“The day after, for the country-side also be able to see the hero,
He went to inspect the city being built at Pithom.–
My book was closed from that day forward.
He went round with an officer who unfortunately
was zealous, but unintelligent. Silly man:
Silly, silly man. He found a labourer
Idling or resting, and he thought, I suppose,
“I’ll show this prince that I’m worth my position”
And beat the workman. A Jewish bricklayer.
He beat him senseless.

“And then?

“Moses turned—turned to what was going on— 
Turned himself and his world turtle. It was
As though an inward knife scraped his eyes clean.

“The General of Egypt , the Lion and the Prince 
Recognized his mother’s face in the battered body 
Of a bricklayer; saw it was not the face above
His nursery, not my face after all.
He knew his seed. And where my voice had hung till then
Now voices descending from ancestral Abraham
Congregated on him. And he killed
His Egyptian self in the self of that Egyptian 
And buried that self in the sand.”

–Christopher Fry in The Firstborn