Читать книгу The Pharaoh and the Priest - Bolesław Prus - Страница 6

[1] Authentic speech of a slave.

“He wishes that this canal be not filled in,” said Eunana.

Herhor shrugged his shoulders and pushed toward the place where they were filling the canal. Then the despairing man seized his feet.

“Away with this creature!” cried his worthiness, pushing back as before the bite of a reptile.

The secretary, Pentuer, turned his head; his lean face had a grayish color. Eunana seized the man by the shoulders and pulled, but, unable to drag him away from the minister’s feet, he summoned warriors. After a while Herhor, now liberated, passed to the other bank of the canal, and the warriors tore away the earth-worker, almost carrying him to the end of the detachment. There they gave the man some tens of blows of fists, and subalterns who always carried canes gave him some tens of blows of sticks, and at last threw him down at the entrance to the ravine.

Beaten, bloody, and above all terrified, the wretched slave sat on the sand for a while, rubbed his eyes, then sprang up suddenly and ran groaning toward the highway,—

“Swallow me, O earth! Cursed be the day in which I saw the light, and the night in which it was said, ‘A man is born!’ In the mantle of justice there is not the smallest shred for a slave. The gods themselves regard not a creature whose hands are for labor, whose mouth was made only for weeping, and whose back is for clubs. O death, rub my body into ashes, so that there, beyond on the fields of Osiris, I be not born into slavery a second time.”