CHAPTER XV.

On the morning after the trial of the bow, Cambyses was seized by such a
violent attack of his old illness, that he was forced to keep his room
for two days and nights, ill in mind and body; at times raging like a
madman, at others weak and powerless as a little child.

On the third day he recovered consciousness and remembered the awful
charge he had laid on Prexaspes, and that it was only too possible he
might have executed it already. At this thought he trembled, as he had
never trembled in his life before. He sent at once for the envoy's
eldest son, who was one of the royal cup-bearers. The boy said his
father had left Memphis, without taking leave of his family. He then
sent for Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges, knowing how tenderly they loved
Bartja, and enquired after their friend. On hearing from them that he
was at Sais, he sent the three youths thither at once, charging them, if
they met Prexaspes on the way, to send him back to Memphis without delay.
This haste and the king's strange behavior were quite incomprehensible to
the young Achaemenidae; nevertheless they set out on their journey with
all speed, fearing that something must be wrong.

Cambyses, meanwhile, was miserably restless, inwardly cursed his habit of
drinking and tasted no wine the whole of that clay. Seeing his mother in
the palace-gardens, he avoided her; he durst not meet her eye.

The next eight days passed without any sign of Prexaspes' return; they
seemed to the king like a year. A hundred times he sent for the young
cup-bearer and asked if his father had returned; a hundred times he
received the same disappointing answer.