Now let me go home!" A few hours later Ameni sent to invite the Regent to breakfast.
"Do you know who the witch Hekt is ?" asked Ani.
"Certainly--how should I not know?
She is the singer Beki--the former enchantress of Thebes.

May I ask what her communications were ?" Ani thought it best not to confide the secret of Pentaur's birth to the high-priest, and answered evasively.

Then Ameni begged to be allowed to give him some information about the old woman, and how she had had a hand in the game; and he related to his hearer, with some omissions and variations--as if it were a fact he had long known--the very story which a few hours since he had overheard, and learned for the first time.

Ani feigned great astonishment, and agreed with the high-priest that Paaker should not for the present be informed of his true origin.
"He is a strangely constituted man," said Ameni, "and he is not incapable of playing us some unforeseen trick before he has done his part, if he is told who he is." The storm had exhausted itself, and the sky, though covered still with torn and flying clouds, cleared by degrees, as the morning went on; a sharp coolness succeeded the hot blast, but the sun as it mounted higher and higher soon heated the air.

On the roads and in the gardens lay uprooted trees and many slightly-built houses which had been blown down, while the tents in the strangers' quarter, and hundreds of light palm-thatched roofs, had been swept away.
The Regent was returning to Thebes, and with him went Ameni, who desired to ascertain by his own eyes what mischief the whirlwind had done to his garden in the city.