Moses Read Online Free PDF Page B

“justice” although, growing into it, he felt it sometimes as “truth,” sometimes as “order,” and sometimes as a hunger to be a little better than he or any other man was.
    It was a full life, and if the days did not lag, neither were they counted. Afterward for Moses this time would have no beginning, although it ended, as so much of childhood does, with the first pain and grief of maturity. Each day blended into the next, and the day past was blurred into the timelessness of the present. It was a land where the sun shone everlastingly, where all that was always had been and always would be—and when, with his royal brothers, he was taken up the Nile in one of the splendid palace barges to view the shining Pyramids of Giza, the incredible mountains built in the ancient past by kings half-forgotten, and still standing so bright and clean with their surface of coloured and glazed tile undisturbed—the absolute of Egypt was proven to him beyond the power of words. Even more strongly than when a teacher-priest read to them, in the ritual singsong, passages from the Book of the Beginning telling how the gods created Egypt and Egyptians so that their own godly selves might endure. Yet when his pride rode too high and free, the maggot of his own doubt sucked at his insides.
    The innuendos and thrusts of his brothers he could possibly explain away as normal envy of the son of the god’s sister, the only son; for the complexity of the God Ramses’ marital and extramarital existence made for difference and distinction among the royal children. There was a strange streak of devotion in the king that would not permit the disenfranchisement of any product of his loins, but as the condition of his mates was varied, so was the status of his sons. The children of the virgin slaves whom Ramses took to bed lived together in a single dormitory, for more often than not their mothers were soon sold into foreign places. As for the concubines, they lived in the royal harem, and while their sons might remain with them even up to the age of seven or eight, they were then given over to the palace priests to live with them and to be raised by them.
    Only the few who were actual wives of the God-King had apartments of their own in the Great House, slaves of their own, and households of their own—and of these, few if any possessed either the wealth or independence of Enekhas-Amon.
    So, envy and pique and bitterness Moses might well expect, but the half of a name which he bore—and which became the target of so many taunts—this he could not escape from, Even in the child there were two persons—the prince of Egypt and the Moses, a child given, not as other children are, given, but through some mystery, which to a child spells horror and foreboding—and thus the one rode on the shoulders of the other.
    Yet not so heavily that the boy didn’t laugh and play with the fullness and fortune of his youth. Circumstance declared him a prince, and as the sun-drenched days became weeks and then months, he grew with the strength and bearing of a prince—a tall, full-muscled boy, supple of movement and with a promise of great power in the wide spread of his shoulders. His face began to change, and bit by bit the comforting resemblance to the people of Upper Egypt left him. His high-bridged nose, so typical of the families of Thebes and Karnak, became thinner, more hawklike, and his nostrils widened, began to curl slightly. The baby flesh fell away from his high, prominent cheekbones and his chin hardened and sharpened, with none of the gentle, soft beauty that the royal family prided itself upon. But the change came slowly, as slowly as his growth and maturation.

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    AT THE HOUR of noon, when the sun stood highest overhead and would therefore not glare in their eyes, the princely children were exercised in the use of arms. Afterward they would clean their steaming bodies in one of the many