Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) (14 page)

‘Youngsters are like that,’ replied Alexander, and his face, pale in the moonlight and framed by his long hair, seemed more than ever like a boy’s. ‘He did what he felt was the right thing – he died like a hero in the full bloom of his youth and we must not weep for him. No human being can lament being alive because no human being knows what tomorrow may bring. What awaits us may well be infinitely worse than death – disfiguring diseases, shameful mutilations, slavery, torture . . .’

Eumolpus kept up, trying to maintain the same slow pace as Bucephalas as he followed his master. Alexander ran his hand over the animal’s mane, ‘Poor Bucephalas – there hasn’t even been time to have him washed and groomed.’

‘Or perhaps you simply didn’t want to separate yourself, not even for a moment, from a friend who helped you conquer the world today.’

‘That’s true,’ agreed Alexander; and he said nothing else.

At that moment from far off they heard people moaning, accompanied by the mournful sound of flutes, and then they saw torches moving across the plain in a sort of procession. The King understood and took a short cut to reach the end of the cortege that was moving in a wide circle towards a small rise surmounted by a stone tumulus. Eumolpus stopped and murmured, ‘Go, my boy, accompany her to her final resting place.’ And he moved off with his swaying gait towards the Macedonian camp. From the other side, beyond Darius’s tent, came the first raucous sounds of the vultures and the other birds of prey as they descended to banquet on the limitless field of death.

The cortege reached the top of the hill and the pall bearers placed the litter on top of the stone tumulus that had been prepared – a ‘tower of silence’. At the corners of the small construction they placed four censers, each of which released a light bluish cloud of incense, and then they left. Alexander, who up until that moment had stood quietly to one side, moved towards Barsine’s body. Embalmed and perfumed, her appearance had not changed and her eyes looked as though they were closed lightly, giving the impression of sleep. They had dressed her in white with a blue stole and placed a crown of small yellow flowers from the desert around her head. Alexander stood alone before her and his memories came to him as in a flood of images. He saw her smile once more, together with her tears, and he felt her warm kisses over his body and it seemed impossible that it was all over and that her beauty, now lifeless, was destined to meet such destruction. He took his golden ribbon from his head and placed it in her hands, then he kissed her for the last time: ‘Farewell, my Love. I will not forget you.’

In that extreme solitude, the din of the titanic battle now behind him, together with the memory of her fragile voice and her beauty, neither of which would ever be anything more than memories now, all these things opened up a great void inside him, bringing a childlike fear of the darkness. For a moment he was overwhelmed by an infinite grief and melancholy and he fell to his knees and cried, his head leaning on the mound, calling out her name more than once.

Then he stood up to look upon her one last time and on seeing her there, still so beautiful, he found he could not accept the idea that her body would be torn apart by wild dogs and birds of prey. He returned to the camp and ordered Eumenes to have a stonework funeral sanctuary erected to protect her remains. Only when he saw that this had been completed did he agree to set off on the march again.

T
HEY SET OFF AFTER
having buried the Greek and Macedonian soldiers who had fallen in battle, for there was not enough wood there to build sufficient funeral pyres. The heat and humidity and the great number of Persian bodies decomposing all over the field were poisoning the air and some soldiers had come down with mysterious fevers for which no remedy could be found.

They came once again to the ford across the Tigris and passed over to the western bank of the river before beginning to move down towards Babylon.

On the fourth stage of this journey, while they were crossing through a region called Adiabene, one of the officers from Mazaeus’s escort came to Alexander to tell him that there was a remarkable natural phenomenon to be seen – a naphtha spring!

‘Naphtha?’ the King asked. He recalled the occasion back at Mieza when Aristotle had burned the naphtha he had been sent from Asia in a flask, remembering the dense smoke and the acrid smell; and he also remembered the fireboat that the inhabitants of Tyre had launched against him one night, setting fire to the assault towers, and how the day after the air was still full of that same stink. So he set off behind the officer who led him to the bottom of a hollow where a fire burned continuously, releasing a thick column of smoke into the air. All around there was a large, black and oily mass, like a swamp with strange iridescent reflections and from which there came that terrible smell. Callisthenes was already there and he was taking a sample of some of the liquid using a glass phial.

‘I want to send some to Uncle Aristotle for his experiments.’

‘But what is it exactly?’ asked Alexander.

‘Well . . . it’s difficult to say. The taste is the most revolting you can possibly imagine – the smell and its appearance too. Perhaps it’s a sort of humour, almost an exudate of this land that is so battered by the rays of the sun. As you know, however, it is combustible and generates incredible heat. Look!’

At that moment a group of soldiers, on orders from their officer, had filled some skins with the naphtha and were spreading two lines of it along the sides of the pathway that led to the camp. Then the officer took a lighted lamp from the hands of one of his men and ignited the ends of the lines – two walls of flame rose immediately and rushed as quick as thought itself towards the camp, leaving everyone with their mouths open in astonishment. The strange substance continued to burn along the pathway, accompanied by two curtains of dense, stinking smoke and an unbearable heat.

Alexander immediately took a bath to free himself of the smell which had impregnated even his hair, and while Leptine washed him, he spoke to Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Callisthenes, a new masseur who came from Athens and whose name was Athenophanes, and his assistant, a boy by the name of Stephanus.

‘From what I’ve seen,’ said the King, ‘this naphtha could be used as a weapon – just imagine the effect if we were to unleash it on our enemies!’

‘I have heard that naphtha is not suitable for such applications,’ said the masseur, who as a young boy had attended a few philosophy lessons. ‘Indeed, the type of fire it produces is completely anomalous. Fire, as everyone knows, is an ethereal, celestial element, which is transmitted through the air spreading heat and light. Naphtha on the other hand comes from the earth and burns only on contact with a completely arid ground like sand or on earth that is too moist and rich like that of southern Babylonia. On a substance of some intermediate humour, such as a man might be considered to be, it would never catch fire – there is no doubt of this.’

‘That seems a rather shaky hypothesis,’ Callisthenes objected. ‘It is difficult to apply intellectual categories to individual physical manifestations which are influenced by multiple and non-quantifiable components and what is more—’

‘I am sure of what I am saying,’ retorted Athenophanes as Alexander came out of his bath and Leptine began to dry him with a linen towel, ‘and my assistant, Stephanus, has heard my teacher, the sophist Hermippus, expound this thesis.’

‘Indeed, I am so sure that I am prepared to demonstrate it myself with an experiment, right here and now before all of you!’ exclaimed the boy, perhaps simply to attract attention and to ingratiate himself in some way with Alexander.

‘I really don’t think it’s worth bothering about,’ said the King. ‘It’s best just to forget it.’

The boy insisted, however, supported by Athenophanes who continued to spout his philosophical theories. No sooner said than done and a servant appeared with the naphtha which young Stephanus began spreading over his body very carefully, as though he were using olive oil.

‘Now,’ announced Athenophanes as he picked up a lamp, ‘I will demonstrate that on a human body of medium humour naphtha cannot burn,’ and he brought the lamp to the boy’s skin. In the blink of an eye Stephanus’s body was wrapped in a ferocious globe of flame that produced a terrible heat. His screams were heart-rending. Everyone grabbed buckets and any other container and threw the water from the bath over him, which fortunately was to hand, but even then it wasn’t easy to put the flames out.

Alexander immediately called for Philip, who took care of the boy, spreading certain ointments over his skin for the burns. It took a great deal of effort on the physician’s part, but he managed to save the boy’s life. Stephanus, however, was seriously maimed and disfigured and his health remained poor for the rest of his life.

Callisthenes advised everyone to steer clear of the evil-smelling liquid until his Uncle Aristotle had completed his studies and discovered what its real characteristics were. The following day they set off once more on their journey.

*

As they advanced, the steppes gave way to an ever more fertile and rich land, irrigated by a great number of canals that linked the Tigris to the Euphrates. Throughout the countryside there were many villages whose peasants were busy getting the land ready for sowing.

Wherever they stopped the local chiefs offered them regional specialities – palm hearts in particular, which were very pleasant and refreshing. Palm wine, however, lay heavily on their stomachs and often caused headaches, but there were really no alternatives; normal wine, even the best wine, did not really keep well in that climate and the drinking water was often poor as well. The dates were excellent, as were the pomegranates that grew abundantly and were exceptionally tasty.

They also saw that vast stretches of the fields were flooded by the peasants themselves using a system of locks on the canals and Alexander found this practice rather strange. Callisthenes made enquiries and was told that in this way the land was gradually freed of the salt that formed on the surface because of the great heat and thus it preserved its fertility.

‘What they are doing is reproducing artificially what happens naturally in Egypt with the flooding of the Nile,’ said Ptolemy. ‘This must be a peculiarity of very hot climates. What’s surprising here, however, is that there are no crocodiles in the Tigris, and none in the Euphrates either – perhaps these animals can only live in the waters of the Nile.’

Nearchus disagreed, ‘Not at all. I have heard tale of a man from Massalia who sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, along the African coast, right to the estuary of a river called Chretes which was crawling with crocodiles.’

‘Beyond the Pillars of Hercules . . .’ sighed Alexander. ‘A man’s life is too short to allow him to see the entire world!’ and he thought of Alexander of Epirus and his unavenged death in the lands of Hesperia.

Towards the end of the journey, their march became more and more of a parade because everywhere the local inhabitants came out of their homes and lined up along the road to acclaim their King. Then the spectacle went beyond all possible expectation and wonder when, there before them on the horizon, there appeared the walls, the towers, the pyramids and the gardens of the most celebrated city in the world – Babylon!

T
HE WELCOME
B
ABYLON
produced for the young conqueror was like something out of a fantastic tale. For ten stadia along the road leading to the city thousands of youngsters – girls and boys – had lined up and were throwing flowers before Alexander’s horse. The majestic Ishtar gate, one hundred feet high and finished in enamelled tiles carrying figures of dragons and winged bulls, seemed to loom more and more as the King advanced with his companions and followed by his army in formation, his soldiers and his officers all dressed in their finest armour.

The inhabitants of the city had taken up position on the ramparts of the towers flanking the gate and along the gigantic walls – wide enough to allow the passage of two four-horse chariots side by side. They were anxious to see the new King who had defeated the Persians three times in less than two years and had forced many heavily fortified cities to surrender.

The priests and the dignitaries greeted Alexander and accompanied him to offer a sacrifice to the god Marduk whose shrine was at the top of the Esagila, the great stepped temple that stood towering over the wide sacred area. Before the immense crowd gathered in the great courtyard, Alexander, together with his companions and his generals, climbed the steps which led from one terrace to another right up to the sanctuary on the summit which housed the god’s bed of gold in this his earthly dwelling.

From up there the King was able to look upon and absorb the amazing spectacle of the majestic metropolis. Babylon extended before him at his feet with all its marvels, with its endless walls, the triple bulwark that protected the royal palace and the ‘summer palace’ located in the northern part of the city. He could see the smoke from the burning incense as it rose from the more than one thousand sanctuaries in the huge urban area – the wide, straight roads that met one another at right angles and all the main arteries, paved in terracotta tiles all bound together with asphalt. Each of the roads began and terminated with one of the twenty-five gates that provided access through the walls, with their colossal doors dressed in bronze, silver, and gold.