Now and then some poor passerby would stare at him. Surely he should not be dressed in this long satin robe. But that did not matter. He was Ramses the Wanderer again. Ramses the Damned only passing through this time. The elixir still had its potency. And the science of this time was no more ready for it than the science of any other.
Look at this suffering, these beggars sleeping in the alleyway.
Smell the filth of that house, as if the door is a mouth that spews its foul breath while gasping for clean air.
A beggar man approached him." Spare a sixpence, sir, I haven't eaten in two days. Please, sir."
Ramses walked on by, his slippers damp and dirty from the puddles in which he had stepped.
And now comes a young woman, look at her; listen to the cough rattling deep from her chest.
"Want to have a good time, sir? I have a nice warm room, sir."
Oh, yes, he did want her services, so very much that he could feel himself hardening immediately. And the fever made her all the more fetching; she thrust out her small bosom gracefully as she forced a smile despite her pain.
"Not now, my fair one," he whispered.
It seemed the street, if it was in fact a street, had carried him into a great wilderness of ruins. Burnt-out buildings reeking of the smoke, with windows empty of drapery or glass.
Even here the poor camped in alcoves and shallow doorways. A baby cried desperately. The song of the hungry.
He walked on. He could hear the city coming alive around him; not the human voices; those he'd heard all along. It was the machines which awoke now as the dirty grey sky grew brighter and became almost silver overhead. From somewhere very far away, he heard a deep-throated train whistle. He stopped. He could feel the dull vibration of the great iron monster even here through the damp earth. What a beguiling rhythm it had, those wheels rolling on and on over the iron tracks.
Suddenly a spasm of shrill noise threw him into a panic. He turned in time to see an open motor car hurtling towards him, a young man bouncing on the high seat. He fell back against the stone wall behind him as the thing rattled and bumped over the ruts in the mud.
He was shaken, angry. A rare moment in which he felt helpless, exposed.
Dazed, he realized he was looking at a grey dove lying dead in the street. One of those fat dull grey birds which he saw everywhere in London, nesting on the windowsills and on the rooftops; this one had been struck by the motor car, and part of its wing had been crushed under the wheels.
The wind stirred it now, giving it a false semblance of life.
Suddenly a memory, one of the oldest and most vivid, caught him off guard, ripping him from the present, cruelly, and planting him squarely in another time and place.
He stood in the cave of the Hittite priestess. In his battle garb, his hand on the hilt of his bronze sword, he stood looking up at the white doves circling in the sunlight under the high grate.
"They're immortal?" he asked her. He spoke in the crude, guttural Hittite tongue.
She had laughed madly." They eat, but they do not need to eat. They drink, but they do not need to drink. It is the sun that keeps them strong. Take it away and they sleep, but they do not die, my King."
He had stared at her face, so old, shrunken with its deep wrinkles. The laughter had angered him.
"Where is the elixir!" he had demanded.
"You think it is a great thing?" How her eyes had gleamed as she approached him, taunting him." And what if all the world were filled with those who could not die? And their children? And their children's children? This cave harbours a horrid secret, I tell you. The secret of the end of the world itself, I tell you!"
He had drawn his sword." Give it to me!" he had roared.
She had not been frightened; she had only smiled.
"What if it kills you, my rash Egyptian? No human being has ever drunk it. No man, woman or child."
But he had already seen the altar, seen the cup of white liquid. He had seen the tablet behind it covered with tiny wedgelike letters.
He stepped up to the altar. He read the words. Could this