a puckered, kindly and anxious face, and a brow that
seemed to sink beneath the weight of the double crown that, save for
its royal snake-crest of hollow gold, was after all but of linen, a
man with thin, nervous hands which played amongst the embroideries of
his golden robe--such was Pharaoh, the mightiest monarch in the world,
the ruler whom millions that had never seen him worshipped as a god.

Abi, the burly framed, thick-lipped, dark-skinned, round-eyed Abi,
born of the same father, stared at him with wonderment, for years had