Mara, Daughter of the Nile (35 page)

Eagerly Mara sat erect and peered through the swaying curtains. They were moving down a broad street lined with sycamores, toward the imposing gates of a great white wall. Beyond the wall she could see groves and a spreading roof, the plumes of tall palms waving in the breeze. And still beyond, over all, shone the clear, pink sky of morning …

Even as the chair passed under the last sycamore and through the gates, a great procession of chanting, scarlet-robed priests was winding up the East Avenue toward the palace, trailing the fragrance of myrrh. Nuit, the Great Mother, making her stately way westward to the dark of the underworld, paused at the perfume and the joyous noise, and glanced over a starry shoulder. Something unusual was happening in the Black Land; but her duties were over and she was sleepy. She moved away, blinking, as the great doors of the throne room were thrown open and the procession passed inside, followed by a throng of cheering, white-clad Thebans who filled the streets and ferries and wharfs as far back as she could see.

Then the stars went out, for the bark of Ra, in fiery splendor, burst out of the East. Sunshine flooded the wide desert and the long, green valley of the Nile. The night was over; a new day had dawned for the land of Egypt.

About This Book

Rear Cover

Publication Info

PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.SA.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182—190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

First published by Coward McCann 1953
Published in Puffin Books 1985

38 39 40

Copyright © Eloise Jarvis McGraw, 1953
Copyright renewed © Eloise Jarvis McGraw, 1981
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Lino Bodoni Book

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McGraw, Eloise Jarvis.
Mara, daughter of the Nile.
Originally published: New York: Coward McCann, 1953.
Summary: The adventures of an ingenious Egyptian
slave girl who undertakes a dangerous assignment as a spy
in the royal palace of Thebes, in the days
when Queen Hatshepsut ruled.
[1. Egypt—History—To 332 B.C.—Fiction]
I. Title.
PZ7.M1696Mar 1985 [Fic] 85-567 ISBN 014 03.1929 8

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hire out, or otherwise
circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Reading Level 8.1

Version Info

v 1.0 HTML

• Scanned and proofed 2010-02-22
  
• Changes / Corrections to the printed book
  
  • forbidden words / words.
    
  • “‘Ai, ai / “Ai, ai
    
• Inconsistent capitalization
  
  • Main Gate / main gate
    
• Inconsistent italics
  
  • deben
    
• Inconsistent spelling
  
  • silver-workers / gold workers
    
  • half-brother / half brother
    
  • water-clock / water clock
    
  • eye-paint / eye paint
    
• Ambiguous hyphenation
  
  • flag-staffs