Last Days With Cleopatra

by Jack Lindsay

  He wanted to say how beautiful she was. But, as always, the thought She is beautiful came to him like the voice of his other-self, his daimon inhabiting the shadow of silence; a shock and a fragrance, leaving him tongue-tied.

  He prayed to Osiris, “Make me hers,” and then knew what he had said, but didn’t like to correct the words into what he had meant, “Make her mine.” The prayer was useless; he was hers already.

  She seemed content that he said nothing; for she smiled and pouted a kiss at him, then averted her head and finished fixing the fillet quickly, her palely gold-burnt cheeks tinged with a warmer rose.

  What was she thinking?

  He despaired of ever knowing, forgetful how little he knew his own thoughts, how in the failing moments before sleep he glimpsed the enormous silence of dream, wherein all the world’s words were only the frenzied life of a colony of insects from under a single turned-over stone, compared with the spaces of ocean and burning desert and windy mountain-crest and night of stars.

  What were you thinking, Daphne? what is this lad to you?

  Nothing, a face out of the myriad faces, a face that you imagine you know and that you know in your imagination, till he becomes real, detached from the myriad, vexing you with his fear. For you also are afraid. You are brave in your ignorance, but none the less brave. Your thought is the earth under your feet, and the warmth of your chafing inner-thighs; and your integrity is the honey-pallor of your cheeks. Your thoughts are nothing, and his thoughts are nothing: creatures that live in the decay of the nerves, swarming under a stone away from the light. But in you is the profundity of the well of light, and you have pressed your breasts against the breasts of the moon, yourself in the mirror of the elements, in the dream of purity that never leaves you; and you are a field of flowers where life pours its unavailing beauty. Yet in you it will avail, for the sweetness will be its own reward, though flowers die.

  *

  For four days in the temples of Egypt a gilded cow cere-wrapt in a black cloth had been shown. Isis in her mourning, the winter-earth where the seed lies ready to rot. For to rot is to be in hell, under the earth amid devouring worms and the heat of excrement; and the eyes of fear cannot tell the maggots of breeding decay from the quickened seed that spirts its lonely tendril of new-birth.

  There was fear in the eyes of the Egyptians, but the lovers did not notice it; and it was all one to them whether they were walking along the marble-columned Street of Canopos or among the huts of sun-dried bricks beyond the walls. They went the way of the crowd, towards the seashore.

  They had missed the earlier part of the ceremony, but were in time to see the Finding, after they had climbed some steps where a space was made by an opportune fainting-fit of a fat woman and by tips lavished by Victor. He held Daphne close, to save her from falling; and she nestled against him closer still. Today there was no tension between them, no discomfort of words; and he was satisfied only to feel her body close, glad that the crowd made it impossible for him to want more or for her to accuse him of wanting it.

  Tonsured priests, clad in linen skirts that fell from under their armpits, were carrying a shrine of acacia-wood resting with miniature pillars on the holy ark. They were singing, on the water’s edge. The crowd moaned. Then the presiding priest held up his arm and drew from the shrine a large casket of gold. With a golden stoop he took up water from the lapping sea, and poured it into the casket. The pure impregnating water was poured into the deathless womb. There was a joyous cry.

  “Osiris is found!”

  The words were called in demotic Egyptian, in broken Greek and Syriac; but Victor knew what they meant. Despite his preoccupation with the closeness of Daphne he felt himself being carried away by the popular emotion. The scene was different from that in the Chapel of Adonis; there was no coloratura-singer from Athens. The defences of scorn, of refusal to feel in common with the unlettered herd, were crumbling. Perhaps the submissive closeness of Daphne drew the lover out of his sheaths of hiding, his sensitive scorn. Perhaps in this clear autumnal day he found faith in the babies of spring that would murmur in their earth-cradles despite the murdering winter-father. He is found. The lost child has come again.

  The crowd was thrilling and swaying, a tumult of criss-crossing emotions like the varying ceaseless waves of the sea, but welded mightily into one like the sea in its rich depths. The priests were gathering soil and vegetable mould from the ground and from wicker-work baskets that they had fetched; they were moistening it with sea-water, mixing it with spices and incense from thuribles, and moulding a small image in the shape of a Moon.

  Victor was passionately interested to see what was being made. His scepticism had left him, a chill forgotten in the warmth of Daphne’s closeness. His heart thumped, and he felt that his own fate was concerned. The Moon. He saw the crescent sweep through gliding skies of gauzy cloud, leaning back upon the war of elements; the hunchback moon-crone, the traitress; the moon with child showing through her womb; the perfect rondured moon, faintly orange with the glow of all-life. The changing moon was the life of earth, unlike the lordly and unswerving sun. Mother Moon. Osiris in the Moon.

  A priest, wearing the dog-mask of Anubis, approached the image, dancing joyfully, and placed on it a scarlet robe. Others were adorning it with gems and paint. In the mother-image were seeds and spices, new powers and lives. The crowd howled and laughed, swayed and clutched one another.

  Suddenly Victor drew back, astonished. What was happening to him? He realised that he had been feeling what the crowd was feeling, unconcerned to ask what it was and what it meant. How changed he was since the day of the Adonia.

  Osiris was found.

  That was the truth, not words about it. The crying and the laughing, the dancing and the kissing, the making and the sowing, the breaking and the eating. Isis had found her lover; the earth would be fertile. Isis and Osiris, the twins who had copulated in the womb of the mother, were come together again. Unreasonably, he felt that he and Daphne were twins, that they had always known one another, that their coming together was certain, predestined by its infinite repetitions in the darkened past, in all the summers and winters that had reeled across the wild earth. Twins, in the womb of the Moon.

  The lovers clung together on the steps, feeling that the huge crowd had come out to witness their betrothal, to pledge their love for ever.

  “Osiris is found!”

  O the grace of heavenly light has blessed the body torn by its nerves and by the wounds of memory. There is mercy. The earth and the sun have mercy on their children. The image of the moon redeems. This is my body.

  The lovers clung together, unable to look into one another’s eyes, wanting the moment to stay intact as long as possible. Need it ever end? Merciful as Osiris who dies for his love and is saved by his sister-lover, his true-self. I am Osiris and you are Isis. I am Isis and you are Osiris.

  The clinging lovers swore in their hearts that never again would they speak a harsh word, never again be inconsiderate or overbearing, never again pass outside the precincts of this assured sympathetic peacefulness. Never again.

  *

  Autumn had come, but Alexandria had no wintry frosts. Its flower-gardens supplied Roman dinner-parties at midwinter with fresh roses for garlands as well as the hammered flowers of jewelled gold that the workshops delicately produced. The Royal Gardens were thick with flowers as Olympos passed through.

  Gardeners were hard at work, superintended by the experts. Olympos paused to see how the special plot of balsamic trees and shrubs was getting on. Cleopatra had encouraged the experiment after gaining from Antonius the gift of the balsam-park of Jericho that Herodes coveted. Flowers from the east had been continuously transplanted—for hundreds of years—and many kinds of trees. Egypt had always suffered from a lack of trees. Olympos determined to have a word sometime with the head-gardener and find out which trees had acclimatised best; something ought to be done to supplement the sycamore and palms of the dusty Nile roads. Bu
t not today.

  He wanted to idle. The very name of the Gardens provoked to mazy indifference. It was Meandros. He turned to lounge through the Surinx Galleries, but there were too many sightseers. He drew back and stood staring at a bank of yellow flowers surrounded by shrubs cut into queer shapes by the topiarist.

  Men and women also tried to grow into his own shape, but a strange hand twisted and sheared their growth, insisting on a different pattern; and the result was hardly as restful as this garden. But let the topiarist once slacken with his clippers and hook, and the result would be chaos: neither the wild tree, nor the neat distortion. That was humankind, neither one thing nor the other. Fate the topiarist was too busy; there were too many lives darting out fresh tendrils, unmannerly leaves of effort, gnarled boughs and cankering fruit.

  Only a few were palms or tamarisk-bushes, able to stand alone, asking only dry soil and cleanness, a little dew. Was he such?

  Olympos did not care for his thoughts and looked away from flower and shrub to the passers-by; and the unrest of the passers-by made him feel more restful. The flowers made him think of pitiable humanity, but the people merely made him think of the classifications of disease and the marvellously enthralling system of nerves and veins, arteries and sinews, bones and tissue, that made up the organism. He watched two lovers, noting only the play of muscle, the admirable articulation of the bones, and calculating the anatomy. A large woman with a wailing child next attracted the scalpel of his glance, and he delved humourously in her surplus tissues, extracting the dwarfed skeleton. He smiled to himself. The child wept because a piece of cake had dropped in the mud, and Olympos meditated on the tear-ducts.

  Never would he know enough about the body. He decided that after all he would remind Cleopatra of her promise. She had said that he could vivisect a condemned criminal. But he had put off the experiment because he couldn’t make up his mind what experiment would be most advisable.

  Most of all he wanted to prove that Erasistratos was wrong in ruling that the arteries carried air. Herophilos had been right when he said that the arteries carried blood and pulsed of themselves from the heart. Why had Erasistratos contradicted him? Still, Erasistratos had a great name, and rightly so. His distinction between the motor and sensory nerves was undoubtedly correct, an essential addition to the discovery of Herophilos that the nerves ran from the brain and spinal cord. But he was wrong about the arteries. Olympos was set on finding the final proof of that wrongness.

  The great days of the Alexandrian medical school were over, perhaps; but every year saw improvements in technique. The methods of cutting for the stone could hardly be made more effective.

  Olympos mused. Was there no experiment that he could make through vivisection to prove that Erasistratos was wrong about the arteries? It wasn’t sufficient to show blood rushing from the arteries; for the obstinate air-theorists replied that there were canals of communication between the veins and the arteries and that the blood, at incision, being no longer compressed by the air, passed from vein to artery. Strabon’s theory of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum!

  How queerly men could use right reasoning for wrong purposes.

  It frightened one, made one feel that perhaps all reason was based on equally irrational premises, made one’s brain giddy with doubts.

  A group of ladies, dressed in light woollen frocks and attended by eunuchs with striped parasols, came walking down the path. Olympos stood aside respectfully, vaguely aware of genteel chatter and leaning on his ivory-knobbed staff. It was a wonder that women didn’t poison themselves with so much antimony in their plastered cosmetics. Was there a connection between cosmetical lead poisoning and the constipation from which most of the society women among his clients suffered? Doubtless all these chattering ladies were constipated: a complaint as indecent as unchastity.

  Then he saw a man walking in the rear of the society group, and recognised him. It was Manethos, one of the few remaining Egyptian noblemen; though a priest at Sais, he had a house at Alexandria.

  The men greeted one another courteously. Olympos, unlike his brother-in-law Nicias, had no race-prejudices, and was curious, if somewhat disdainful, about ancient Egyptian medicine. He respected Manethos, a worthy descendant of the high-priest who had written the history of Egypt in Greek.

  “Is there any news from the Palace,” asked Manethos. “I have just arrived from Sais.”

  He was a tall man with a slight stoop; his sanguine complexion showed up on his high cheek-bones despite the copper tinge of his skin; his eyes were dark brown, fringed with long lashes; his mouth lax and damply scarlet; his nose large and thin. He spoke with an air of extreme but not burdensome refinement; his Greek was as pure as the Greek of Olympos, but a little foreign-sounding in its meticulous enunciation. His clothes were rather Greek in cut, but woven of the finest Egyptian flax, and he wore papyrus sandals.

  Olympos shook his head. “They are all in good health.”

  He knew that Manethos had not referred to politics. No-body discussed politics openly; but every rumour flew about Alexandria as if proclaimed in the streets by the palace heralds.

  The Egyptian priest and the Hellenic doctor looked sea-wards. The sea was not visible, but could be faintly heard behind the line of government buildings. Both men expected to see an horizon clouded with the sails of Roman war-galleys. But such matters were not discussed.

  “I have come,” said Manethos with a frank smile, “to ask the Queen if she will lessen the requisition on the temples of our district.”

  “All districts are equally affected,” began Olympos, then hurriedly went on, “I know nothing of such matters. I am a physician of the body, not the state, thanks be to Apollo.”

  Manethos wanted to say more, but restrained himself. There had been no harm in the simple statement of his mission, but anything further would be dangerous, however friendly Olympos seemed. There were good men among the Greeks, but they had no tradition; they had the erratic tastes and emotions of the newly arrived. Meanwhile there was no use in talking. Many men had been thrown into prison during the last few months for talking too loudly. Egypt was doomed, caught between Greek and Romans; but had not strangers conquered her before ? Yet Egypt endured, and all would be well while her religion lived—the worship of the holy Trinity and the One unknowable, Ra supreme. The religion was Egypt, and the pyramids and temples mere chance memorials.

  “Will you dine with us?” he asked. “ My wife is with me at our house in the street of Arsinoe Basileia; and she will join with me in requesting your presence. You recall the house?” Olympos nodded and Manethos continued. “And bring your brother Nicias, if he will come.”

  “He isn’t very well,” said Olympos, anticipating a refusal from Nicias. “But I’d be pleased to accept.”

  Manethos looked at the flower-beds. Very pretty. Prettier perhaps than anything the Pharaohs had; and the tiers on tiers of buildings were pleasanter, more habitable, than the City of Amen in the days of the ancient dynasties of the Sun. But the great lotus-pillars and the pylons would outlast the Alexandrian scene. Ra was eternal, and the depths of silence cool in the deserts of heat; the voice speaking on, the question, the ineffable answer. Let the sands take it all again. There was something they could not take. Osiris returning to his Father Ra, the plenitude of light, the beginning and the end. In the blood were the caverns of silence, hewn from quarries of distance. Light above, and light beneath, and a core of light, and light everywhere. And darkness.

  Let the Romans come. There was time and space to engulf them also.

  “I shall be honoured to receive you,” he said politely, a trifle mincingly. “And my wife echoes my sentiments. Good morning.”

  Olympos nodded a farewell, but did not see him pass on; for his eyes were taken up by a festering sore on the knee of a small boy who was coming down the path, limping. The sore seemed badly infected. He wanted to stop the nurse and inspect the boy’s knee, perhaps save the boy’s life, learn something more. But n
o, it wasn’t really interesting; and he’d be snubbed, no doubt.

  He too passed, belatedly giving another nod after the departed Manethos.

  *

  No sentries challenged him as he entered Cleopatra’s palace. The royal buildings stretched on indefinitely; colonnade mounting into colonnade, gallery opening into hall and reception-room; endless terraces and every kind of glass-cased summer-room; statues everywhere, bordering the steps and ushering the loiterer under each tree-shadow. Cleopatra had built her palace beyond the Theatre, raised so that it looked down over the Royal Harbour towards the Pharos and its moles, on to the open sea. On the Lochias Promontory she was rebuilding the Temple of Isis to complete the view, to finish off the perspective on the right.

  Olympos knew that she would be in the largest summer-room, receiving her sons, her daughter, and her daughter-in-law. He entered and stood aside unnoticed. The two younger princes sat on chairs, attended by their tutors and nurses; and in the rear the two princesses waited, also seated on chairs, though the nurses had to watch the smaller princess, who had a habit of sliding off and bumping her head. The rear of the big room was filled with functionaries, for each prince had his retinue and quarters. Cleopatra, with her back to the light that streamed through the westward-facing windows, was clad in a long low-girdled gown of byssus, a fine linen; her only mark of state being the white ribbon tied round her head as diadem, with strings falling down her back. She seemed tired, peaked with. sleeplessness; and all the efforts of her girls, trained masseuses, had not been able to remove the heaviness from round her eyes. Her nose looked forbidding, as it always did when she showed weariness; but her eyes were darkly alive, and her lips had their unfaltering curve of wit and charm.

  She’s getting old, thought Olympos, but age suits her better, I think, than youth, if only she’d stop furying. She’ll wear herself out.