Twenty years had passed in the wilderness of sand and ruins beyond the Nile's reach. Twenty years had the hermit guarded the caves; twenty years he had watched, with some boredom, the tegmu ball balancing atop its pinnacle within the shadowed, ancient hall of the ruined sepulcher.
He was awakened from his doze by a shifting stream of sand and a clatter. The tegmu fell and rolled across the floor. The hermit lifted his head and stopped the ball with one stiff, aged paw.
They were coming!
He bolted upright. His vigil was over.
He took the tegmu and leapt across the courtyard like a cat fifteen years his junior. They were coming! Already the sand had begun to pour from the sides of the temple as the mechanism buried deep below its stones shuddered to life.
The hermit placed the glowing tegmu in a slot in the wall and the ball rolled away, down a series of tubes beneath the dunes. His life's work had finished--or had it just begun? He leaned against the sun-warmed stones and stared up at the clear, blue sky. He was not the first cat to stalk this solitary haunt. When his mother had brought him as a kitten, an old, grizzled monk had lifted him from the basket. The old man had taught him how to read the manuscripts that lay within the caverns' depths.
His master had mentioned once his own master, an elderly sand cat who had cleared the place of mice long before his time. In the grizzled monk's final days, he had taken the hermit to the deep cave beneath the hermitage. Here by the light of a guttering torch, the kitten beheld the pawprints of his predecessors, hundreds upon hundreds of cats who had come to think, to ponder the mysteries of the stars, and watch the tegmu. The hermit added his ochre pawprint beside his master's, and a few days later he was alone in the ruins.
"Herr Sahib! Mister Uzatas! Abdul Baatin!"
The hermit opened his eyes. Day had passed into night. It had been so long since he had heard his own name, he had forgotten it. Now the memory of his mother's paw on his head returned. "You are Abdul Baatin, servant of the unseen," she had named him.
"Gentlemen." Baatin's voice was rusty from lack of use, but he waved to the men in blue and yellow turbans who approached him on camelback. "The gods have been released."
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