Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  Socles remained silent for a few seconds.

  “I promised myself to tell you everything, so I shall do so. I’ve always laughed internally at the folly of Lysimachus, who, after having accomplished a perilous voyage to reach the most venerable sacerdotal college that has ever existed, had not been able to moderate his intemperance. Our passions are attached to us no less faithfully than our shadow. Sometimes, like him, I have procured mental exaltation by means of wine. I remember that you reproached me for it. So I took care during my voyage not to raise anything but water to my lips. A small gourd of wine was, however, attached to the flank of my camel, for wine can be a precious comfort when one endures excessive fatigue. Exhausted by the final two days of my journey through the sands, when I perceived the mass of shadows made by the oasis of Ammon in the distance, I could not resist the desire to give my weakening body the same satisfaction as my soul. I drank a little wine, which rendered me life with excess. I left my guide by the first well, under the first date-palms, and I ran toward the gigantic columns that I glimpsed through trees, in order to present myself without delay to the hierophants of the temple.

  “They caused me a vivid surprise, and that surprise was shared by them. They are clad in animal skins and they are living in a half-ruined temple, which they have no thought of repairing. They receive no offerings from the inhabitants, and nourish themselves on the flesh of game that they kill themselves—which is contrary to the rules of all colleges of priests in all religions. Hunting also seems to be their principal topic of conversation. They appeared to me to be singularly lacking in understanding, and vulgar, and that opinion was not belied by the few days that I spent with them.

  “I must admit that when I explained the purpose of my journey, while the wine was acting upon my brain, I expressed myself volubly and did not give the impression of possessing the slightest parcel of the wisdom I was seeking. But I must also admit that they only listened to me distractedly and that their greatest concern was to ask me whether I had brought the wine with me. I gave them what remained in my gourd, and they drank it avidly.

  “I wondered afterwards whether they might have wanted to deceive me. Perhaps they were only the servants of the true hierophants and had judged me unworthy of being taken to them. I questioned the inhabitants, but they are half-savage and live in abject huts. I explored the oasis and found no trace of a hidden sanctuary. I arrived at the conviction that the location had been deserted by the perfect men who had once lived there. Nevertheless, my voyage was not futile. I was able to observe in my conversations with the hunter priests that they retained a strong tradition of a time when the temple of Ammon had sheltered beings they called ‘the sovereigns of the mind.’ They also spoke with pride of Alexander’s visit, and they knew that the King of Macedonia had come, not for an oracle, but to obtain a talisman, which he had taken away.”

  The music of trigonal harps, triangular citharas and tambourines reached the ears of the three philosophers in gusts. The boat had drawn nearer to the left bank. Men were seen running hither and yon, agitating lamps. At the same time, on the opposite bank, other chants were rising, and some sort of procession was visible. Touta had got up and, standing at the prow of the boat, she looked at each bank in turn.

  “If I understand correctly,” said Aurelius, whose face now reflected the deepest disappointment, “your research has concluded with the certainty that Alexander was the custodian of the supreme verities of the world, that he carried those verities around his neck during his life and that they were placed in his coffin after his death. In accordance with his will, that coffin was transported to Alexandria. But what has become of it now? The mausoleum that contained it, the funerary crypts where the bodies of the Ptolemies were, and the hypogeum that Cleopatra had constructed to shelter her body and Antony’s, collapsed thirty years ago, during the last earthquake, which destroyed almost all of the Street of the Sema. The Christians affected to see that as a miraculous manifestation. A chapel of Saint Athanasius was built on the cupola of agate and crystal of Stratonicus’ tomb and it is, I believe, the Church of Saint Mark that now stands above the marble hall where Alexander reposed.”

  “That’s possible,” relied Socles, “but that marble hall was constructed in blocks so thick that it must have rested the crumbling of the old Alexandrian soil. A celebrated prophecy said that the kingdom of the man who would receive and keep Alexander’s body would be stable and flourishing. Ptolemy sent an army to search for the sacred remains in Damascus. The believed in the prophecy, and he had an interest in defending, against men and time, a coffin on which the future of his dynasty depended.

  “In any case, there is mention of the thickness of that marble in Strabo, when he reports that Ptolemy IX violated the sepulcher by virtue of cupidity in order to take possession of the old coffin and replace it with a coffin of glass. Those massive walls were also the astonishment of the emperors Augustus, Caligula and Septimus Severus when they came piously to visit the tomb of the hero. We know from accounts of those visits that Alexander’s body was respected for centuries. According to the history of Cassius Dio, Septimus Severus even had a certain number of sacred works on the religions of ancient Egypt buried, which he did not want scholars to study but which he dared not destroy because of the reactive force that sometimes strikes the sacrilegious. Very close to us, in the very soil of Alexandria, which we have trodden so many times, is the most inestimable document on the verity that we are pursuing. It only remains for us to attain it.”

  Aurelius made a gesture of discouragement. That task was impossible. How could an excavation be carried out? How could it even be attempted in soil that belonged to the Christians? For the Christians, the disappearance of the venerated monuments of paganism had been a blessing, a sign of the divine will. They would not permit them to be resuscitated.

  He shook his head and said: “It’s easier to go on foot across the world to reach he abode of the wise men.”

  But Socles repeated: “Who knows? Who knows?” And he added: “Menalchos, who lives in Bruchium, not far from the street of the Sema, told me once that his cellar communicates with a subterranean aqueduct that dates back to the earliest epoch of Alexandria, through which water no longer passes. He talked about it at every opportunity, in accordance with his favorite idea, to demonstrate the superiority of our forefathers over us in all material workings. He praised the strength of old constructions, the solidity of the cements employed, and gave the walls of that aqueduct as an example. He offered to take me down there. He had studied its history and he knew that it had been disaffected at the time of the construction of Cleopatra’s mausoleum, because the architect had encountered it in digging the foundations. Now, Cleopatra’s mausoleum was adjacent to Alexander’s tomb. The site of Menalchos’ house indicates that the aqueduct must be parallel to the two monuments. By following that aqueduct, which the earthquake hasn’t destroyed, since Menalchos talked about it a few years ago, one would certainly arrive at Alexander’s tomb. Menalchos’ faculties have declined to the point that he scarcely recognizes his friends, but an understanding could be reached with his son to buy his house. It would be easy then to undertake the necessary work...”

  Aurelius seemed to be chasing such vain projects away with his hand.

  “But why does Olympios, who never stops smiling, not give us his opinion on this matter?” said Socles, turning to his friend.

  Olympios replied: “What’s the point of going to so much trouble? It is within us that the verity lies, and it’s sufficient to look into one’s soul to discover it. A man who meditates alone goes further than the temple of Ammon and the River Ganges. I don’t know what is written on Alexander’s papyrus, and it matters little to me. I prefer to decipher the eternal papyrus that unrolls incessantly within me, and of which the clairvoyance that I’m in the process of acquiring will explain the mute hieroglyphs and the invisible symbols No prophet’s words, no sacred teaching of a messiah is worth as much as the little tru
th that we extract ourselves by the radiance of our interior lamp.”

  “I’ll gladly agree,” said Socles, “but what mental force will not be mine if I can reach the certainty that superior beings are directing humankind, and if I can be the servant of their thought!”

  “The only means of reaching them and conversing with them is to be immobile and to meditate. You know full well what force there is in meditation. Concentrated thought has such a great power that no law of the universe can resist it. Are not the extraordinary results that I have achieved the striking proof of it?”

  It was the turn of Socles and Aurelius to smile, but their faces quickly resumed an expression of gravity. They knew that that was their friend’s weakness. Olympios claimed to possess the power that Simon Magus had had, of which certain Ethiopian gymnosophist boasted, of being able to rise into the air by means of the power of the will alone. He was still, he said, in the early stages of his results. He only rose up rarely and not very high—and never in the presence of other men. That was the mystery of the hidden forces that he set in motion; they required solitude. Aurelius and Socles pretended to believe in those powers, and did not ask to verify them.

  Touta inclined her loyal face toward her master, as if she wanted to say something, but at that moment, clamors resounded on both banks of the river. The moon had risen high in the sky and it gave a supernatural appearance to the villages, with their lamps, a sycamore wood and a distant monastery. Two groups were facing one another, separated by the width of the Nile, and they were shouting threats of death at one another, while a flock of frightened ibises streaked the sky.

  The group to the left was led by an old man who was bowed down under the weight of a white ewe, which he set down by the water’s edge. Behind him marched players of harps and tambourines, of both sexes. Young men and women were carrying lanterns, raising them with an alternating gesture, and sometimes uttering a modulation that was sometimes plaintive and sometimes joyful. On the opposite bank, the moonlight suddenly caused the reflection of a huge metal Christ to glisten. A Christian priest, his hands joined, was standing up, leaning over the river. Monks and peasants appeared to be praying behind him, only interrupting themselves to address threats to the group on the other side of the Nile.

  The boatmen explained to the philosophers the meaning of the scene they had before their eyes.

  The villages scattered on the left had remained faithful to the old religion of Egypt, and continued to worship the goddess Neith, the protectress of that region. On the first evening of the month of Choiac, in accordance with age-old custom, the inhabitants came to the Nile to sacrifice a ewe in honor of the goddess, in order that the river’s flooding would not be delayed and would continue to bring fertility. On the opposite bank, however, there was a monastery, and the peasants who lived in its vicinity were Christians. It was necessary to satisfy their taste for superstition. Otherwise, they would have feared that the Nile would only flood on one side. The priest of Jesus, clad in is sacerdotal garments, had therefore come on the day prescribed by the Egyptian rite in order to invoke the river and combat by means of a ceremonial appearance the influence of the priest of the goddess Neith.

  “Fortunately, crocodiles are abundant in this place,” said one of the boatmen. “Otherwise, both parties would throw themselves into the water in order to come to blows.”

  The boat glided over the shiny water between the two groups. The pagan priest was now taking handfuls of gem salt out of a bag, which he threw high in the air and which fell back, making a rain full of silvery incandescence. The incense burned in profusion on both sides swirled and rose up in a double spiral, which the breeze united in the sky.

  “That’s the image of the error of the entire earth,” said Socles. “People hate one another because of their different religions, but at a certain height their confused prayers are no more than a single breath, which is lost in the unknowable.”

  Almost at the same time, a cry resounded on the two banks. The Christian priest and the monks fell to their knees beneath the huge metal cross, which swayed as if struck by terror. Opposite, the handfuls of gem salt launched with so much precipitation made broader luminous circles. The movement of the lamps raised at arm’s length and the noise of the trigonal harps became hectic.

  Christians and pagans alike were staring at the boat, the cadence of whose oars caused it to move downstream majestically. The wooden sides hid the philosophers and the oarsmen from their view. They only saw Touta standing at the prow in her white tunic, slightly agitated by the wind, and under the ocher moonlight, in the thousand parcels of light reflected by the waves, that feminine apparition on a dream-like boat had something miraculous about it. The uttered cry became a prayer, and the same effusion toward beauty curbed both enemy groups at the same time.

  “Touta is the Virgin Mary for one party,” said Aurelius, “the goddess Neith for the other, but she’s only a servant to us.” A few seconds later, he added: “Can there be a man for whom she would only be a beloved woman?”

  VI. The Statue of Aphrodite

  Leaning on the balustrade of the terrace, Priscilla gazed at the sea. It was not yet dusk. The heat was scorching and the air still. An implacable mildness came to the shining waters.

  Behind her extended the immense gardens of Diodorus’ villa. The villa stood facing the sea, far beyond the western Necropolis and the catacombs of Alexandria. It had been constructed a century before by the most ostentatious of the Diodoruses on the model of Roman villas. It was surrounded on all sides by colonnades, with large porticos where statues of all the gods of Athens and Rome had once stood. Priscilla’s grandfather had had them removed and replaced by statues of saints and martyrs, too large or too small, which seemed solemn and out of place under the liberty of the marine breeze. Apart from that, the splendor of the dwelling had been conserved intact. No one had dared touch the mosaics of the Atrium, which represented celebrated scenes of mythology, the painted murals, the azure cupolas or the large pools in the middle of the rooms, into which one descended by means of onyx steps, and where jets of water deployed the mysterious poetry of the pagan sensuality that was in their fluid surge.

  To the left extended the thermes, the apotheca where wine was pressed, the compluvium where livestock was bathed, the habitation of the procurator and the vilicus, the slaves’ lodgings, the cowsheds, the sheepfolds, the beehives and the poultry-yards. But to the right was the mass of gardens with their expertly designed flower-beds, their baskets of multicolored flowers, their pathways sprinkled with coral pink powder, their irrigation channels and their pavilions with painted domes, for repose and reverie.

  Priscilla’s great-grandfather, who had begun the cultivation of the gardens, had had a mania for singular flowers and rare shrubs. Enriched by speculations in grain, to the profits of which had been added those of his cotton-mills, he had spared no expense to bring plants from all the countries of the world, which had never been seen in Alexandria, with the soil in which they had grown, and even the fluid of their natal rivers to water them.

  For him, travelers had gone as far as he was able to suppose that there was soil with vegetation. He had had Assyrian, Hindu and Persian gardeners, who had planted, cultivated and grafter. He had been able to exhibit a pale pink flower in the form of a sun, with animate bloodsucking tentacles like those of cephalopods, which an Ethiopian had brought back from the mysterious sources of the Nile, and he had rejoiced in sitting in the shade of a tree with great palms, which only grew in the inaccessible mountains of the realm of Magada and bore the magical characters of a vanished language between the fibers of its bark.

  Priscilla shuddered. Lost in her reverie, she had not heard the sound of the oars of a galley going along the coast and making a black patch against the first tints of dusk. It was emerging from the port of Eunostos and heading for Cyrene or Carthage. Songs and laughter filled the deck, reaching as far as the young woman. Priscilla saw that it was transporting an ambulant troupe of
mimes and dancers.

  They must be Greeks. Some of them were naked to the waist, with effeminate faces and curly hair, and wore red skirts like the women of Syria, at the extremity of which hung stones of all colors. Hands on hips, agitating their bellies and raising their knees, they were dancing in an equivocal and grotesque fashion, to the discordant sounds of a lute, in order to make the mariners laugh.

  A Jewess with enormous breasts, who was only clad in a transparent loincloth, was also dancing, waving a tambourine over her head, which she was striking rhythmically.

  Priscilla distinguished the coarse faces of the oarsmen, their expressions of bestial gaiety, and the movement they made to hoist themselves up on their benches in order to get a better view of the improvised spectacle. She also distinguished, at the rear of the ship, two forms lying against the rigging, who were gripped by a feverish enlacement. It seemed that a magnet had attracted them forcefully, stuck between them in an immutable caress that ought to last for an eternity

  For a few seconds, Priscilla, her head forward, gazed with a passionate curiosity. Then she knew that she had to turn away and flee the vision of evil. She went along the terrace, down a few steps and followed a path.