The Tour Part 22

And in fact the priests who came to meet the travellers in front of the dromos of the sacred lake, surrounded on every side with pillars, first amiably demanded a stater a head as entrance-fee, while Caleb, of course, had seen to a supply of rich provisions, as an offering to the deity. The slaves carried baskets with cakes, roast meats and jars of hydromel.

In the lake lay Such, the huge monster; but the priests had tamed the terrible deity: they were luring him from the middle of the lake, where his temple was, to the bank, because some Persian visitors happened to have arrived before Lucius and wished to present their offerings. On the edge of the lake the priests took Such fearlessly by his terrible jaws and made him swallow the cakes and meat and wine of the Persian grandees, who were greatly diverted and laughed aloud.

"They must be great n.o.blemen," said Caleb, "and are going from the pillars of Sesostris to Alexandria, even as you, my n.o.ble lords, are going from Alexandria to the pillars of Sesostris. My lord, if you permit me, I should much like to exchange a few words with the guide of the Persian lords."

Lucius gave his permission; and the crocodile, who had swallowed his Persian presents, swam back to the middle of the lake. But the priests now quickly lured him to the other side, where Lucius was waiting; and the ever greedy crocodile approached; and the priests again took him fearlessly by his terrible jaws and the monster now swallowed Lucius' gifts, the cakes, the roast meat, as though insatiable; and the priests, laughing, emptied a jar of hydromel into his maw.

Meanwhile, Caleb, after a few words with the guide, had sunk in salaams before the Persian lords.

"He's offering the Persians his diversorium," said Uncle Catullus, jestingly.

And in fact Caleb, in a few minutes, came back happy and swaggering to his own travellers and said, in a mysterious whisper:

"I have recommended their Persian lordships to be sure to stop at the Hermes House at Alexandria; and I slipped a gold ptolemy into their guide's hand. Yes, my lords, business is business; and, if we did no business at Alexandria, I could never hope to see my beloved Saba again. For there you must have done business, if you want to live in the country; there's no business to be done there, my lords."

By way of Heracleopolis, where divine honours were paid to the ichneumon, the spotted rat that devours the eggs of the adders and attacks the adders themselves, after first rolling itself in the mud, which dries round its body and forms an armour, the travellers reached Cynopolis, where the dog is worshipped as Anubis, and Oxyrynchus, where the fish of the name is venerated. And it now appeared that, in this region of Heptanomis, where, on the Arabian side of the Nile, the strange battlements of the blinding white Alabastrites Mountains blaze against the sky, all animals received divine honours, as though the priests had inst.i.tuted these popular forms of worship in great numbers everywhere, so that they might the more carefully keep to themselves the secret Hermetic wisdom. Cats and falcons, sheep and wolves, baboons and zebus, eagles and lions, goats and spiders: all the animals were worshipped in one or other town or village; all the animals had their temples and priests; and Uncle Catullus said that he grew weary of having to admire so many sacred animals, especially as Apis, the little bull, and Such, the crocodile, were after all the only ones that were really interesting to see. But all these cattle, all these birds and fishes, all these creatures, from carnivora down to insects, were worshipped, tended, fed and shown in the temples to strangers, each time at a piece of gold a head. No, it was really too silly, especially when, after the first Crocodilopolis, on the left, the second Crocodilopolis appeared on the right, on the bank of the Nile, with another Such!

"Lucius," said Uncle Catullus, "honestly, I'm not going to feed any more sacred crocodiles, nor any sacred goats or cats or beetles either. I've seen enough of all those pests, do you hear, nephew?"

And Lucius and Thrasyllus were inclined to agree with Uncle Catullus; and the barge sped past the wondrous purple of the Porphyrites Mountains, gold-ruddy crests in the orange evening sky, up to Ptolemais, the greatest town in the Thebais.

Ptolemais was a prosperous city, ruled like Alexandria by a munic.i.p.al government founded on the Greek model; but after Ptolemais the travellers were especially charmed with Abydos. Here they saw the Memnonium, which was not so gigantic as the labyrinth, but which still was built of great single blocks of stone, according to that same marvellous system of lost ancient architecture. They also saw the underground well, which is reached by vaults and galleries, a subterranean miracle of monoliths, always fitted to one another and upon one another, without masonry. The temple of Apollo rose in a flowering acacia-wood, as in a sudden dream of swarming white, fragrant blossoms.

Lesser Diospolis and Tentyra followed. The Tentyrians worship Aphrodite and hunt the crocodile, which they destroy wherever they can; and Uncle Catullus said that they showed good taste in this civilized choice. After the half-Arabian Coptos and Apollonopolis, Thebes loomed into view, with its hundred gates, the gates which Homer sang, the gates through which two hundred warriors, with all their horses and chariots, could pa.s.s. And, as the travellers drew near, in the rosy dawn behind Thebes, the Smaragdis Hills appeared in green outline, transparent and far-away as a dream, through the misty light of the horizon.

Thebes was already called Greater Diospolis and worshipped Zeus-Jupiter.

"Heaven be praised!" said Uncle Catullus. "The Upper Egyptians are become sensible. Venus and Jupiter are once more held in honour! Every conceivable sort of crocodile, goat, dog, rat, falcon and beetle is done with. It was high time!"

Like Memphis, Thebes spread itself as an immense, ancient, but dying city. For eighty stadia along the Nile its ancient palaces and temples stood in an endless row, forsaken, ruined, cracking, slanting and sinking, with their pillars and walls, their mutilated colossi and sphinxes, their obelisks already fallen to the ground. Even in the sun, a grey melancholy spread over the great city, whose streets, indeed, were crowded with numbers of pedestrians, camels and litters, but without the feverish, metropolitan bustle which had reigned at Alexandria. The gloom of a fatally waning glory lay like a haze over all this architectural immensity, which Cambyses, with his Persian hordes, had in past ages destroyed beyond repair, as with gigantic hammer-strokes.

In the moonlit night the city, with its vast outlines, with its endless row of t.i.tanic palaces, rose beside the Nile like a t.i.tanic citadel, mysteriously chilling to the heart. In these abandoned temples the lost wisdom especially had been cultivated by the omniscient priests, the heirs of Moses and of Hermes Trismegistus. Here the utmost wisdom of philosophy and astronomy and astrology was known. Here the year and the day were calculated by the sun and no longer, as of yore, by the moon; here the year was divided into twelve months of thirty days, with five intercalary days; and here was calculated the time that must be added to the three hundred and sixty-five days in order to arrive at the exact length of the year. The kings who reigned here reigned, according to the hieroglyphs on the obelisks, over Scythia, Bactria, Ionia and India! They had ruled the world, in the deep-sunk centuries! In the measureless s.p.a.ces of their immense palaces and temples, from which the Nile, flowing silver in the moonlight, could be seen through the rows of pylons gleaming as it had gleamed centuries ago, not an atom remained of the material or immaterial life of this long, long array of monarchs. Their names alone were still extant, written on cracking or mutilated obelisks, but their history lingered only in a few disputed legends. The unplumbed depth of the past made Lucius' sensitive mind turn giddy. Yet, as he wandered by Thrasyllus'

side through the endless forsaken halls and rooms and courts, here dark with shadow, there lighted by the spectral moon, he was charmed by the sombre beauty and grandeur of that giddy depth.

Here, too, stood a monolithic memnonium. Next came, linked together, the forty royal tombs hewn in the rock. And, in front of this t.i.tanic ruin, in which not a mummy remained, the travellers saw, in the moonlit night, the two seated colossi, themselves carved out of monoliths; but one, with the trunk broken off--by what power?--had fallen in the high gra.s.s, while the other still stared towards the east, in the hieratic att.i.tude, the long hands upon the knees, the pschent crowning the vast, ecstatic head, with its huge, staring, sightless eyes, from which the enamel had disappeared and the jewelled pupils.

The travellers stood in silence before the statue in the moonlight; and even Uncle Catullus refrained from jesting. The atmosphere at this spot was woven of shimmering divinity. The moon was waning, the dawn was rising rose-red. And, as though with a human voice, a single note sounded from the statue. The note was intoned clearly and almost plaintively; it developed into the powerful sound of a man's high voice, swelled into something terribly human and almost divine and broke off short and hard. They all heard it in the uncertain light: Lucius, Thrasyllus, Catullus, Caleb, Cora, all the slaves, male and female, who had accompanied the travellers. Caleb turned very pale and time after time pressed his lips to his amulets.

And, motionless and now silent, the blind colossus stared towards the sun, which was rising out of a sea of rosy beams and gold-dust cloud.

That evening, in the temple of Zeus-Jupiter-Ra, the travellers saw the strange ceremony of the wedding of the Pallade, or Pallachide. She was the daughter of one of the greatest families of Diospolis and was chosen a month ago, for her birth and beauty, as the priestess of the G.o.d. She had served the G.o.d that month by giving her beauty to whomsoever she would. Now that the period of her service was past, she was marrying her bridegroom, a young man, like herself a member of one of the greatest and oldest Theban families. There was a ceremony of mourning and dirge because the service of so fair and famed a maiden was at an end; there was the presentation of gifts by all whom she had embraced that month; there was glad gaiety now because of her wedding. She was attired and anointed as a G.o.ddess and received great honour from the close-packed mult.i.tude; and after her wedding she kissed the priestess who succeeded her, likewise a virgin from one of the leading families of the town, and who was shown naked before the altar and was exquisitely beautiful as a child.

"Every country has its customs," said Uncle Catullus, with a shrug. "I don't envy the bridegroom; but no one seems to consider it odd; and the polite thing for us foreigners to do will be just to act as though we thought it all quite natural."

And with Lucius, Thrasyllus and Caleb he approached the bride, who was now sparkling with jewels beside her bridegroom; and their slaves threw roses and lilies and lotus-flowers before her feet; and she thanked him with a silent, winning dignity, standing amid the circle of her kinsmen in a queenly att.i.tude.

But, after Thebes, to Uncle Catullus' despair, there reappeared on the banks of the Nile the towns at which crocodiles, fishes and falcons were worshipped.

"Lucius," said Uncle Catullus to his nephew, seriously, one morning, while the barge was approaching Apollonopolis Magna, "Lucius, my dear boy, I have a confession to make to you. I think I've had enough of it. I'm sick of falcons, fishes and crocodiles which are G.o.ds, not to mention dogs, wolves, beetles, bulls and other cattle. And, in addition to being sick of all these sacred animals, I'm sick of all those strange Egyptian foodstuffs, while, moreover, I suspect Caleb of fortifying with barley-spirit the wines with which he supplies us out of his store; and this applies not only to the thick-as-ink Mareotis wine, but also to the topaz-yellow liqueurs of Napata.... Lucius, my dear boy, I am old and I feel ill. My head is like a sponge saturated not with water but with impressions of strange ceremonies and immoral customs. Also my stomach is overloaded and my palate over-excited. I have a craving for a few succulent oysters and a young roast peac.o.c.k. I understand that one can't get those here, on the Nile; but still I should like to learn what your plans really are ... I've heard something about hunting-expeditions and the pillars of Sesostris...."

"Yes, uncle," said Lucius, with a smile, "Caleb did suggest that we should leave the barge at Philae, where we shall soon be arriving, and go through Ethiopia with carts, camels, elephants and tents, go hunting on elephants and ostriches and travel over Napata and Meroe, through forest and wilderness, to Cape Dire and the pillars of Sesostris, where we shall find the quadrireme waiting for the homeward journey."

"Well, my dear boy, I think that this programme, together with my spongy brain and overloaded stomach, would be too much for me. If I were to accomplish it by your side, then Egypt would certainly be the death of me, a contingency which I am dreading as it is. I think, don't you, that I had better go down the Nile again in the barge, past all the sacred wolves and falcons and cats and beetles?"

But Caleb had approached:

"In that case, my n.o.ble Lord Catullus," he said, "I have a much better plan. In fact, I, your humble, obedient servant, agree with you that the journey through Ethiopia would perhaps be very tiring for you. That is why I would propose that the thalamegus take you from Apollonopolis Magna, by the ca.n.a.l, to Berenice, on the Bay of Acathantus, in the Arabian Gulf. [4] At Berenice you will meet the quadrireme, which has gone by Pelusium and the Nechao Ca.n.a.l [5] and is ascending the Arabian Gulf to fetch us at the pillars of Sesostris. In this way you will do the journey without inconvenience and yet with enjoyment, for the Berenice Ca.n.a.l pa.s.ses along the Smaragdis Mountains and they are a dream, my lord; my lord, they're a dream!..."

Thus did Caleb advise him, reflecting that, if Uncle Catullus adopted this programme, instead of going back to Alexandria, the princely apartments at the Hermes House would remain unoccupied and could be let to the Persian grandees who had fed the sacred Such on Lake Moeris and who were travelling in the opposite direction to his own n.o.ble clients....

CHAPTER XXV

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 ca.n.a.l 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 h.e.l.l.

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 n.o.ble client. These hunters included five Elephantophagi, with whom Lucius hunted the elephants which sometimes pa.s.s 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 n.o.body; 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 encompa.s.sed 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.