"Happened! Things have come to a pretty pass there, and you'll hear of
it soon enough. Do you think I should have left house and grandchildren
at my age,--going on for eighty,--like any Greek or Phoenician vagabond,
and come out among these godless foreigners (the gods blast and destroy
them!), if I could possibly have staid on in Egypt?"

"But tell me what it's all about."

"Some other time, some other time. Now you must take me to your own
house, and I won't stir out of it as long as we are in this land of
Typhon."

The old man said this with so much emphasis, that Nebenchiari could not
help smiling and saying: "Have they treated you so very badly then, old
man?"

"Pestilence and Khamsin!" blustered the old man.

[The south-west wind, which does so much injury to the crops in the
Nile valley. It is known to us as the Simoom, the wind so perilous
to travellers in the desert.]

"There's not a more good-for-nothing Typhon's brood on the face of the
earth than these Persians. I only wonder they're not all red-haired and
leprous. Ah, child, two whole days I have been in this hell already, and
all that time I was obliged to live among these blasphemers. They said
no one could see you; you were never allowed to leave Nitetis' sick-bed.
Poor child! I always said this marriage with a foreigner would come to
no good, and it serves Amasis right if his children give him trouble.