As his camel paced forward, Pentaur, the purchaser, glanced back twice or thrice.
"Truly," he assured himself with much complacency, as he perceived Timokles being carried, "I follow the maxim of Ptah-hotep: 'Treat well thy people, as it behooveth thee; this is the duty of those whom the gods favor.'" As Pentaur, for that moment, thought of the dread hour when, after death, according to Egyptian belief, he should stand before the judgment-seat of Osiris, the camel-rider felt convinced that he would have merl which might stand him in good stead in that ordeal.
Little by little, Timokles regained consciousness.

He marveled to find himself carried.

He had expected to be killed where he fell.
The many painful welts of the lash's stripes stung him with keen pain.
"O mother! mother!" Timokles' heart cried silently.
Had she indeed lost all love for him, since she had told him she wished he had died rather than become a Christian?
"Lord Christ," cried Timokles' breaking heart now, "I have left all for thee!" The company pushed on rapidly.

At length, after morning with its heat had come, the party halted, and the slave who had carried Timokles flung him on the sand, the slave comforting himself that possibly the evil of the Christian's touch might be warded off by a symbolic eye of Horus that the pagan wore tied to his arm by a slender string.

Such eyes were often used by Egyptians as amulets and ornaments.
When the hot hours of the day were past, the caravan again made, ready to go on.