One of Cleopatra's Nights (3 page)

"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 work 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.

Who is this young man, balancing himself upon a fragment of bark, who
dares follow the royal cangia, and is able to contend in a race of speed
against fifty strong rowers from the land of Kush, all naked to to the
waist, and anointed with palm-oil? What secret motive urges him to this
swift pursuit? That, indeed, is one of the many things we are obliged to
know in our character of the intuition-gifted poet, for whose benefit
all men, and even all women (a much more difficult matter), must have
in their breasts that little window which Momus of old demanded.

It is not a very easy thing to find out precisely what a young man from
the land of Kemi, who followed the barge of Cleopatra, queen and goddess
Evergetes, on her return from the Mammisi of Hermonthis two thousand
years ago, was then thinking of. But we shall make the effort
notwithstanding.

Meïamoun, son of Mandouschopsh, was a youth of strange character;
nothing by which ordinary minds are affected made any impression upon
him. He seemed to belong to some loftier race, and might well have been
regarded as the offspring of some divine adultery. His glance had the
steady brilliancy of a falcon's gaze, and a serene majesty sat on his
brow as upon a pedestal of marble; a noble pride curled his upper lip,
and expanded his nostrils like those of a fiery horse. Although owning a
grace of form almost maidenly in its delicacy, and though the bosom of
the fair and effeminate god Dionysos was not more softly rounded or
smoother than his, yet beneath this soft exterior were hidden sinews of
steel and the strength of Hercules—a strange privilege of certain
antique natures to unite in themselves the beauty of woman with the
strength of man.

As for his complexion, we must acknowledge that it was of a tawny orange
color, a hue little in accordance with our white-and-rose ideas of
beauty; but which did not prevent him from being a very charming young
man, much sought after by all kinds of women—yellow, red,
copper-colored, sooty-black, or golden skinned, and even by one fair,
white Greek.

Do not suppose from this that Meïamoun's lot was altogether enviable.
The ashes of aged Priam, the very snows of Hippolytus, were not more
insensible or more frigid; the young white-robed neophyte preparing for
the initiation into the mysteries of Isis led no chaster life; the young
maiden benumbed by the icy shadow of her mother was not more shyly pure.

Nevertheless, for so coy a youth, the pleasures of Meïamoun were
certainly of a singular nature. He would go forth quietly some morning
with his little buckler of hippopotamus hide, his
harpe
or curved
sword, a triangular bow, and a snake-skin quiver filled with barbed
arrows; then he would ride at a gallop far into the desert, upon his
slender-limbed, small-headed, wild-maned mare, until he could find some
lion-tracks. He especially delighted in taking the little lion-cubs from
underneath the belly of their mother. In all things he loved the
perilous or the unachievable. He preferred to walk where it seemed
impossible for any human being to obtain a foothold, or to swim in a
raging torrent, and he had accordingly chosen the neighborhood of the
cataracts for his bathing place in the Nile. The Abyss called him!

Such was Meïamoun, son of Mandouschopsh.

For some time his humors had been growing more savage than ever. During
whole months he buried himself in the Ocean of Sands, returning only at
long intervals. Vainly would his uneasy mother lean from her terrace and
gaze anxiously down the long road with tireless eyes. At last, after
weary waiting, a little whirling cloud of dust would become visible in
the horizon, and finally the cloud would open to allow a full view of
Meïamoun, all covered with dust, riding upon a mare gaunt as a wolf,
with red and bloodshot eyes, nostrils trembling, and huge scars along
her flanks—scars which certainly were not made by spurs.

After having hung up in his room some hyena or lion skin, he would start
off again.

And yet no one might have been happier than Meïamoun. He was beloved by
Nephthe, daughter of the priest Afomouthis, and the loveliest woman of
the Nome Arsinoïtes. Only such a being as Meïamoun could have failed to
see that Nephthe had the most charmingly oblique and indescribably
voluptuous eyes, a mouth sweetly illuminated by ruddy smiles, little
teeth of wondrous whiteness and transparency, arms exquisitely round,
and feet more perfect than the jasper feet of the statue of Isis.
Assuredly there was not a smaller hand nor longer hair than hers in all
Egypt. The charms of Nephthe could have been eclipsed only by those of
Cleopatra. But who could dare to dream of loving Cleopatra? Ixion,
enamoured of Juno, strained only a cloud to his bosom, and must forever
roll the wheel of his punishment in hell.

It was Cleopatra whom Meïamoun loved.

He had at first striven to tame this wild passion; he had wrestled
fiercely with it; but love cannot be strangled even as a lion is
strangled, and the strong skill of the mightiest athlete avails nothing
in such a contest. The arrow had remained in the wound, and he carried
it with him everywhere. The radiant and splendid image of Cleopatra,
with her golden-pointed diadem and her imperial purple, standing above a
nation on their knees, illumined his nightly dreams and his waking
thoughts. Like some imprudent man who has dared to look at the sun and
forever thereafter beholds an impalpable blot floating before his eyes,
so Meïamoun ever beheld Cleopatra. Eagles may gaze undazzled at the sun,
but what diamond eye can with impunity fix itself upon a beautiful
woman, a beautiful queen?