Tonight I read 20 pages of a book by G. A. Henty. It’s a story about ancient Egypt called “The Cat of Bubastes”. It started out with a people called the Rebu. The prince of the Rebu is the main part of the story so far, where I am in the book, and his name is Amuba. The Egyptians attack the Rebu and win. During the fight the King gets shot with an arrow and dies. The mom kills herself by drinking poison because she didn’t want to be a slave of the Egyptians. They take the Amuba and a friend of his who is an adult his name is Jethro. They get taken to Egypt and are made to serve in the temples and then sold to a man with a son, wife, and daughter. They have a ton of animals. Amuba learns all kinds of Egyptian thinking and how they do stuff. He learns how to hunt different animals and kills a Neboot. A cat of Bubastes got sick and died (the Egyptians considered cats sacred and if someone had killed one they must die even if it was an accident). The priests went to search for another cat take its place but it had to be magnificent. They chose the cat of the priest’s daughter. Now to what I read tonight: the two boys, Amuba and Chebron (the son of the priest), both went to kill a hawk that had been eating some of their animals. Both of them went to the place where the animals were kept and brought their bows to kill the hawk. Amuba hit the hawk and killed it but Chebron missed and hit a tree and the arrow bounced off the tree and killed the cat chosen to be the Cat of Bubastes. Chebron, worried that he would be put to death, stood there so still that you would think he has a statue. Amuba, who did not know the discipline for killing a sacred animal, asked “what’s the matter?” Chebron explained the consequences of killing a sacred animal. Amuba buried the cat and leveled the ground and then wiped all the blood up while Chebron went to tell his father Ameres. Later Ameres (The Priest) taught the boys about God and how they had been worshiping false gods. He told them all about the Israelites. When Chebron’s sister came home she said the cat is missing. So she made a huge search party to begin a search for the cat.
I’ll let you know what happens when I read the rest.
