Moses by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

head.
    â€œNo tongue, boy? Come now, Prince of Egypt, speak up!”
    â€œAh, let the boy be,” Amon-Teph said. “I brought him here. Can’t you see that he is frightened, as who wouldn’t be, with such a set of old rascals as you gathered around him, ready to steal the clothes off his back? Let him be,” Amon-Teph laughed, and the others joined him, and then, still giggling, they walked across the observatory leaving Moses alone, then put their heads together and began to whisper.
    For his part, Moses was relieved not to be the object of their attention, and he began to drift along the rail, elated by the height at which he stood and by the wonderful view of the fitfully lit palace, the gleaming Nile spreading southward into the Delta, and the whole sprawling City of Ramses, the finer buildings and minor palaces with lamps to light their windows and courts, the poorer dwellings merged into the darkness. “How splendid,” he thought, “to have a place like this for your own and to be able to mount here each evening to such a height that you could almost reach up and touch the moon-goddess”; and with this thought he stretched out his arm and heard Amon-Teph grunt behind him,
    â€œYou’d need a long arm to reach her, Moses.”
    The boy turned, surprising the priest with the glow of excitement on his long, aquiline face; and the fat man asked Moses whether he liked the stars so much?
    â€œI feel happy,” Moses said, uncertain of cause or source.
    The priest nodded and placed one arm over the boy’s shoulder, gesturing toward the sky with the other. “A great, strange mystery, Moses, and one of the innumerable factors that make it difficult for a priest to live up to his name. In the old days, they say, we were honoured and honourable, perhaps because we were less greedy and more credulous—or more devout. I am still very devout, mind you, but I permit myself the luxury of bewilderment, which my own teacher—when I was a boy like you—told me is more of a pitfall than gold, women or power. But I only share the bewilderment of an Egypt that snivels over ancient glories and compensates itself with the unbelievable luxury and power that the great God Seti and the God Ramses, his son and your uncle, brought to us. For that, we give humble thanks to our mother Isis, whom you can now see rising over the reedy wilderness of the Delta.”
    â€œI don’t understand that,” Moses said, feeling a strange sense of freedom and the right to speak anything that might come into his thoughts.
    â€œNo. I don’t suppose you do,” Amon-Teph said. “While you suspect that I am being blasphemous, you can’t quite put your finger on the core of it. But you see, Prince, all of us who spend our hours up here watching the stars become a little blasphemous, because the stars and the sun make man humble, and I am afraid that humility and blasphemy are not as far apart as you might imagine. Were you thinking that I praise Isis for less than virtue?”
    Thoroughly bewildered now, Moses shook his head, and the priest said gravely, “The moon is Isis or Isis is the moon—yes, Moses? And lovers look at the moon after they embrace; but the peasant who tills his field and brings forth the ears of wheat that keep you and me alive—as well as the lovers—and put spring and strength in your long limbs and warm my old, tired bones—he wants to feel the sun on his brown back, and when he feels its heat, he knows that life stirs everywhere. Tell me, young Moses, you who are a prince of Egypt and were educated so well that, as a lord of the Nile, you might be the equal if not the greater than equal of any man on earth—tell me, what is the name of the bright fire that warms our days?”
    This returned the boy to reality, and thankful that now he grappled with what he understood, he answered, “ That anyone knows, Amon-Teph, for the