I
Whilst her great train was picking its way carefully from the
mountain-tops of Abyssinia, eight thousand treacherous feet of height,
to the littoral of the Red Sea, the slim brown queen had experienced
only impatience. In the cool quietness of her mountain home it had
seemed the most natural thing in the world to arise and visit the young
king of the Jews. On every step of the long journey downhill it had
seemed natural. In her own country it seemed right she should do as
she had chosen. But now they had left Abyssinia, left the great
tropical forests with the gigantic candelabra trees, left the arid
cactus-covered plains, left the pleasant green valleys where water
trilled and the boxwood trees and wild roses and water cress grew, and
had come to arid Ailet by the Red Sea. And here were great stretches
of sand and mimosa, here half-naked, cunning black men, here a heat
like a pall, here the brooding mystery of Egypt, that knows all things
and is silent to questioning.
A different world, and in the different atmosphere there came a
faltering, a waver into the heart of Balkis. Was she a fool? For two
miles her royal train stretched. First, the fighting men in their
short white robes, graceful, powerful as cats; then the line of laden
camels with tinkling bells; then the great black elephants with their
gleaming black skin, their gleaming white tusks, their painted
trappings; then the litters of her women; then her own litter; a welter
of attendants, bearing the provisions of the journey and the present
she was bringing to Solomon, the young king of the Jews: spices; and
gold of Ophir; and large diamonds from the Abyssinian mines;
apes--great red-faced baboons that had the strength of ten men, and
delicate blue monkeys, pretty as birds; and peacocks that outdid
precious stones in the shimmer of their colors; and tusks of ivory,
large as the branches of great trees.... Her heart wavered, and for an
instant it occurred to her in panic to go back. But if she returned
now, she would be dissatisfied all her life, and grow inward, and
become maybe hard as a stone, and that was against nature, for all
things grow outward, as a tree grows outward, to fill up the empty
spaces of Death....
"No! no! I shall go on."
Up in the cool mountains decision had seemed so natural, action so
easy. But below in humid Egypt subtleties of thought seemed native to
the weak Nilotic breeze, and she could see herself as though she were
another woman. She could see her orphaned childhood, when the care of
all her counselors was to have her gracious and kind, and sweet as a
small bird's song. They had instructed her that queens are not made by
crowns, but by graciousness and strength and courtesy, so that any
beholder might know she was a queen were she dressed in the garments of
her humblest slave. And she had grown older into young maidenhood, and
wise old heads had helped her govern and take care of her wild mountain
folk, and came a few years more and she was twenty-two, and the
counselors were too old to counsel, being either querulous old men or
dotards, living in forgotten days, and Balkis herself had to rule,
being queen. To be queen alone would have been simple.
But being queen, she was lonely, and being gracious and just, she was
wise, and being wise, questions arose in her like a spring of well
water. Thought rose like a hawk and swept in widening gyres, but
arrived nowhere. Thought and emotion were with her in the red Afric
dawn. Thought and emotion were with her like the flickering lightning
and terrible thunder of the Abyssinian hills. Thought and emotion came
with blue mountainy twilight. And there was none to share them. None
to ask. None to satisfy. Being a queen, there was none she might
consort with but kings and queens, and the kings of the states about
her were shrewd political men, who could not understand what a young
girl felt, and her young womanhood quivering like the jessamy bough....
Their eyes would be on the riches of Ethiopia; so they were out....
And the queens of Africa, outside herself, were not queens, but tribal
chieftainesses, half priestess and half prostitute, Amazonian,
untutored.... She could not talk to them.
And so she had decided there was nothing for her to do but to govern
justly, to grow old gracefully, to weep a little in private, to find it
hard to go asleep of nights, to look forward to death as a sentry
awaits the dawn, until a swart Egyptian trader had brought word of the
new king of the Jews, now David was gone. A boy he was, they said, a
strange dreaming boy, with none of his father's delight in war, and
with a gift of strange inspired wisdom. She was told the story of two
women, that were harlots, and how they each claimed a certain child as
theirs, and of Solomon's judgment.
"And how old is the young king of the Jews?" Sheba asked.
"Twenty-three or twenty-four."
"A year or so older than I."
And she was told how Hiram, King of Tyre, that shrewd man, was a friend
to the young prince, and how the arrogant Pharaoh of Egypt conceived it
worth his while to make a treaty with him.
"And is he married?"
"No, Sheba, he is not married," the trader vouched....