And so it happened. Uncle Catullus thought that Caleb's suggestion was
really not bad; and so he remained on board the thalamegus with Rufus
the under-steward and a number of male and female slaves and was to go
from Apollonopolis Magna to Berenice, there to meet the quadrireme,
while Lucius, Thrasyllus and Caleb took ship in a simple barge which
brought them to Syene. Tarrar was with them; and Cora was with them.
"Cora," Lucius had asked, "do you dare undertake the journey through
the forest and the wilderness?"
"My lord, I am your slave," Cora had answered, gladly; and she had
gone with them.
"When we come back at night from hunting, Cora, you shall sing to us
under the twinkling stars of Ethiopia...."
At Syene the travellers saw the last Roman soldiers: there were always
three cohorts stationed at this spot, on the Egyptian frontier. At
Elephantina was the Little Cataract, in the middle of the river,
falling over rocky steps, across whose smooth surface the water first
shot forward quickly, to come shooting next over a rocky rampart,
roaring and clattering in a deep dive. And the travellers saw the
watermen come up from Philae in light boats and then shoot, with the
powerful, brawling stream, over the steps and raise themselves over
the rocky wall and slip, boat and all, with joyful cries, down the
waterfall into the depths; and it looked such a safe sport that first
Caleb, next Lucius, next even Cora, strapped into a little skiff,
shot the rapids, raising themselves over the wall and slipping down
the waterfall.
From Syene to Philae the journey was done in carts. There was an
end to any luxurious comfort; the road led for hundreds of stadia
through a level plain with strange big rocks, like statues of Hermes
in a Greek city, along the road. They were round and cylindrical,
like polished black stones, three on top of one another, from large
to small. The travellers were conveyed to the island in a raft of
laths and wickerwork, on which the water lapped over their feet.
"Herodotus tells us," said Thrasyllus, "that the mysterious sources
of the Nile ought to be here, near Syene and Elephantina, and that
the canal which leads to them is an abyss and a bottomless sea! But
Herodotus often tells us fairy-tales! For observe, the abyss,
the bottomless sea, is covered all over with islands; and they are
inhabited; and the sources of the Nile are certainly not here!"
At Tachampso the travellers again took a boat. But the Ethiopian
forests were now to be traversed. Lucius mounted his elephant; the
others mounted camels; more camels carried tents and luggage, of which
there was now only a little; and Caleb had hired a strongly-armed
escort of powerful Libyans and swift-footed Arabs. For, though the
Ethiopians themselves were not warlike and offered no danger to the
travellers, there were the savage races, the Troglodytae, the Blemmyes,
the Nubians, the Megabari, and, above all, the Ochthyophagi and
Macrobii, who, if they were not overawed by the sight of a strong
and numerous force, might surprise and plunder the travellers. The
civilized world ended here. This was the very end of the world. True,
on the Nile there was still Napata and the Ethiopian capital, Meroe;
but beyond that was buried the secret of the world's end, the secret
of the sources of the Nile, the secret of the horizons of the earth,
the secret of the endless sea surrounding the world. Here, in these
forests, began the temptation merely to go on and on, to go on in order
to learn what the end would be, with what temptations and with what
dread perils. Caleb told of travellers who had gone on and on and who
had seen Typhon's awful giant head appear above the edge of the world,
with gaping mouth; and he had swallowed them up. One guide had escaped
and had told it to Caleb, who said that he was worthy of belief. There
also, in the immeasurable ocean that washed the world's edge, lay
the great serpent, which coiled itself in spirals and then covered
the whole surface of the water, as far as the eye could reach, when
it came up to bask in the scorching heat of the southern sun. Once,
said Caleb, some daring travellers, who thought that the snake was
a sort of dark desert, had walked over its scales, for miles on end,
until the snake moved and they realized the terror and slipped into
the sea in which you sink and sink and sink, for three centuries,
before reaching the bottom of Typhon's Hell.
These were the terrible tales which Caleb knew how to tell, one after
the other, while the sun set over the forest and the stars twinkled
and the fires blazed high and the tents were pitched and a sheep
roasted on the spit. And Caleb made himself so much afraid and the
guards and drivers so very much afraid that, shivering with fear, they
asked Cora to sing. Then Cora would play on her harp and sing to them;
and at the sound of her voice the dread visions, the uncanny phantoms,
the giants and pygmies vanished and sleep came over them all, except
Thrasyllus, who remained awake, smiling and thoughtful, and looked
up at the stars and reflected that, thanks to his studies, he knew
the occult secret, that the world was not a disk, washed by the sea,
but a sphere, which glowed with internal fire and moved round the sun,
the centre of the universe....
It was as though a new health were making Lucius strong and
cheerful. Yes, it seemed to Thrasyllus that Lucius was no longer
thinking of Ilia and that he was cured of his carking grief. In
the Ethiopian forests, which now almost surrounded them with an
impenetrable wall of huge trees and dense foliage and tangled creepers,
he abandoned himself enthusiastically to the delights of the great
hunts which Caleb organized, with the aid of the mighty hunters
whom he had hired for his noble client. These hunters included five
Elephantophagi, with whom Lucius hunted the elephants which sometimes
pass through the forests in herds. The elephants were often shot by
archers, three of whom served one heavy bow: two men, leg forward,
held the bow; the third drew back the string; and the arrow, dipped
in snake poison, struck the elephant, who fell stunned. If the
elephant was not killed, he was surrounded with a network of ropes;
and, when he recovered consciousness, he was tamed and made to lure
other elephants. If the elephant, however, was not to be tamed and if,
after recovering his senses, he relapsed into a dangerous rage, then
he was driven, amid much shouting and yelling, against a tree, which
had purposely been sawn through at the foot. Elephants are accustomed
to rest against trees; but, as soon as the untamable elephant leant
against this tree, it fell over him and prevented him from rising, so
that he broke the bone of his leg and was killed. This often implied
cruelty, but it also implied danger; and Lucius' newly aroused manhood
found satisfaction in this robust, virile sport.
But there was also the hunting of the swift-footed ostriches,
with hunters selected from the tribe of the Struthophagi; and this
hunt provided the maddest enjoyment and excited Caleb and Tarrar in
particular; and Thrasyllus and Cora also came to look on, for it was
a most diverting spectacle, in which the hunters disguised themselves
as ostriches, with little skirts of feathers and with one hand stuck
into a stuffed ostrich-neck, with the stuffed head sticking out on
top. There were first wild bird-dances; then the hunters darted forward
and scattered corn and lured the real birds, which rushed after them
and pecked at the grains, until they were caught in ravines from
which they could find no issue and were shot with arrows. And with
their precious feathers, bleached and curled, the Struthophagi made
costly coverings, soft and white and downy, which Caleb bought for a
song to send to Alexandria and Rome, where they were a great luxury,
so that Caleb made a pretty penny by the transaction.
Sometimes there was danger in the forest. There was danger when
the Struthophagi met the Sionians, a tribe of nomads with whom they
were always at war; it was dangerous when the Acridophagi appeared,
the verminous locust-eaters; but the travellers' strong escort, the
huge Libyans and nimble Arabs, inspired respect and the wild nomads
fled at the first bow-shot. And Caleb was afraid of nobody; he feared
only the wood-nymphs, who, when they have caught you in their arms,
which are pythons, laugh and laugh into your ears, until you go mad,
and then dance round with you, until you drop dead. And, when he
lay down at night to sleep under a black ostrich-feather covering,
he also feared the scorpions, which have no fewer than four jaws and
whose bite is not fatal but produces a slow, incurable canker.
They also caught lions, in nets, and hippopotami, in pits, and wild
buffaloes, which they pursued with the huge hounds of the Cynamolgian
hunters. They hunted from tall trees and they hunted from the reeds
in the water. It was a rude and stimulating life; and Caleb once said
to Lucius, seriously, that he felt the courage to go on and to go
on again ... to fight the great snake in the ocean that encompassed
the earth....
It did not come to that, however. But the caravan was approaching
Napata and the Ethiopian emerald-mines and topaz-rocks. The
emerald-mines were like marvellous green, magic caves, in which
thousands of slaves were working; the topaz-rocks were visited at night
time: the stones, because of their yellow sheen, are almost invisible
by day, but glitter in the dark night; then little metal tubes are
planted over each stone that is found, so as to make it easier to
recognize the stones in the daytime and to grub them out. In former
ages, the Egyptian and Ethiopian kings maintained separate guards
around these mines and rocks.
At Napata, where the travellers now arrived, they saw their first
entirely native, barbarian town. There was not a word of Latin
spoken here; Lucius and Thrasyllus could not have made themselves
understood without Tarrar and Caleb; and even then the little Libyan
slave and the Sabaean guide found it difficult to grapple with the
language. The Ethiopians, who wore no clothing save the skin of some
animal round their waist, surprised the travellers by the smallness of
their stature. Everything about them was small: their houses built of
palm-leaves and bamboo, their oxen and goats and sheep; and Thrasyllus
was of opinion that the legend of the Pygmaei, or nations of dwarfs,
had originated because of Ethiopia.
The natives ate hardly any meat, but mainly vegetables and fruits,
or young shoots of trees, or they would suck reed-stalks and
lotus-flowers. But they also took blood and milk and cheese; and there
was no other food. No, Uncle Catullus would never have stood it here,
thought Lucius, when the travellers went still farther south, to
the capital of Ethiopia, Meroe, on the island of the same name. And
here Lucius discovered that the famous date-wines and topaz-yellow
liqueurs of Napata and Meroe were a sheer hoax, that there was no
wine or liqueur whatever distilled in Ethiopia and that the delicious
drinks with which Master Ghizla and Caleb had provided him and Uncle
Catullus came from no farther than Lake Mareotis at Alexandria!
A fabulous vegetation, however, grew luxuriantly over the island. If
the people and animals were small, the trees shot up with amazing
vigour: the huge palm-trees, the ebony-trees, the ceratia and persea,
under whose gigantic domes of thick foliage the green villages of
little plaited wicker huts disappeared from view. In the marshes round
Lake Psebo the travellers hunted, if not the great snake, at any rate
the terrible boa, which even ventures to attack the elephant. And the
natives showed them a fight between one of these boas and an elephant
and a hippopotamus.
They visited the gold-mines, the copper-mines, the jewel-mines, the
temples of Hercules and Pan and of a strange barbaric deity. The dead
were buried in the Nile, or else they were kept in the houses under a
mica slab of human form. In the middle of the town stood the Golden
Temple, where the king dwelt in sacred mystery. There were slabs of
gold between bamboo columns. In former ages the priests elected the
kings and deposed them at will; but a certain king had caused all the
priests to be strangled and since then a law had been passed that,
if the king were maimed or lost a limb, all the people of his court
had to inflict the same injury on themselves, for which reason the
king's person was guarded with great care and was divine and sacred;
and the travellers did not see him.