powerful blood, their old blood, so that his burns might heal faster, saying that he was innocent, he had not put them in the sand -- it had been the Elder -- please, please, would they let him drink from the original fount.
"And then ravenous hunger consumed him. And convulsing, he distended his fangs as a cobra might and he shot forward, his black claws out, to the neck of Enkil.
"Enkil's arm rose as the Elder said it would, and it flung the burnt one across the chamber on his back before it returned to its proper place.
"The burnt one was sobbing and I was even more ashamed. The burnt one was too weak to hunt for victims or bring victims. I had urged him on to this to see it. And the gloom of this place, the gritty sand on the floor, the barrenness, the stink of the torch, and the ugly sight of the burnt one writhing and crying, all this was dispiriting beyond words.
" 'Then drink from me,' I said, shuddering at the sight of him, the fangs distended again, the hands out to grasp me. But it was the least I could do."
"As soon as I was done with that creature, I ordered him to let no one enter the crypt. How the hell he was supposed to keep anyone out I couldn't imagine, but I told him this with tremendous authority and I hurried away.
"I went back into Alexandria, and I broke into a shop that sold antique things and I stole two fine painted and gold-plated mummy cases, and I took a great deal of linen for wrapping, and I went back to the desert crypt.
"My courage and my fear were at their peak.
"As often happens when we give the blood or take it from another of our kind, I had seen things, dreamed things as it were, when the burnt one had his teeth in my throat. And what I had seen and dreamed had to do with Egypt; the age of Egypt, the fact that for four thousand years this land had known little change in language, religion, or art. And for the first time this was understandable to me and it put me in profound sympathy with the Mother and the Father as relics of this country, as surely as the pyramids were relics. It intensified my curiosity and made it something more akin to devotion.
"Though to be honest, I would have stolen the Mother and the Father just in order to survive.
"This new knowledge, this new infatuation, inspired me as I approached Akasha and Enkil to put them in the wooden mummy cases, knowing full well that Akasha would allow it and that one blow from Enkil could probably crush my skull.
"But Enkil yielded as well as Akasha. They allowed me to wrap them in linen, to make mummies of them, and to place them into the shapely wooden coffins which bore the painted faces of others, and the endless hieroglyph instructions for the dead, and to take them with me into Alexandria, which I did.
"I left the wraith being in a terrible state of agitation as I went off dragging a mummy case under each arm.
"When I reached the city I hired men to carry these coffins properly to my house, out of a sense of fittingness, and then I buried them deep beneath the garden, explaining to Akasha and Enkil all the while aloud that their stay in the earth would not be long.
"I was in terror to leave them the next night. I hunted and killed within yards of my own garden gate. And then I sent my slaves to purchase horses and a wagon for me, and to make preparations for a journey around the coast to Antioch, on the Orontes River, a city I knew and loved, and in which I felt I would be safe.
"As I feared, the Elder soon appeared. I was actually waiting for him in the shadowy bedroom, seated on my couch like a Roman, one lamp beside me, as old copy of some Roman poem in my hand. I wondered if he would sense the location of Akasha and Enkil, and deliberately imagined false things -- that I had shut them up in the great pyramid itself.
"I still dreamed the dream of Egypt that had come to me from the burnt one: a land in which the laws and the beliefs had remained the same for longer than we