Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

He could not bear to sit for long, and he stood up to walk leisurely round the pool. When he had completed the first lap he saw Shayth carrying a jug, making hurriedly for the room. His eyes followed her until she disappeared behind the door. He decided to sit down again and had only just done so when he heard a chilling scream ring out from inside the room. He leapt to his feet, his heart in his mouth, and raced over to the source of the commotion. He found Rhadopis sprawled on the floor in the center of the room, the slave girl kneeling by her side, bending over her, calling her, touching her cheeks, and checking her pulse. He rushed over to her, his legs trembling, panic and alarm clearly visible in his wide eyes. He knelt down next to Shayth and taking Rhadopis's hand between his own, he found it cold. She seemed like one asleep, save that her face was all pale, tinged with a gentle blueness. Her ghostly lips were slightly parted, and locks of her black hair lay disheveled on her breast and shoulders while others had tumbled onto the carpet. He felt his throat slowly parch, his breath unable to escape as he asked the slave in a hoarse voice, “What is wrong with her, Shayth? Why isn't she answering?”

The woman answered in a voice like a wail, “I do not know, sir.

“I found her when I entered the room just as you see her now. I called her but she did not respond. I ran over to her and shook her but she did not come to, and no sign of consciousness showed in her. O Lord, my lady. What is the matter with you? What has afflicted you to make you like this?”

Benamun did not utter a word, but looked long at the woman crumpled on the floor in terrible stillness. As his eyes looked about her they alighted on the fiendish phial beneath her right elbow, the stopper removed. He let out a sorrowful moan as his trembling fingers picked it up. All that remained inside — were a few drops clinging to the glass and as his eyes moved between the phial and the woman, the truth became clear. A shudder ran through his slender body that tore him all to shreds. He moaned in agony and the slave turned to him as he exclaimed in a panic-stricken voice, “O God, how terrible!”

Shayth fixed her eyes on him as she asked him in apprehension and alarm, “What is it that horrifies and disturbs you? Speak, man. I am almost out of my mind with confusion.”

He paid no attention to her, and addressing Rhadopis as if she could hear him and see him, he said, “Why have you taken your own life, why have you taken your own life, my lady?”

Shayth screamed and beat her breast with her hands, saying, “What are you saying? How do you know she has taken her own life?”

He threw the phial violently against the wall and it smashed into pieces, then he said in bewilderment and dismay, “Why did you annihilate yourself with this poison? Did you not promise me that you would seriously consider coming with me to Ambus, far away from the troubled South? Were you deceiving me so that you could put an end to your life?”

The slave looked at the shards of broken glass, all that remained of the phial, and said in disbelief, “Where did my lady obtain the poison?”

Shrugging his shoulders inconsolably, he said, “I brought it to her myself.”

She was filled with rage and screamed at him, “How could you do that, you wretch?”

“I did not realize that she wanted it so that she could kill herself with it. She deceived me, as she did just now.”

She turned away from him in dismay and burst into tears, and pored over the feet of her mistress, kissing them and — washing them — with her tears. The young man — was swamped — with desolation as he fixed his bulging eyes on Rhadopis's face, which was now shrouded in eternal stillness. He — wondered in his desolation how oblivion could apprehend such beauty as the sun never before had shone upon, and how such burning overflowing vitality could quiesce and don this pale and withered hide that would soon display signs of corruption. He longed to see her, if only for a fleeting moment, the breath of life restored to her, her graceful walk, a smile of joy beaming from her resplendent face, an expression of love and seduction. Then he could die and it would be his last memory of this world.

Shayth's wailing irritated him intensely and he chided her, “Cease your racket!”

He gestured to his heart and continued, “Here is the place of noble grief. More noble than weeping and wailing.”

There still remained in the slave's heart the faintest glimmer of hope, and looking at the youth through her tears she implored him, “Is there no hope, sir? Perhaps it is just a severe faint.”

But in his grief-stricken voice he said, “Neither hope nor expectation shall bring her back. Rhadopis is dead. Love is dead. All my delusions are scattered asunder. Oh, how dreams and delusions toyed with me. Now, though, everything is over. Fearsome death has roused me from my slumber.”