The dregs of the army were sent for this duty in the wilderness and most
of the men bore in their faces the impress of corruption and brutality.
Those in authority on the Nile knew how to choose soldiers whose duty it
was to exercise pitiless severity against the defenceless.

At last the mines were opened and Joshua himself seized a lamp and
pressed forward into the hot galleries where the naked prisoners of
state, loaded with fetters, were hewing the copper ore from the walls.

Already he could hear in the distance the picks, whose heads were shaped
like a swallow's tail, bite the hard rock. Then he distinguished the
piteous wails of tortured men and women; for cruel overseers had followed
them into the mine and were urging the slow to greater haste.

To-day, Pharaoh's birthday, they had been driven to the temple of Hathor
on the summit of the neighboring height, to pray for the king who had
plunged them into the deepest misery, and they would have been released
from labor until the next morning, had not the unexpected attack induced
the commander to force them back into the mines. Therefore to-day the
women, who were usually obliged merely to crush and sift the ores needed
to make glass and dyes, were compelled to labor in the galleries.

When the convicts heard Joshua's shouts and footsteps, which echoed from
the bare cliffs, they were afraid that some fresh misfortune was
impending, and wailing and lamentations arose in all directions. But the
deliverer soon reached the first convicts, and the glad tidings that he
had come to save them from their misery speedily extended to the inmost
depths of the mines.