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Updated: June 7, 2025
But it was no person who disturbed his solitude. Heraklas saw only the head of an ibis, called "Hac" or "Hib" by the Egyptians, and the lad, mindful of the honor due the bird as sacred to the god Thoth, the Egyptian deity of letters and of the moon, made a gesture of semi-reverence.
One day Heraklas had hidden himself among the northern crags beside the great sea. His eyes were bent upon his roll. He had been reading John's record of the conversation between Christ and the man who was born blind. "Jesus said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" The man whose eyes Christ had opened, answered and said, "Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him?"
Between him and the shimmering desert came the memory of his brother's face, and Heraklas forgot Ptahtanen, and cried out again in desperation. His eyes strained toward the desert. Somewhere in its depths, his twin brother Timokles, the being whom of all on earth Heraklas most loved, lived, or perhaps, in the brief week that had elapsed since he was snatched from his Alexandrian home, had died.
Before the great temple of Ceres in the southeast quarter of the city, the crier stood on the steps of the portico, and proclaimed his invitation: "All ye who are clean of hands and pure of heart, come to the sacrifice! All ye who are guiltless in thought and deed, come to the sacrifice!" Among the passing people, the lad Heraklas shrank back.
There descended softly into the hold two men, one bearing a light. Heraklas drew back farther into the darkness. The men passed on, their light held so that Heraklas did not see their faces. But the hasty glimpse that the lad had of his surroundings told him that the beast he had crept away from was a lion that was securely caged in one portion of the hold.
Athribis' head vanished instantly, and Heraklas, snatching the papyrus, wound it closely, and thrust it into his garments. He hastily replaced the loose brick. No safe place for the papyrus would the hole be, hereafter. When he met Athribis afterwards in a corridor, Heraklas felt his heart beat more quickly against the hidden roll. But the lad was stern in outward semblance. "Athribis!" he said.
Suddenly Heraklas, attracted perhaps by the silent force that lies in a human gaze; lifted his head from his reading, and glanced upward. Athribis had not time to start aside. The eyes of the two met in a long, piercing gaze! Heraklas sprang to his feet. The papyrus fell, on the loose brick beside him.
"Yet why hideth he here?" The supposed sign of the tau rolled in sight again, as Heraklas shifted the papyrus. Heraklas had discovered the papyrus when it hung from the palm in the court. Seeing the character of the writing, he had kept the roll for secret perusal. He conjectured that the thief, supposed to have been on the roof, might have dropped the roll.
Heraklas was to enter into Alexandria at the earliest dawn and was, if possible, to send a message to his mother. He was to obtain an amount of food, such as he could carry without exciting suspicion, and was to met his brother and Philo at the appointed place on the sea-shore. Then they were to flee. Heraklas went with the others a little way. It seemed as if he could not part from Timokles.
He remembered what the Egyptians were wont to say, when on the nineteenth day of the first month, they ate honey and eggs in honor of Thoth: "How sweet a thing is truth!" Heraklas murmured with a heavy sigh, "Timokles told me he had found 'the truth' O Timokles, is thy 'truth' sweet to thee now? Oh, my brother, my brother!"
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