The Man Who Died Read Online Free PDF Page B

two slaves.
    The boy suddenly left off beating the girl. He crouched over her,
touching her, trying to make her speak. But she lay quite inert, face
down on the smoothed rock. And he put his arms round her and lifted her,
but she slipped back to earth like one dead, yet far too quickly for
anything dead. The boy, desperate, caught her by the hips and hugged her
to him, turning her over there. There she seemed inert, all her fight was
in her shoulders. He twisted her over, intent and unconscious, and pushed
his hands between her thighs, to push them apart. And in an instant he
was covering her in the blind, frightened frenzy of a boy's first
passion. Quick and frenzied his young body quivered naked on hers, blind,
for a minute. Then it lay quite still, as if dead.
    And then, in terror, he peeped up. He peeped round, and drew slowly to
his feet, adjusting his loin–rag. He saw the stranger, and then he saw,
on the rocks beyond, the lady of Isis, his mistress. And as he saw her,
his whole body shrank and cowed, and with a strange cringing motion he
scuttled lamely towards the door in the wall.
    The girl sat up and looked after him. When she had seen him disappear,
she too looked round. And she saw the stranger and the priestess. Then
with a sullen movement she turned away, as if she had seen nothing, to
the four dead pigeons and the knife, which lay there on the rock. And she
began to strip the small feathers, so that they rose on the wind like
dust.
    The priestess turned away. Slaves! Let the overseer watch them. She was
not interested. She went slowly through the pines again, back to the
temple, which stood in the sun in a small clearing at the centre of the
tongue of land. It was a small temple of wood, painted all pink and white
and blue, having at the front four wooden pillars rising like stems to
the swollen lotus–bud of Egypt at the top, supporting the roof and open,
spiky lotus–flowers of the outer frieze, which went round under the
eaves. Two low steps of stone led up to the platform before the pillars,
and the chamber behind the pillars was open. There a low stone altar
stood, with a few embers in its hollow, and the dark stain of blood in
its end groove.
    She knew her temple so well, for she had built it at her own expense, and
tended it for seven years. There it stood, pink and white, like a flower
in the little clearing, backed by blackish evergreen oaks; and the shadow
of afternoon was already washing over its pillar bases.
    She entered slowly, passing through to the dark inner chamber, lighted by
a perfumed oil–flame. And once more she pushed shut the door, and once
more she threw a few grains of incense on a brazier before the goddess,
and once more she sat down before her goddess, in the almost–darkness, to
muse, to go away into the dreams of the goddess.
    It was Isis; but not Isis, Mother of Horus. It was Isis Bereaved, Isis in
Search. The goddess, in painted marble, lifted her face and strode, one
thigh forward, through the frail fluting of her robe, in the anguish of
bereavement and of search. She was looking for the fragments of the dead
Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in
fragments over the wide world. And she must find his hands and his feet,
his heart, his thighs, his head, his belly, she must gather him together
and fold her arms round the re–assembled body till it became warm again,
and roused to life, and could embrace her, and could fecundate her womb.
And the strange rapture and anguish of search went on through the years,
as she lifted her throat and her hollowed eyes looked inward, in the
tormented ecstasy of seeking, and the delicate navel of her bud–like
belly showed through the frail, girdled robe with the eternal asking,
asking, of her search. And through the years she found him bit by bit,
heart and head and limbs and body. And yet she had not found the last
reality, the final clue to him, that alone could bring him really back to
her. For she was