This note and her mother's she gave to the weeping Mandane, and begged
her to give both to Cambyses when she was gone. She then fell on her
knees and prayed to the gods of her fathers to forgive her for her
apostasy from them.

Mandane begged her to remember her weakness and take some rest, but she
answered: "I do not need any sleep, because, you know, I have such little
waking-time still left me."

As she went on praying and singing her old Egyptian hymns, her heart
returned more and more to the gods of her fathers, whom she had denied
after such a short struggle. In almost all the prayers with which she
was acquainted, there was a reference to the life after death. In the
nether world, the kingdom of Osiris, where the forty-two judges of the
dead pronounce sentence on the worth of the soul after it has been
weighed by the goddess of truth and Thoth, who holds the office of writer
in heaven, she could hope to meet her dear ones again, but only in case
her unjustified soul were not obliged to enter on the career of
transmigration through the bodies of different animals, and her body,
to whom the soul had been entrusted, remained in a state of preservation.
This, "if" filled her with a feverish restlessness. The doctrine that
the well-being of the soul depended on the preservation of the earthly
part of every human being left behind at death, had been impressed on her
from childhood. She believed in this error, which had built pyramids and
excavated rocks, and trembled at the thought that, according to the
Persian custom, her body would be thrown to the dogs and birds of prey,
and so given up to the powers of destruction, that her soul must be
deprived of every hope of eternal life. Then the thought came to her,
should she prove unfaithful to the gods of her fathers again, and once