B.C. 11. Nine years after.
The god of spices, and incense, and embalming,
God of the body's dim eternity.
Anubis, the faithful jackal, kept the scales,
And warded off the wicked hands of Set.
The Feather of Truth, and the heart, kept balance, still.
But Set, the hard, the proud, the confident,
Set, with the crocodile, Ammit, at his side,—
Set, the beautiful, the hard and proud,
The devious, the diabolical postponer,
Tried, still to outwear her heart, till it fall from the scales
Into the monstrous jaws to the second death.
He said: “Your fable is yourself in truth,
Your rumour is your soul, your name is you
To the secret caves of long reëchoing time.”
Set, the Accuser, lifted his hand of stone
And sounds came up from the darkness under the sea
And the bones in darkness under all the sands:—
“She poured us out like water and like wine,
She wasted us in battle, let her die!
She wasted us in battle, let her die!”
But what have the gods to do with such complainers?
They love the beautiful, the hard and proud—
Only these can wake them from the night.
The law's delay among the gods is great.
They sleep on shadowy thrones. Their words grow gray.
Their ribs are basalt and their faces basalt
Cut by the hardest chisels of proud priests,
There on The Terrace of a Million Years.
High above in the light of each changing year,
Priests of the jewelled temples of Abydos,
Thinking not of forgotten Cleopatra,
Of Cæsar, Cæsarion, or Antony,
Sang their sweet songs of the soul's resurrection,
Songs to Osiris, “First of the Westerners,”
Thinking only of their unburied dead,
Of mummies to be sealed in their holy tombs.
