33 CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Thy arrogance confounds me. Surely a man would not dare to defy by such a speech the combined might of State and priests. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON That may be. But I dare. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD We shall see for how long. (To the crowd) So ye all wish to die for the “criminal’s “sake? HORMOSE We are prepared to die for truth. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD That is to say, for thine own pride. For no one knows where truth doth lie—not even thou, O priest of the forbidden god. In the meantime, listen, ye all, to what I have to say. SEBEKHETEP (Drawing the CAPTAIN apart) We were not sent here to make speeches, Master. We were told to bring back the lot of them in chains, if they did not renounce the heresy. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD (Apart, to SEBEKHETEP) They will renounce it speedily. The maiden, it is true, glories in insolence. But she will come to terms in time, as all the others. Set thy mind at rest. I know these

34 people: in spite of their high-sounding talk, they are just like the rest of men and women. SEBEKHETEP Just like the rest of men? What dost thou mean? Surely we who are faithful to the creed and customs of our fathers, and who obey the law, are worth much more than this foul gang of rebels and blasphemers? CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD I meant but this: like nearly all men, these fear pain even more than death, and love their families more than the novelties of which they boast. Our gods and families together stand or fall, for we profess the faith of our fathers, while they do not. Our gods and our blood speak the same tongue, while theirs do not. Thou shalt see for thyself, when the time comes for them to choose, how easy it is to win them back to the good old beliefs of our race, which is their own. (To the crowd) Do ye know what death those are to meet who persist in defying Pharaoh’s orders? ABNEBA What will be done to us? CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD I am not here to tell thee. But thou knowest the law: a tax-collector, guilty of exaction, has now his nose cut off; while a soldier who steals that which is Pharaoh’s property, is beaten with a hundred blows. Supporters of a public enemy,

35 your guilt is by far greater than that of bribetaker or thief, or harsh oppressor of the poor. Your punishment shall be more terrible than theirs—that I can say. HORMOSE Still I resist an unjust decree. ABNEBA And so do I. SUTA And so do I. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON And so do I. Glory to Him-Who-lives-in-Truth for ever! CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Think twice, fair renegade; think twice before thou speakest. Thy father was a priest of Amon, king of gods; also a man of royal blood, counting among his ancestors the great Seqenen-ra, who fought our foreign conquerors and was in battle slain. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Glory to Him-Who-lives-in-Truth, Nefer-kheperu-ra, Beautiful Essence of the Sun! There is none greater than He, both Lord of many lands, and Teacher of the Way of Life. I owe allegiance to Him alone! CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD And thou art ready to be scourged and torn and disfigured, for what thou namest “truth”?

36 ONE OF THE DISCIPLES Torn and disfigured . . . ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Not for the truth alone, but also for the pleasure of stamping upon the papyrus of unrecorded history, for ever and ever, as my seal, a sign of love for Him; and also for the thrill of answering His foes defiantly until the end. ONE OF THE DISCIPLES Torn and disfigured . . . (To the CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD) Thou threatenest us with worse than death. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Submit to Pharaoh’s orders, and thou shalt live. ONE OF THE DISCIPLES Alas, we cannot but yield to fear and submit to the power that crushes us. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Ye pack of slaves! Why did ye ever pretend to love Him? CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD (To the SOLDIERS) Lead them unto Neferhetep, the High Priest of Amon, and say: “They have submitted, and repent, and no longer belong to the ‘heretic’s’ gang.” ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Shame!

37 CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Hold thy peace! SCENE II. (CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD; ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON, HORMOSE, ABNEBA, SEBEKHETEP, SUTA) CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD (Apart, to SEBEKHETEP) Now, watch the rest of them, and believe me when I speak. (To the others) So ye do not fear death, or pain. But shall I say that diligent informers have made disquieting reports about two men ye know: Setnakht, the high official, and another dignitary whose name is Ptahotep? ABNEBA My first-born! SUTA My old father! ABNEBA I fail to understand. All my sons have, for years, returned to the old faith. They even have renounced the names which I had given them at birth, severing themselves completely from our fold. What is this spy’s report? SUTA I also cannot grasp the meaning of this hint about my aged father. More staunch supporter of Amon and all the gods of Egypt the land has never borne. It is against his will that I am here.

38 He hates Him Whom I serve in secret. Yet I love him. He is my father. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Well, well. But that will save neither of them. If every evil-doer who hates that greater “criminal” whom we are not to name were free, there would be no need of jails within the land of Egypt—for the whole country hates Him thoroughly. Thy son, O woman, has been found guilty of bribery. I know it well, for all the spies work under me. Now, of any official thus convicted, Pharaoh said: “It shall be counted against him as a capital crime.” And thy father, young man, has been discovered to exact money from the poor by foul processes, for which misdeed the punishment is mutilation and exile. ABNEBA O great one, spare my son! Intervene! Withhold the sword of justice! Allow me to see the friends I have at court, and ask of them what can be done! CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Thou forgettest thou art thyself under arrest. SUTA O master, intervene! Do not allow that shame and suffering of my old father! Have mercy upon him! CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD It is within my power to intervene. Setnakht and Ptahotep, can yet be allowed to go in peace

39 without the king suspecting anything of their ill deeds. Neither of them is yet under arrest, and if I like, neither will ever be. But tell me, both of you, why should I care to please rebels and enemies of Pharaoh and of all the gods? In my stern duties I might be as obstinate as ye in your allegiance to the “heretic.” ABNEBA O great one, if my son be spared, I shall return to the old gods—the gods of our land—according to Pharaoh’s command. SUTA O great one, if thou wilt but spare my aged father, I too will submit. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Shame! CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Hold thy peace, woman! I am not dealing with thee. (To the two others) Will ye, indeed? . . . and go at once and bow down to those gods, whom just a while ago ye had declared to be products of ignorance and superstition? ABNEBA (With lowered eyes) I yield, not joyfully, but to a dire necessity that overpowers me, accepting the lesser of two great evils. Yes, I shall go and do what thou hast said, but knowing all the time that those gods of our fathers are mere symbols.

40 CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD We all know that ourselves. Symbols are useful things—things without which a nation cannot live. ABNEBA These never were of any use to me. I shall only be accomplishing a gesture without meaning. And I say so, that all may know that I am no deceiver. What can I do, if it is the only way to save my son? But I will never forget the light which I have seen and loved. O Akhnaton, my King! ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Take not His sacred name in vain, and pretend not to love Him, when, thou art ready to yield to His foes to save a renegade. ABNEBA A renegade—a misled man—but he is my son. Zetut, thou never wast a mother. Thou never wast even a wife. Thou knowest not the true significance of love and life. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON I love Him. That alone I know. That is enough for me. SUTA Because thy father stood against Him, thou dost not cherish his memory. Thou art apart from the rest of mankind.

41 ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON So much the worse for mankind. ABNEBA He Himself, He Whom thou lovest so, would understand us and forgive us, if He were here. For He was human. There was no strange excess in Him. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON And yet He never compromised. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Enough, I have not come to hear thee praise the “heretic.” Enough. (To ABNEBA and SUTA) For the last time: are ye two people ready to obey the law, or not? I have no time to waste. ABNEBA I said: I shall obey. I yield reluctantly; yet I do yield . . . for the sake of my son. SUTA I yield, for the sake of my father. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Well, I shall keep my word. (To SUTA) The old man will be glad to see thee once again a worshipper of Amon, the mighty king of gods. (To ABNEBA) And thou wilt soon forget thy reluctance among thy sons and grandsons, no longer grieved by any threat of death. (To SOLDIERS) Lead them both to Neferhetep.

42 SCENE III. (The CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD; HORMOSE; ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON) CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD The “criminal’s” following is growing, I am afraid, more and more scanty. (To HORMOSE) What is, in thy opinion, the cause of such a rapid disaffection among thy people, O wise one? HORMOSE Just human weakness. They love themselves and love their kith and kin more than the truth. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD And why? We would link our truth with our kith and kin, and call it “wisdom of our fathers,” and die for it, if it were necessary. And thus dying for it, we would feel as though we were dying for them. HORMOSE The truth is one. That which thou callest “truth” is no truth whatsoever. To name it “ancient wisdom” will not help. It is but superstition—or at the most, mythology: symbols, biding reality from the minds and hearts of men. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Or perhaps revealing it to them the only way they can possibly grasp it. Men require symbols. The truth is one, thou sayest. We say the same, and so did our wise fathers, long, long ago. But

43 each race has to grasp eternal truth through myths, slowly evolved by its own genius. Our religion is the natural creation of our race. But thine is the mad dream of one Individual. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Ours is the one, true natural religion of all the living: men, beasts, birds, and even plants; the joyful song of all that breathes upon earth to the One Sun, to the One God. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Yet the conscious creation of one Individual; and not the long patient, anonymous expression of millions; not the dream of a whole race. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON It is the unconscious dream, the latent joy, the hidden praise of all the living glad to live—the Song of Life, masterfully intoned by Him Who is the culmination and the flower of it all: the Individual for Whom, as He hath said Himself, “all creatures have been raised” from time without beginning. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Man has his share in what thou callest “Song of Life,” through the worship he offers to the gods of his fathers. It is, however, upon these the “heretic” waged war. HORMOSE He allowed the common folk to worship them within their homes. But He thought He could

44 raise the better men of Egypt above the ties of land and time, and create, with their help, a new mankind—a mankind free from childish fears; needing no misty hopes, no myths, no abstruse symbols; glad; able to face the bright, bare truth, as the eagle gazes at the Sun: able to live by it, strong and detached and kind, loving all creatures in the common Parent, living at peace with them, as with itself; a mankind enjoying without guilt the splendour of its natural home—this world—and dying in beauty, when the hour comes, without remorse, without regret. He failed—for none were strong enough to follow Him. None had the eagle’s eyes to face the Sun; none had the eagle’s wings to soar above both fear and hope, and age-old customs, all alone, within the clear transparent sky, abyss of light. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON He is in advance of our times; He is in advance of many barbaric ages yet to come. But wait until the world has perished before thou sayest, “He failed.” As children grow, and their old clothes become too small for them, so men might feel, one day, that they have grown, and cast off superstition, and come to Him. HORMOSE New barbarisms, in course of time, and new foolish beliefs, will take the place of the old ones. But myths and symbols, I am afraid, humans will always need; and the ethics of nearly all the men of any time, will always be the ethics of the land in which they live. The joyous Teaching, resting on no hopes or threats, or customs; the Teaching

45 of integral, active love towards all living things just for the sake of life’s own beauty, Akhnaton’s Teaching is, I am afraid, too perfect for the world. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD But is it not the aim of all religion to lift man to the awareness of the truth? HORMOSE It should be so. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD And thou thyself admittest that man-made similes and myths are necessary to that end; that hopes and fears are necessary too? And thou acknowledgest also how difficult a task it is, for an average man, to live up to a creed that both his kith and kin and all his fellow-men reject? HORMOSE I do. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Then thou confessest that the “heretic” had dreamed an impossible dream and schemed in vain his frenzied war on all our old traditions? HORMOSE I do.—And yet I know He taught the only truth that will survive traditions, however old they be the everlasting Truth that dominates them all. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON The world’s last great Ones will turn back their thoughts to Him and say: “He is our Master.”

46 CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Provided He is not forgotten long before their times, as I hope He will be. His Teaching may well be the same ultimate truth hidden in many age-old myths. His God, Who is the same as Ra, may be the One behind all gods, Whom we also bow down to. We do not deny that. We fight in Him the Man who rose against tradition, against His race, against mankind; the stray Individual Who has no roots in any soil, no past in any age, no future, no meaning, no place; the Individual Who may be great, but Who is nobody, because He is only Himself . . . ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON . . . Who is the everlasting Soul of all the living, singing to the Sun the joy of life upon the shores of time, for ever and for ever. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Hold thy peace, woman! (To HORMOSE) Thou thyself hast pointed out the weaknesses of the forbidden creed. Wilt thou not submit to the king, and cease calling thyself, “High Priest of Aton”? HORMOSE I cannot but revere my Master in my heart. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Revere Him to thy heart’s content. All that we want of thee is silence. All that we want of thee is that thou shouldst no more perform the rites of the forbidden cult in public.

47 HORMOSE And before whom could I perform them now? The few who still loved Akhnaton have all, excepting one, been scared into obedience and drawn back to the many gods. It is no use defying Pharaoh for the sake of sheer defiance. But do not ask me to praise gods that mean nothing to me. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Nothing is asked of thee but silence—ever more. And thou shalt be allowed to live in peace in thine own house. Thou knowest human weakness too well to try to spread the Teaching of the “heretic” among thy neighbours. Therefore thou art not dangerous. I shall not uselessly make a martyr of thee. Go. (HORMOSE goes out) ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON (As he goes) O once-revered father, how can the thought of worthless men and their hearts needs be of such a weight in thine eyes? How canst thou love mankind at large, its weakness and mediocrity, more than thou lovest Him? Alas! SCENE IV. (THE CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD; ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON) CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Thou art alone, Zetut-Neferu-Aton. See: all have yielded to facts and to good sense, save thee. Wilt thou remain alone, stubborn in thy decision, defying not merely Pharaoh’s stern command but

48 the spirit of our race, and, what is more, the very laws of human nature? ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON I do not yield to facts. Facts I create. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD O grand-daughter of kings, most surely pride befits thee. But what facts canst thou now create, alone and powerless? ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON The real history of my life—a thing of beauty, a thing no power can efface; a thing that will have been, for ever. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD The history of a life that thou art soon to lose, if thou persistest in thy folly; the history of a life of which, to say the least, thou shalt spend all the years within a prison-pit, in loneliness, in gloom, in dreariness, in sorrow, and in oblivion . . . while the world will go its way, indifferent to all thy lofty dreams. O, think of it I Day after day, month after month, year after year . . . to live, and never to see the Sun. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Never to see the Sun . . . perhaps. And yet to stand for Him Who is for ever like the Sun, while the whole world has turned from Him, forsaken Him, forgotten Him; to be the only one whom His powerful enemies could neither buy nor frighten, nor coax into obedience; the last one to

49 love Him; also to know—not to imagine, nor believe, not to hope, but to know—that this one fact, which I created, is everlasting as a fact; is the one monument erected to His glory, no monarch’s orders can tear down; the act of love no force on earth nor in high heaven can undo. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD It is no compensation for all thou losest by persisting in the worship of that “criminal.” ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Do not insult my King, if thou wishest to have any reply from me. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Pardon me; for, personally, I do not hate Him. To speak thus is just a mere habit, which became general in all the land ever since the days of King Tutankhamon. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Accursed land, that has preferred the yoke of a self-seeking priestly gang to the leadership of the One-Who-lives-in-Truth! Well, speak: what do I lose? What can I lose? What is there in the world, which I can value more than the pleasure of loving Him? CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Zetut . . . speak not as would a frenzied woman. For thou art young and fair, and lovelier to look upon than any other maiden. Tell me: what dost thou mean, when thou sayest thou “lovest” Him?

50 He is dead, and the dead have no feelings. His great dreams are all dead with Him. His creed is dead, or rather never was alive; and never can it be revived as the creed of a nation. Revere Him in thy thoughts as a man above men—as a god, if that word, can add to thy contentment. But turn thy heart to things that count: to real things; to living human love; to power also, for which I know thou cravest. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON No love ever counted for me but His. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Zetut, I have been admiring all the time thy pride and eloquence, and above all, thy beauty. I love thee. I am also a descendant of kings, and I enjoy great influence. Keep thy faith in thy heart. I am no enemy of any faith. Just pay to the gods of the state a mere outward homage; and link thy destiny to mine. Become the lady of my house . . . and I shall give thee power, beyond that which thou canst expect ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON It would not be the power to reconstruct His City and to restore His cult. It would not be the power to give Him back the land from end to, end; the power to crush His enemies; the power to rule, and, in His name, and for His greatest glory, to change the laws that give the bulk of men their sense of good and evil. Therefore I do not want it. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Zetut . . . why dost thou love Him so?

51 ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON I do not know. All I can say is that I cannot think of my own self apart from Him. He is the only Man of whom I ever could speak thus. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD But He is dead. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON That makes no difference to me. For me, He is alive. Just as the fiery Orb, from which He doth proceed, fills the whole earth with heat and light and causes it to bloom, so doth He fill my being with the bliss of love and immortality . . . But more I cannot say. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Why dost thou blush? Why hast thee in thine eyes that sudden light I cannot bear to see? I do not grasp the meaning of thy words. Or rather, I dimly perceive in them a meaning I dare not admit to myself, lest I become the bitterest foe of Him Whom thou adorest as much as the Sun—if not more. My last request to thee is that thou shouldst depart from here before Neferhetep’s arrival. He is to come, with other priests, and curse thy King upon the ruins of this place. Thou canst do nothing to prevent the deed—neither can I. But I have orders to remain, while thou art free to go. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON I shall remain—however much the horrid sight will cost me. I shall remain, and stand against

52 the tide, and to the last defend alone this holy spot; resist, resist until I fall . . . for Him, and for the pleasure of being bold and beautiful in action as in speech. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Zetut . . . They come! I entreat thee: go. Stand not, for all the might of priesthood and of state to crush thee. Thy life is dear to me. ZETUT-NEFERU-ATON Not to myself; not when the men who hate my Lord exult in triumph, and I can do no more for Him than to assert my love in ready fearless death. CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD Zetut! End of Act II.