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a stiff little false beard strapped to his chin. 
    “Well?” he said, and I struck a chord on my lyre and sang to him of the lands beyond Egypt that he had never known, king though he was of the mightiest of realms. 
    I sang to him of Hellas, its great jagged mountains and green plains and cool swift rivers, and of the islands about it in the sea that sparkled in the sunlight like his pendant. I sang of Troy, and of the war that had not happened yet, but would. I sang him Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; I sang him invincible Achilles and valiant Hector; I sang him Helen and Paris and Menelaus; I sang him Heracles and Icarus and Perseus, Theseus and Prometheus and King Oedipus. I sang him Zeus and Apollo and Poseidon and Dionysus. Then I sang to him of the mysterious humid jungles of Africa and the giant predatory beasts that prowl their vine-entangled paths. I sang of the Hyperborean lands that I would visit in a later year, that time when I would sail with Odysseus, those dark water-girt lands, densely forested and green with rain, where the people are as tall as this Pharaoh is short and as fair and golden as he is dusky, and the summer days never end and cold thick snow falls from the bleak gray sky in the wintry time of little light. I sang of the far lands I have seen in dreams, where the yellow-skinned shaven-headed emperors dine with sticks of ivory on vessels of bronze and clothe their daughters in garments of silk. I sang to him of mighty Rome that is yet to come, and of the even mightier empires that will come still farther on in time, in a day when men will fly through the air and journey to other worlds. I even sang to him of those other worlds. I had never sung so long nor so well in all my days. But I was not so much singing for him as I was for myself, for I needed to sing my way into Egypt in order to heal myself of my sorrow, and as I sang I knew I was conquering him and would thus in time conquer even my own intense and nearly unconsolable grief. 
    He listened without a word, gripping the sides of his golden throne so hard his arms began to tremble. When I stopped he pointed at my lyre with the flail-scepter and said, “What is that thing? How is it made?” 
    “It is made of a frame and a sounding-board and strings,” I said. 
    He beckoned with the scepter and I put the lyre in his hands and he swept his fingers across the strings and made an ugly discordant sound. 
    “No,” I said. “Like this.” I took it from him and sang him the first song of Orpheus and Eurydice, the happy one, the song of meeting and loving, and he began to weep. Great glossy tears ran down his fleshless face and vanished into the coarse bristles of that false beard. He seemed bewildered, as though he had never wept before: I think that was so. For he was a man of stone, if he was a man at all, this Pharaoh of Egypt. He was not accustomed to weeping. He maintained a godlike facade, and I think he believed, much of the time, in the reality of his own divinity, though behind that facade there was, I suppose, a real man, with all the doubts and fears and turmoils that real men have. Only through my music could I reach past the stony facade to the man within. 
    “Sing another,” he said. 
    So I sang him the second song of Orpheus and Eurydice, the song of her death, and he wept again, though it was a different sort of weeping and it bewildered him even more. I sang him the song of my finding her. I sang him the song of my losing her again. Then he had had enough; the experience of feeling strong emotion was something new to him, I knew, and my singing brought him pain along with delight. 
    “You will make such instruments of music for us,” said Pharaoh. “You will teach us the art.” 
    I pressed my hand to my breast in acknowledgment of the command.

9
    Pharaoh grew fond of me. I became a member of his court, the familiar of his high priests and viziers. Each night when the furious sun dropped into the western desert