Charmion, at once anticipating a confidence, assumed a look of pained
sympathy, and drew nearer to her mistress.
"I am horribly weary!" continued Cleopatra, letting her arms fall like
one utterly discouraged. "This Egypt crushes, annihilates me; this sky
with its implacable azure is sadder than the deep night of Erebus; never
a cloud, never a shadow, and always that red, sanguine sun, which glares
down upon you like the eye of a Cyclops. Ah, Charmion, I would give a
pearl for one drop of rain! From the inflamed pupil of that sky of
bronze no tear has ever yet fallen upon the desolation of this land; it
is only a vast covering for a tomb--the dome of a necropolis; a sky dead
and dried up like the mummies it hangs over; it weighs upon my shoulders
like an over-heavy mantle; it constrains and terrifies me; it seems to
me that I could not stand up erect without striking my forehead against
it. And, moreover, this land is truly an awful land; all things in it
are gloomy, enigmatic, incomprehensible. Imagination has produced in it
only monstrous chimeras and monuments immeasurable; this architecture
and this art fill me with fear; those colossi, whose stone-entangled
limbs compel them to remain eternally sitting with their hands upon
their knees, weary me with their stupid immobility; they trouble my eyes
and my horizon. When, indeed, shall the giant come who is to take them
by the hand and relieve them from their long watch of twenty centuries?
For even granite itself must grow weary at last! Of what master, then,
do they await the coming, to leave their mountain-seats and rise in
token of respect? Of what invisible flock are those huge sphinxes the
guardians, crouching like dogs on the watch, that they never close their
eyelids, and forever extend their claws in readiness to seize? Why are
their stony eyes so obstinately fixed upon eternity and infinity? What
weird secret do their firmly locked lips retain within their breasts? On
the right hand, on the left, whithersoever one turns, only frightful
monsters are visible--dogs with the heads of men; men with the heads of
dogs; chimeras begotten of hideous couplings in the shadowy depths of
the labyrinths; figures of Anubis, Typhon, Osiris; partridges with great
yellow eyes that seem to pierce through you with their inquisitorial
gaze, and see beyond and behind you things which one dare not speak
of--a family of animals and horrible gods with scaly wings, hooked
beaks, trenchant claws, ever ready to seize and devour you should you
venture to cross the threshold of the temple, or lift a corner of the
veil.
"Upon the walls, upon the columns, on the ceilings, on the floors, upon
palaces and temples, in the long passages and the deepest pits of the
necropoli, even within the bowels of the earth where light never comes,
and where the flames of the torches die for want of air, forever and
everywhere are sculptured and painted interminable hieroglyphics,
telling in language unintelligible of things which are no longer known,
and which belong, doubtless, to the vanished creations of the
past--prodigious buried works wherein a whole nation was sacrificed to
write the epitaph of one king! Mystery and granite--this is Egypt! Truly
a fair land for a young woman, and a young queen.
"Menacing and funereal symbols alone meet the eye--the emblems of the
_pedum,_ the _tau_, allegorical globes, coiling serpents, and the scales
in which souls are weighed--the Unknown, death, nothingness. In the
place of any vegetation only _stelæ_ limned with weird characters;
instead of avenues of trees, avenues of granite obelisks; in lieu of
soil, vast pavements of granite for which whole mountains could each
furnish but one slab; in place of a sky, ceilings of granite--eternity
made palpable, a bitter and everlasting sarcasm upon the frailty and
brevity of life--stairways built only for the limbs of Titans, which the
human foot cannot ascend save by the aid of ladders; columns that a
hundred arms cannot encircle; labyrinths in which one might travel for
years without discovering the termination--the vertigo of enormity, the
drunkenness of the gigantic, the reckless efforts of that pride which
would at any cost engrave its name deeply upon the face of the world.
"And, moreover, Charmion, I tell you a thought haunts me which terrifies
me. In other lands of the earth, corpses are burned, and their ashes
soon mingle with the soil. Here, it is said that the living have no
other occupation than that of preserving the dead. Potent balms save
them from destruction; the remains endure after the soul has evaporated.
Beneath this people lie twenty peoples; each city stands upon twenty
layers of necropoli; each generation which passes away leaves a
population of mummies to a shadowy city. Beneath the father you find the
grandfather and the great-grandfather in their gilded and painted boxes,
even as they were during life; and should you dig down forever, forever
you would still find the underlying dead.
"When I think upon those bandage-swathed myriads--those multitudes of
parched spectres who fill the sepulchral pits, and who have been there
for two thousand years face to face in their own silence, which nothing
ever breaks, not even the noise which the graveworms make in crawling,
and who will be found intact after yet another two thousand years, with
their crocodiles, their cats, their ibises, and all things that lived in
their lifetime--then terrors seize me, and I feel my flesh creep. What
do they mutter to each other? For they still have lips, and every ghost
would find its body in the same state as when it quitted it, if they
should all take the fancy to return.
"Ah, truly is Egypt a sinister kingdom and little suited to me, the
laughter-loving and merry one. Everything in it encloses a mummy; that
is the heart and the kernel of all things. After a thousand turns you
must always end there; the Pyramids themselves hide sarcophagi. What
nothingness and madness is this! Disembowel the sky with gigantic
triangles of stone--you cannot thereby lengthen your corpse an inch. How
can one rejoice and live in a land like this, where the only perfume you
can respire is the acrid odor of the naphtha and bitumen which boil in
the caldrons of the embalmers, where the very flooring of your chamber
sounds hollow because the corridors of the hypogea and the mortuary pits
extend even under your alcove? To be the queen of mummies, to have none
to converse with but statues in constrained and rigid attitudes--this
is, in truth, a cheerful lot. Again, if I only had some heartfelt
passion to relieve this melancholy, some interest in life; if I could
but love somebody or something; if I were even loved; but I am not.
"This is why I am weary, Charmion. With love, this grim and arid Egypt
would seem to me fairer than even Greece with her ivory gods, her
temples of snowy marble, her groves of laurel, and fountains of living
water. There I should never dream of the weird face of Anubis and the
ghastly terrors of the cities underground."
Charmion smiled incredulously. "That ought not, surely, to be a source
of much grief to you, O queen; for every glance of your eyes
transpierces hearts, like the golden arrows of Eros himself."
"Can a queen," answered Cleopatra, "ever know whether it is her face or
her diadem that is loved? The rays of her starry crown dazzle the eyes
and the heart. Were I to descend from the height of my throne, would I
even have the celebrity or the popularity of Bacchis or Archianassa, of
the first courtesan from Athens or Miletus? A queen is something so far
removed from men, so elevated, so widely separated from them, so
impossible for them to reach! What presumption dare flatter itself in
such an enterprise? It is not simply a woman, it is an august and sacred
being that has no sex, and that is worshipped kneeling without being
loved. Who was ever really enamoured of Hera the snowy-armed or Pallas
of the sea-green eyes? Who ever sought to kiss the silver feet of Thetis
or the rosy fingers of Aurora? What lover of the divine beauties ever
took unto himself wings that he might soar to the golden palaces of
heaven? Respect and fear chill hearts in our presence, and in order to
obtain the love of our equals, one must descend into those necropoli of
which I have just been speaking."
Although she offered no further objection to the arguments of her
mistress, a vague smile which played about the lips of the handsome
Greek slave showed that she had little faith in the inviolability of the
royal person.
"Ah," continued Cleopatra, "I wish that something would happen to me,
some strange, unexpected adventure. The songs of the poets; the dances
of the Syrian slaves; the banquets, rose garlanded, and prolonged into
the dawn; the nocturnal races; the Laconian dogs; the tame lions; the
hump-backed dwarfs; the brotherhood of the Inimitables; the combats of
the arena; the new dresses; the byssus robes; the clusters of pearls;
the perfumes from Asia; the most exquisite of luxuries; the wildest of
splendors--nothing any longer gives me pleasure. Everything has become
indifferent to me, everything is insupportable to me."
"It is easily to be seen," muttered Charmion to herself, "that the queen
has not had a lover nor had anyone killed for a whole month."
Fatigued with so lengthy a tirade, Cleopatra once more took the cup
placed beside her, moistened her lips with it, and putting her head
beneath her arm, like a dove putting its head under its wing, composed
herself for slumber as best she could. Charmion unfastened her sandals
and commenced to gently tickle the soles of her feet with a peacock's
feather, and Sleep soon sprinkled his golden dust upon the beautiful
eyes of Ptolemy's sister.
While Cleopatra sleeps, let us ascend upon deck and enjoy the glorious
sunset view. A broad band of violet color, warmed deeply with ruddy
tints toward the west, occupies all the lower portion of the sky;
encountering the zone of azure above, the violet shade melts into a
clear lilac, and fades off through half-rosy tints into the blue
beyond; afar, where the sun, red as a buckler fallen from the furnace
of Vulcan, casts his burning reflection, the deeper shades turn to pale
citron hues, and glow with turquoise tints. The water, rippling under
an oblique beam of light, shines with the dull gleam of the
quicksilvered side of a mirror, or like a damascened blade. The
sinuosities of the bank, the reeds, and all objects along the shore are
brought out in sharp black relief against the bright glow. By the aid
of this crepuscular light you may perceive afar off, like a grain of
dust floating upon quicksilver, a little brown speck trembling in the
network of luminous ripples. Is it a teal diving, a tortoise lazily
drifting with the current, a crocodile raising the tip of his scaly
snout above the water to breathe the cooler air of evening, the belly
of a hippopotamus gleaming amidstream, or perhaps a rock left bare by
the falling of the river? For the ancient Opi-Mou, Father of Waters,
sadly needs to replenish his dry urn from the solstitial rains of the
Mountains of the Moon.
It is none of these. By the atoms of Osiris so deftly resewn together,
it is a man, who seems to walk, to skate, upon the water! Now the frail
bark which sustains him becomes visible, a very nutshell of a boat, a
hollow fish; three strips of bark fitted together (one for the bottom
and two for the sides), and strongly fastened at either end by cord well
smeared with bitumen. The man stands erect, with one foot on either side
of this fragile vessel, which he impels with a single oar that also
serves the purpose of a rudder; and although the royal cangia moves
rapidly under the efforts of the fifty rowers, the little black bark
visibly gains upon it.
Cleopatra desired some strange adventure, something wholly unexpected.
This little bark which moves so mysteriously seems to us to be conveying
an adventure, or, at least, an adventurer. Perhaps it contains the hero
of our story; the thing is not impossible.
At any rate he was a handsome youth of twenty, with hair so black that
it seemed to own a tinge of blue, a skin blonde as gold, and a form so
perfectly proportioned that he might have been taken for a bronze statue
by Lysippus. Although he had been rowing for a very long time he
betrayed no sign of fatigue, and not a single drop of sweat bedewed his
forehead.
The sun half sank below the horizon, and against his broken disk figured
the dark silhouette of a far distant city, which the eye could not have
distinguished but for this accidental effect of light. His radiance soon
faded altogether away, and the stars, fair night-flowers of heaven,
opened their chalices of gold in the azure of the firmament. The royal
cangia, closely followed by the little bark, stopped before a huge
marble stairway, whereof each step supported one of those sphinxes that
Cleopatra so much detested. This was the landing-place of the summer
palace.
Cleopatra, leaning upon Charmion, passed swiftly, like a gleaming
vision, between a double line of lantern-bearing slaves.
The youth took from the bottom of his little boat a great lion-skin,
threw it across his shoulders, drew the tiny shell upon the beach, and
wended his way toward the palace.