She thought about going back.
She told herself that it was already a good deal to be able to tell Aurelius and Socles about the existence of this corridor and staircase. But she reflected that the traces of the forcing of the doors would be discovered, that they would be guarded henceforth, and that it would doubtless be impossible to come back. By virtue of her audacious attempt and belated terror, she would have rendered the philosophers’ projects unrealizable.
Then again, she was nearing the goal.
Perhaps the end of the stairway was behind the turning that she could perceive, and perhaps, if she went down a few more steps, she would see the glass coffin in which Alexander reposed...
Unsteadily, she descended.
But one turning succeeded another. The stairway was very long. The air was increasingly poisonous. As she leaned on one of the walls, she had a sensation of viscous damp on her hand. A sweat was escaping the stones, and sometimes a droplet ran over the granite, leaving a greenish trail behind it.
Touta felt dizzy. The spirals of the staircase were multiplied in her mind, and she had the sensation of descending into the depths of the earth.
Suddenly, a flow of fresh air passed and inclined the flame of the candle, which she protected with her hand instinctively. A stone that she had bumped with her foot resonated, and that resonance echoed like an appeal, like a burst of laughter, in an immeasurable, dismal, tenebrous extent that unfurled before her. That lasted for a few seconds, and Touta shivered, closed her eyes and thought that she was about to die.
Then silence fell again, but heavily, coming from high up and far away, implacable, charged with the ephialtes of the dead and the mist of their impotent desires.
Then, raising her candle, Touta gazed.
She sensed, rather than saw, great architectural masses that were stacked above her head. She distinguished colossal pylons, a cupola broken in several places, a balcony supported by stone caryatids, but which was not supported by anything at its extremity, as if it launched forth into the nocturnal space. There were files of obelisks that led to circular edicules, hermes, broken altars and fragile lotiform columns that were suggestive of young women, prisoners of a population of dead giants.
At hazard, she turned left. In the disarray of her soul, the vision of her goal persisted. She was almost walking on tiptoe, fearing the voices and laughter that might have greeted her appearance in that formidable realm of defunct stones.
Immediately, she almost collided with a black mass that barred her route. It was the immense statue of a goddess with the wings of an ostrich. On her head it bore a pointed bonnet, conical in form, and was holding out a pair of doves in her right hand.
She went around the statue and found herself in a hemicycle surrounded by niches, which she examined. Those niches, which numbered seven, contained the sacred animals symbolizing the evolution of inferior reigns. There was a serpent with a human head, a crocodile in the mouth of which the ivory of sharp teeth glistened, a bat with rubies in the place of its eyes, a jackal symbolizing Anubis, a crouching cynocephalus symbolizing the adoration of the rising sun, an ibis, the image of Thoth, and a winged bull, with its muzzle directed upwards and its wings deployed, to attest that matter must bring forth its greatest strength in order to rise toward spirit.
What were those great sarcophagi that the wandering Touta glimpsed, around which those mute divinities stood? Perhaps the one where Queen Cleopatra and Antony reposed, united forever? Perhaps that of the divine Stratonicus? Perhaps that of Ptolemy Euergetes, the benevolent king? Perhaps that of Ptolemy Philopator, the debauched king who poisoned his father? But how could the gods that guarded them be consulted?
Never, in any temple built in the sunlight, had she contemplated faces as terrible, as closed to human prayers, as ravaged by the absence of pity, as consciously orientated toward evil! Did the perpetual shadow lie as heavily upon the gods as upon humans? Was it truly the case that they never heard prayers, that they never granted them, that they were merely companions in the darkness and brothers of the sepulcher?
Touta bumped into the knees of a bronze statue of Hathor, the cow-headed goddess. Mentou, the god of war, gave the impression of wanted to launch his blade at her. Horus resembled in his gesture the bronze sphinxes by which he was surrounded. The ithyphallic Khem threatened her with his attributes. Osiris extended the stumps of his broken arms toward her. Others, inclined, seemed to want to seize her in passing in order to crush her on the marble of their breasts. And she stumbled over fallen statues, climbed over the torsos of gods, and stepped over heads that seemed to want to bite her.
Where was the glass coffin for which she had come?
She had lost all presence of mind. She ran to the right and the left, sometimes retracing her steps, waving her candle, contemplating fearfully the pyramidal masses, the syenite columns, the rows of porticos with their cubic capitals, sometimes going through the arch of a portal that led to a new tomb, to a further infinity of mortuary darkness.
And suddenly, she stopped.
Her mind recovered all its clarity, but only to bring her new faculties of terror. She was not mistaken! A noise was audible in the empire of mute forms. She had woken up the slumbering powers. In the air, heavy with bituminous vapors that troubled her brain, a mysterious life now floated. It was a muffled murmur, a prolonged echo, a trailing voice.
Bewildered, she started to flee.
What monstrous figures were about to appear, what fantastic forms were about to reach out to seize her? She retained a gasp in the depths of her throat, and in the movements she made, the wax of her candle ran over her shoulder and arm, and that burn gave her the sensation of a touch emerging from the invisible. Her garment caught on a broken column and she uttered a howl, thinking that it was a stone hand that wanted to drag her to the ground—and a savage howl replied to hers from all directions.
She had launched herself into an avenue of obelisks. But to the right and the left those obelisks were agitating, rising and falling, leaning over and extending the mystery of their hieroglyphs toward her. A sphinx opened its human jaws immeasurably and stuck out its breasts toward her. Then, stone bats began to whirl around her head, fixing her with the beads of their ruby eyes.
She looked behind her and saw the troop of divine animals on her heels.
The cynocephalus was gamboling and grimacing, the serpent was unwinding its coils, and sometimes moving its sorrowful human face closer, the ibis was elongating is long legs and extending its ridiculous neck, the jaws of the crocodiles were moving, the rearing lions shook their manes, she was brushed by the flight of phoenixes with red-painted plumage, and winged bulls hovered above her head in the tenebrous air, like errant bolides.
She had wanted to violate the secrets of the dead, and she was irredeemably doomed. She passed through the same places without recognizing them, always more closely followed by her fears, and the sepulchral life became more intense and more prodigious.
Increasingly menacing Hathors succeeded one another, Astartes unfastened heir veils in order to envelop her in them. Isises and Osirises tried to crush her. Anubises with jackals’ heads that presided over embalmings threw the black boxes that were their emblem at her. Apophises attempted to trip her with their forked tongues, Auta the female warrior with her buckler, Anhour the conductor with his rope, and the obscene Khem with his enormous penis.
And figures more mysterious loomed up between the steles and the obelisks. Royal mummies emerging from sarcophagi advanced their black, paltry, shrunken forms, attempting to envelop Touta with a circle of bodies wrapped in bandages, on which the heads seemed deformed, and they stared at her with their implacable gold masks.
Down the megalithic steps that were staged before her Touta ran, driven and lifted up by the endless horror of the monstrous images, the unnamable entities of the subterranean night, pursued by a procession of statues, by a procession of mummies.
She had penetrated into an enclosure, a darke
r and more silent place, and there, her legs exhausted, out of breath, devoid of consciousness, she fell to her knees.
Oh, if she had imprudently penetrated into the realm of Ahriman, the god of evil, she renounced he struggle. Let him take her! Let the Drujs seize her with their slender fingers, let the Yatus cut her up and crush her in the mortar of eternal change...
The paving stones on to which she had fallen were black marble, the walls were black marble, the arch of the vault was black marble with exceedingly thin white veins, like human tears in the night of the world.
Touta held up her candle again in her clenched hand. And she saw...
Blue-tinted and oblong in form, radiant and veiled, milky in places, the color of mat sapphire, the color of the moon rising on a autumnal evening, over the white jade pedestal sent from India by King Sandracottus, like the symbol of ideal qualities and inaccessible perfections, reposed the glass coffin of Alexander.
It was miraculous, serene, immortal.
In a second, Touta understood that she had reached her goal, and her vacillating light permitted her to glimpse the contour of the sacred mummy, and even the prominence made at its neck by the scroll for which she had come in search. But she had no joy in that, and not for an instant did she conceive the possibility of seizing it. The papyrus on which the truth was written seemed infinitely far away, separated from her by an infinity of perspectives and mirages.
Perhaps, in spite of her exhaustion and her distress, she might still have attempted to overturn bronze or marble, to stave in lead—but how could one touch that opaline transparency, that glaucous cloud, that lunar crystal so mysteriously blue-tinted?
And then, the distance was too great, in spite of the fact that she only had to put out her hand. And she felt so weary!
A great calm invaded her. She gazed within herself at a light that was born there and illuminated in waves her past existence. She had only lived in order to arrive here and die before the inexpressible blue of Alexander’s glass coffin. It had been necessary for her to sacrifice herself and she offered her life joyfully. She would never see the light of the sky again.
She liked that. Men were pitiless and the gods worse. She preferred not to be among the victors, and to fall in darkness serving the only man who had ever been good to her. He was not of the triumphant race either. He was weak, human and sad. She would not bring him back what he desired.
“May the true light enlighten him as it enlightens me!” she murmured.
She sent him her last thought. She had descended the stairway of renunciation by the megalithic steps that had led her to the black marble room.
A voice repeated by a thousand echoes resonated in her ears like a tempest: “Touta!”
Yes, yes, she was ready! It was Yima, the master of the dead who was calling her. She was no longer afraid. Ormuz protects those who are able to give their lives for others; he throws his white robe over them.
“Touta!” called the voice, even nearer.
From the depths of her memory surged the formula of conjuration in the Zend language: “I have honored Ahuramazda, the holy and the veridical. By the grace of Ahuramazda, I am purified.
“Touta!” was repeated behind her.
She had stood up, lifting, in a hand that was no longer trembling, the flame of her candle, bluer in the rarefaction of the air, like the incarnation of her being, spiritualized by sacrifice.
And when Peter struck her from behind with his staff, with all his might, she entered thus into the realm of the dead, more luminous to the good than that of the living, of which Ormuz himself came to open the gates.
Peter considered Touta with surprise. After a long wait in his house, a suspicion had come to him. He had run to the church and had seen the door to the subterrain open. He had gone down the first staircase, found Touta’s lamp in the presence of the debris of the second door and had gone into the gallery descending toward the tombs.
He regretted the body of the woman he had desired and had counted on enjoying. It was a wealth that he might have possessed and which was lost to him forever. But he knew how to sacrifice his pleasure to his interest. He found himself in the presence of even greater riches, the secret of which had just been revealed to him. A woman who knew that secret could not be allowed to live any longer.
The tombs of the Ptolemies! He had heard talk of their splendors and their burial.
How many jewels were there in the sarcophagi of kings! How many precious metals in the faces of statues! There were the eyes of Serapis, which were diamonds, and the teeth of Aphrodite, which were pearls! And all that could be his possession!
But Peter felt a sudden frisson. That dead woman at his feet, the putrefaction of the air, and the thickness of the darkness around him, suddenly chilled him and caused his knees to buckle.
He would see later! He would inform Bishop Cyril. Only holy men could triumph over the demons that must populate this pagan metropolis.
Then too, the candle with which he had equipped himself was almost extinct. Touta’s had fallen on the floor. He hastened to relight it, and he placed it beside her.
Without looking back he drew away, and was only reassured after having climbed back up the spiral staircase and the subterranean gallery. He replaced the pieces of the worm-eaten door, went out of the church and, for the first time, he perceived that the stars projected an extraordinary light.
And all night long, in the crypt of black marble, next to the thin form of the dead woman, the candle burned.
The gods of stone remained immobile; the mummies did not awaken in the hieroglyphic sarcophagi. Yima did not emerge from the darkness to attest the violence and injustice committed in his empire. For in the sunlight of life or the darkness of the subterranean night, evil never has its immediate punishment and one cannot know at what belated moment of time the hand that strikes will be immobilized and there will finally be a loving word for the good.
When dawn appeared over the earth, the wick and the wax were consumed in the land of subterranean catafalques and the flame went out with a little sigh. And the body of the young woman, under the influences of gases and miasmas, commenced the slow, indefeasible labor of death, and became black with white furrows, similar to the marble on which it was lying.
XI. Amoraim’s Luck
Every man has an occasional stroke of luck, and sometimes it seems to coincide with a date, a small event, or a familiar or ridiculous action, to which it is attributed.
It arrived for the unfortunate Amoraim.
When he burned his clothes soiled with Christian blood, he no longer had anything with which to dress himself but a few rags found at the bottom of an old chest. But a charm, a magic, undoubtedly resided in those rags.
He had made a firm resolution to remain henceforth crouched in the demi-obscurity of his shop, in order that no purchaser of candles would perceive his wretched appearance. That was what he did. But he could not stay there for long. For the first time in his life, the sunlight in the street inspired a singular admiration in him. He sensed, without knowing why, a lightness, an unaccustomed delight. Decidedly, he felt no shame for his patched and torn robe. He desired to run through the city and inform himself about new things.
“Ignorance is not wealth,” he repeated to himself, that day. “To possess knowledge of the sciences and life and remain humble at the same time, that is the sign of a man’s superiority.”
He did not reflect that perhaps it was very late for him to enter into the path of study. No, curiosity passed through all the holes in his robe.
It was very hot. It was the middle of the afternoon. He closed his shop and he left the Jewish quarter, desirous of hearing news, of seeing monuments, of participation in existence.
The news was not good. There was no talk of anything but the death of Hieros, and the anger of the Christians was bursting forth in threats. But Amoraim was not interested in that. He did not want to think about the role he had played. He had done his duty, he had obeyed pru
dence. It was up to God to regulate the affair.
He went down to the port, walking tranquilly toward his first stroke of luck. Students went past him, arguing. He followed them, because there is always something to learn from youth. The group took the street of the Sema, arrived at the Museum, and went in.
The Museum! Amoraim knew that there were books accumulated there, and professors who debated. People spoke against the law there. But does not error make the truth stand out more clearly? He went in behind the students.
Certainly, he had entered with all possible modesty. He limped up a broad stone stairway and went through a door through which everyone was going. He hastened to sit down on a bench at the back, in a room full of listeners, at the very moment when a woman of marvelous beauty advanced on to a stage.
For a few seconds, Amoraim was able to think that his old bad luck had accompanied him, as usual. Curious faces turned toward him. People whispered, and laughed. Two people who were standing up near the door even made a movement in his direction. But then the woman who had appeared on the stage smiled and sketched a gesture that signified: Let it go.
And she began to speak.
Amoraim did not understand anything she said, but he felt penetrated by a strange sweetness as he listened to her. A wave of beauty reached him, and the meaning of the words was not necessary for him to be bathed by it. Then again, he was not mistaken. That astonishing magicienne, that elite individual, to whom God had made a present of the gift of the Word, had just distinguished the poor Jew Amoraim in the crowd. She fixed her great bright eyes upon him, and she almost made him a sign with her hand.
Amoraim left the Museum transfigured. He started to walk with his head high, like a young man who has had a beautiful amorous adventure. He was not astonished because a few young men pointed their fingers at him, and even followed him, imitating his limping gait. No, there was no mockery in that imitation, but rather admiration, and perhaps jealousy.
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