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Updated: June 7, 2025
"O my brother! my brother!" murmured Heraklas, the tears running down his face in the dark, "I am Heraklas! I, too, am a Christian!" "Heraklas!" cried Timokles, "Heraklas! How camest thou hither?" "Peace!" whispered Heraklas in terror. "Thou wilt be heard!" Heraklas cast his arms about his brother and clung to him.
He could hear the sound of feet above him and the laughter of men who, no doubt, were drinking on this almost their last night in port. A sound came from another portion of the hold, and Heraklas listened, trying to discover whether the living being in that direction were a beast or a person. While he listened, a faint light began to shine in the hold.
Timokles and the other two had been considered weaker in body, or else the persons who secured the Christians had been in haste to join the reveling of the mariners, and had thought cords strong enough. Yet what availed it that the feet of any of the Christians were free, if their bodies were securely bound? "Thou hast done all thou canst, Heraklas," whispered Timokles. "Go now, my brother.
Then Heraklas, helpless in his misery, raised his hands with the palms outward before him, after the custom of an Egyptian in prayer, and addressed him whom the Egyptians thought the maker of the sun, the god Phthah, "the father of the beginnings," "the first of the gods of the upper world."
It was only after long labor with his knife around this staple that it shook a little in its hold on the wall. Then Heraklas seized the staple, and swung his whole weight upon it, and dug his knife into the wall like a madman. He worked with perspiration standing on his forehead, his breath coming in pants.
One after another the three fugitives finally slipped into the water. Heraklas bore up Timokles, who swam but weakly. The third Christian was feeble, but he made headway, and in slow fashion they came at length to the docks of Alexandria. By this time it was long past midnight.
"Isis and Osiris bless thee!" wished the suppliant. Heraklas' lips parted to answer. Should he, who had been blessed of the Lord, seem to accept the blessing of idols? But the beggar turned to another giver, and Heraklas hurried on his way. Before he could reach home, a sacred procession came in sight.
Then, tradition said, there had arisen a dreadful tempest of hail and lightning, that destroyed the murderous heathen. Was the Christian God greater than Serapis, the great deity of Egypt? Such thinking sent Heraklas back again to study the papyrus of John's Gospel. And now Athribis wearied, waiting for Heraklas' reading to end.
Heraklas flung himself on a seat covered by a leopard's skin, and gazed moodily upward at the palm-leaves, one or two of which stirred faintly under the slight wind that came from a corridor, whither the wooden wind-sails, sloping boards commonly fixed over the terraces of the upper portions of Egyptian houses, had conducted the current of air.
And he must stay here, polishing a corridor's pavement, when such things, were being done in the streets! His dark eyes glanced back again. Heraklas' head was bowed. Stealthily Athribis passed out of sight of the court. He threaded his way through corridors. "Whither goest thou?" asked another slave by the threshold.
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