"Such being the case," continued the judge, "I find you guilty and sentence you to hard labor in the mines for the rest of your life. Next case."
They hustled me away to a cell. A few days later, I found myself one of a gang of fifty-odd convicts on their way to the mines of Upper Egypt, with a squad of soldiers to guard us. We, walked the whole two hundred-odd leagues. It took us a month and a half, into late Mounychion. At least, I think that was the time, albeit I lost track of the days.
Each convict had a fetter cold-forged around his right ankle. A chain was threaded through a large ring in each fetter and secured by a padlock through the last link. Since I was the largest man in the gang, I was given the last position on the chain, so that I could carry the padlock.
Up the Nile we trudged, past Memphis with its pyramids and its palm groves, and on into Upper Egypt. We had to march in step to avoid tripping over the chain. With each stride, fifty-odd right feet lifted the chain into the air and dropped it back into the dust with a clank. The soldiers and their officer did not treat us with any special brutality, but neither did they make any allowances. When a couple of elderly convicts collapsed and could go no further, the soldiers unshackled them, knocked them on the head, and threw the bodies into the Nile, where I suppose the crocodiles made short work of them.
At Koptos, we left the Nile for a road across the desert, between the Nile and the Red Sea. The heat was fearful. To keep us from collapse, the soldiers let us sleep in the shade of the boulders during the heat of the day and marched us most of the night.
At last we came to the rocky hills that sundered Egypt from Ethiopia. Here were heavily guarded stockades, which spread out for many furlongs. My gang clanked into one of these stockades. The gate slammed shut behind us, and I heard the heavy wooden bolt on the outside shot home.
People swarmed inside the stockade. They were mostly men, but there were also women and children, working the gold-bearing ore. Most were completely naked. All were filthy, and the men had long hair and beards. The women were such bedraggled creatures that, even in my lecherous youth, I do not think that the sight of them would have aroused my lusts. Supposing that Hippalos had received a sentence like mine, I kept looking for him but did not see him.
The officer in charge of us unlocked the padlock on the end af our chain, and we were unshackled and presented to a civilian official. This man asked each of us what language we spoke. I said:
"Greek."
"Any others?"
"Scythian, and a little Syrian and Indian."
"You shall go to Stockade Five, with these others. Next!"
In Stockade Five I was again lined up and looked over by is official, who said:
"You're too old and too tall for the galleries. We'll put you at the mortars. Next!"
I was taken to a large mortar and handed a sledge with a head of black basalt. Presently a naked boy of twelve approached with a basket of ore on his head. He dumped the ore into the mortar, and my overseer said:
"Now, you swine, pound that ore until it is crushed to fine gravel. Go ahead; I'll tell you when to stop."
I heaved up my sledge and brought it down on the ore. And again and again. The unfamiliar labor made my arms ache until I got the knack of it, but the instant I slowed up the overseer brought his whip down on my back.
When the ore was crushed finely enough, another boy appeared with a pail and a scoop. He scooped out the ore and took it in the pail to another part of the inclosure, where it was put into a large mill like a grist mill. Women and old men, with chains through their ankle rings, turned these mills by pushing capstan spokes round and round. The instant one of them faltered, he received a cut of the whip. Water boys trotted about with their buckets and dippers, not as a kindness, but because it was impossible in that heat to get much hard work out of men without a constant supply of water.
My overseer—unlike the officer who had marched me from Alexandria—was one of the nasty kind, who beat people for the fun of it. He was always seeking a pretext for inflicting insult or injury on his prisoners. But, even with his best efforts, he could not keep me busy all the time, because there were frequent delays between loads of ore. During these pauses, I looked about and learnt how the mining was organized.
The young, able-bodied men were sent into the underground galleries with lamps attached to their foreheads and picks and hammers in their hands, to follow the veins of gold-bearing quartz. Children gathered the ore in baskets and brought them out to the mortars. These were arranged in a long line, mine being in the middle. A score of hammers, pounding away at the same time, made a deafening racket.
The pounded ore was transferred to the mills, where it was ground to powder. Finally, this powder was taken to a large shed. There, I learned, skilled workmen separated the gold dust from the powdered rock by washing the ore down inclined wooden troughs with baffles across the bottom.
I got through the afternoon somehow. Black-skinned Nubian soldiers herded all of us in Stockade Five to a barrack, where we were lined up and served bowls of stew, big slabs of bread, and water laced with vinegar. While the food was a far cry from that served at Physkon's table in Alexandria, I have seldom tasted anything better. There is no sauce like a ravenous appetite.
After dinner we were taken in squads to the latrine and then back to barracks, where we were chained together by our ankle rings before being locked up for the night. The women were chained in a group at one end of the building. Only the children were not chained, it being assumed that each child would seek out its mother for the night.
When the guards had all gone out, leaving a hundred-odd naked convicts asprawl in their chains, I struck up acquaintance with my chain mates. The man on one side of me swore that he was no lawbreaker but had been put here by some envious kinsman, who had filed a false accusation. Perhaps; but he was a whiny sort of man whom I should not have believed no matter what he said.
My other neighbor was quite a different sort. He said he had been a burglar—"and the best mother-futtering burglar in Alexandria, too!"
"Why," I asked, "do they put all us Greek-speakers together?"
'To make it harder to escape. You see that our fornicating guards are Nubians? None knows a word of Greek, and I've never known a Hellene who spoke Nubian. Likewise you'll find the Egyptian convicts guarded by Celts, and the Judaeans bv Illyrians, and so on. So there's no chance for collusion or bribery."
"Does nobody ever escape?"
"Not since I've been here. You work, and work, and work, and at last you die, and that's that. Most of these poor slobs are glad to die. Many kill themselves."
"But not you?"
The burglar spat, "Not I! By Poseidon's prick, I can stand it. Next year, who knows? Maybe that fat-arsed King Sausage will die, and his successor will celebrate by freeing us."
"Do you really think so?"
He gave me a gap-toothed grin in the dim moonlight that came through the small, barred windows. "Dip me in dung, man, but funnier things have happened; so why not hang on to what fornicating little hope we have? While you're alive, anything can happen; but once you're dead, you're gone for good."
I would have spoken more to him, but fatigue carried me off to dreamland in the middle of a sentence.
As things fell out, I did not have to put my cheerful, foul-mouthed burglar's philosophy to the test. The second day after my arrival, I was whaling away at my mortar when I saw that a youngish man in a clean tunic and a broad-brimmed hat, with a close-cut black beard, had entered the stockade and was speaking to my overseer. Looking vaguely familiar, he was followed by a small group of men. Two were soldiers; the third was a stubby, familiar-looking shape. The overseer led the group to where I worked, saying: