At once two ebony black Nubians recommenced to wave their ostrich-feather fans above his restless head.
Again did Shamash, an Asiatic eunuch, hold to his master’s nose a small glass phial of somnific poppy-oil.
Once again did Bekit, his little daughter, chafe with fragrant sandal oil his fleshless ankles.
All in vain! Pharaoh’s frame failed to relax.
Suddenly, with an impatient gesture, Pharaoh pushed aside the ivory head-rest and summoned Dedu, Keeper of the Royal Linen.
The rebuffed, but smiling Bekit, held to her father’s lips a blue glazed goblet filled to its lotiform brim with sparkling Thinite wine. As he drank, the swaying forms of Ata and Mai, youngest of the court dancers, rose from the floor beyond him. Barely had they assumed a single graceful posture before the gold seal-ring upon Pharaoh’s hand flashed in the semi-gloom. He waved them impatiently aside.
Entering softly, Dedu, Keeper of the Royal Linen, carefully drew back the curtains from the windows. These green byssus draperies had served to keep out the brilliant rays of the sun, as reflected from Queen Thi’s “pleasure lake,” on the northern shore of which Perao, the royal palace, stood.
Thus, one might admire the charming decoration of the room, with its green tiled walls, its cedar columns, its elaborately designed ceiling, and its painted stucco floor covered with powdered lazuli and gold dust.
In answer to a hasty motion on the part of his silent master, Dedu commenced to bind him in the long, flaring-skirted gala robes of the day, things of wonder for the seemingly innumerable ramifications of their softly rippling white pleats. A gem-encrusted belt of ruddy Nubian gold was clasped about his slender waist, a girdle broad in the back and tapering towards the front, where a fiercely charging oryx, carved from a solid block of Babylonian lazuli, served to conceal the mechanism of the clasp. The restless monarch’s feet were bound in soft gazelle-hide sandals, sandals dyed a rich rose-pink, gilded and turned up at the toe. Over a padded linen skull-cap was set the royal warbonnet, a magnificent dome-shaped headdress of a brilliant sky blue. From the center of this regal head-covering, and immediately above the monarch’s low and unnaturally retreating forehead, the red jasper eyes of two golden asps glittered like spots of hidden fire, as they quivered upon flexible wires with every movement of the impatient monarch.
