Death Comes as the End

‘But you yourself are not the same Renisenb who went away with Khay.’

‘Yes I am! Or if not, then I soon shall be again.’

Hori shook his head.

‘You cannot go back, Renisenb. It is like my measures here. I take half and add to it a quarter, and then a tenth and then a twenty-fourth—and at the end, you see, it is a different quantity altogether.’

‘But I am just Renisenb.’

‘But Renisenb has something added to her all the time, so she becomes all the time a different Renisenb!’

‘No, no. You are the same Hori.’

‘You may think so, but it is not so.’

‘Yes, yes, and Yahmose is the same, so worried and so anxious, and Satipy bullies him just the same, and she and Kait were having their usual quarrel about mats or beads, and presently when I go back they will be laughing together, the best of friends, and Henet still creeps about and listens and whines about her devotion, and my grandmother was fussing with her little maid over some linen! It was all the same, and presently my father will come home and there will be a great fuss, and he will say “why have you not done this?” and “you should have done that,” and Yahmose will look worried and Sobek will laugh and be insolent about it, and my father will spoil Ipy who is sixteen just as he used to spoil him when he was eight, and nothing will be different at all!’ She paused, breathless.

Hori sighed. Then he said gently:

‘You do not understand, Renisenb. There is an evil that comes from outside, that attacks so that all the world can see, but there is another kind of rottenness that breeds from within—that shows no outward sign. It grows slowly, day by day, till at last the whole fruit is rotten—eaten away by disease.’

Renisenb stared at him. He had spoken almost absently, not as though he were speaking to her, but more like a man who muses to himself.

She cried out sharply:

‘What do you mean, Hori? You make me afraid.’

‘I am afraid myself.’

‘But what do you mean? What is this evil you talk about?’

He looked at her then, and suddenly smiled.

‘Forget what I said, Renisenb. I was thinking of the diseases that attack the crops.’

Renisenb sighed in relief.

‘I’m glad. I thought—I don’t know what I thought.’

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