It was the sixteenth of June, and the first bivouac on the night of
the retreat. The army had refused to go farther. Neither prayers,
commands, nor threats of the Emperor had brought them to reason.
Celts, Romans, Pagans, Christians, brave men and cowards, all had
answered in the same words--
"Let us go back to our own country!"
The chiefs rejoiced in secret; the Tuscan augurs openly triumphed.
After the burning of the ships there had been a general insurrection.
And now not only the Galileans but the Olympians and Hellenists were
persuaded that a curse was on the Emperor's head, and that the Furies
were pursuing him. When he walked through the camp talk would cease
and people edge away from him in fear. Sibylline books and the Book of
Revelation, Tuscan wizards, Christian prophecies, gods, and angels,
joined forces to crush the common foe. The Emperor then announced that
he would lead his men homewards northward through the fertile
provinces of Apolloniatis and Adiabene. According to this plan of
retreat, while retaining a hope of forming a junction with the troops
of Procopius and Sebastian, Julian consoled himself with the thought
that he was keeping within the borders of Persia, and that he might
still encounter Sapor's army, deliver battle, and win a decisive
victory.
The Persians were no longer visible. Desiring to weaken the Romans
before a crushing attack, they set on fire their own rich champaigns
of barley and wheat, and destroyed every store and granary in the
country.
Julian's soldiers marched through a black desert, still smoking with
traces of fire.
Famine soon set in.
In order to augment the invaders' distress the Persians had broken the
canal-dykes and flooded the fields, being aided in this endeavour by
brooks and torrents which had overflowed their courses owing to the
melting of the snow on the Armenian mountains. The flood dried up
quickly under the burning rays of the June sun, but left the warm soil
coated with slimy mud. Asphyxiating vapours and the bitter odour of
ashes and of rotting vegetation loaded the air every night, and
befouled the drinking water, the food, and even the rags of the
soldiers. Myriads of insects rose from corrupted marshes. Mosquitoes,
venomous horse-flies, rose in clouds round the beasts of burden and
fastened themselves on the men. Their subtle hum went on night and
day. Maddened by stings, the horses died or stampeded, the oxen broke
their traces and overturned the wagons. After exhausting marches
through defiles and fords the soldiers obtained no rest; tents were no
refuge against the insects, and to get any sleep the men had to wrap
their heads in stifling cloaks, while the bites of a certain small
transparent dung-coloured fly produced swellings and boils which
gradually became a horrible purulent plague. During the last days of
the march the sun was invisible. The low, dense, stifling sky was a
white cloth of cloud; and its motionless glare still more painful to
the eyes than the naked sun.
And so they kept marching, wasted, weak, with hung head and feeble
step, day after day, between the implacable sky and the black, burnt
earth.
"Surely," they thought, "Anti-Christ, the man apostate from God, must
have intentionally led them into this accursed place, to leave them to
their doom." Some murmured, "Curse the generals!" but incoherently, as
in a dream. Others kept praying and whining like sick children,
begging a crust of bread or a mouthful of wine from their companions.
Many from weakness dropped and died on the road.
The Emperor ordered the last rations kept for himself and for his
staff to be distributed among the famished rank and file. He contented
himself with a thin soup of flour and suet, a fare from which the
meanest soldier would have revolted. Thanks to extreme temperance, he
felt continually full of nervous excitement, and at the same time a
lightness of body, as if he had wings. This lightness sustained him
and increased his strength tenfold. He attempted not to think of the
future. But to return to Antioch or Tarsus, defeated, and to submit to
Galilean ridicule, that he certainly would never endure.
One night the soldiers were resting, the north wind having driven off
the flies. Oil, flour, and wine, from the last Imperial supply, had
assuaged their hunger. The hope of return gradually revived. The camp
became silent. Julian withdrew to his tent. Now he was wont almost to
dispense with sleep, or if he slept at all, it was towards daybreak.
If by chance profound slumber overtook him, he would wake terrified,
with drops of cold sweat on his forehead. He had need of full
possession of consciousness to stifle the dull pain gnawing at his
soul.
Entering his tent, he trimmed the lamp with a pair of snuffers. Rolls
of parchment and the Gospels lay around him on the ground in disorder.
He began to write his favourite work, _Against the Christians_, begun
two months previously at the opening of the campaign. Reclining, with
his back turned to the tent door, Julian was re-reading the
manuscript, when suddenly he heard a slight noise.
He turned round, uttered a cry, and sprang to his feet. He thought he
saw a ghost. On the threshold stood a youth, clothed in a ragged brown
garment of camel's hair; a dusty sheepskin, the "melotes" of the
Egyptian anchorites, flung over his shoulders. His bare feet were shod
in sandals of palmwood.
The Emperor scanned him, waiting, unable to pronounce a word.
"Do you remember," said a well-known voice. "Do you remember, Julian,
how you came to me in the convent? Then I repulsed you. But I have not
been able to forget you, because we are singularly like each other,
singularly near each other...."
The lad threw back his black hood, Julian saw the bright brown hair,
and recognised Arsinoë.
"Whence--why have you come? Why are you clad thus?"
He still feared lest this might be some spirit, which would vanish as
unexpectedly as it had appeared.
In a few words Arsinoë narrated to him her fortunes since their last
parting.
After leaving her guardian Hortensius and giving the greater part of
her wealth to the poor, she had long lodged with the anchorites to the
south of Lake Mareotis, west of the Nile, among the sterile mountains
of Libya, in the terrible Nitrian and Sciathian deserts. She had been
accompanied by the young Juventinus, the disciple of old Didimus. They
had been taught daily by the ascetics.
"And then," asked Julian, not without a certain apprehension, "and
then, girl, did you find among them what you were seeking for?"