by Talbot Mundy
She loved Caesar far more loyally than he was capable of loving her; she understood that there was something lacking yet before Caesar could see eye to eye with her. She must continue his education. She began to talk to him about the Nile-bank cities and the wonders of ancient Egypt that she hoped to revive; of the priest-kings who had made that civilization possible; and of empires, of which nobody knew anything, in the far south, whence the endless boat- and camel-loads of ivory were brought, and whence the Nile flowed from sources that no man had ever guessed.
Reviving ancient splendors was not Caesar’s passion; he preferred, like any other Roman, to plunder the old in order to erect the new, claiming that that was nature’s method. So Cleopatra tried another angle of assault: she spoke to him of the route to India — of Tros’ passion to build a ship-canal — and of the advantage of invading India by sea without having first to defeat the hitherto unconquerable Parthians. With India conquered or reduced to vassalage, the Parthians might later on be taken in front and rear.
Interested, curious and fascinated, Caesar weighed that argument carefully. To conquer Parthia and to avenge the defeat of Crassus would do more than anything else that was imaginable to win the heart of every Roman and make his own power absolute. He thought the route to India by sea was worth considering. At his age a direct assault against the Parthians, in an inhospitable climate, hundreds of miles from his base and with Rome still weak from the effects of civil war, was not an undertaking to be entered on without considering alternatives. He craved the glory of the conquest of Parthia, but he did not enjoy the prospect of the hardships.
And he was convinced that Cleopatra was telling him the truth about one, at least, of her motives for urging the Nile expedition. She had theories on child-birth similar to those that had found favor with the ancient Greeks in the height of their achievement. Determined to bring forth a child who should combine her genius and Caesar’s, but with added attributes of spiritual strength and understanding, she proposed to fill her mind with and to absorb into her very soul such influences as should govern a great prince’s character. The child’s education should begin now, before he was born; it was her duty to the world, that needed an ideal government, and to the gods, who had provided her with opportunity. She would open her heart devoutly, splendidly and gaily, to the spirit that had made ancient Egypt great and that should blossom forth anew under the guiding hand of her and Caesar’s son.
That was an entertaining experiment that delighted Caesar. He remembered his own mother. He had observed that great mothers produce great men. He had no son whom it had been convenient to recognize. Brutus only acknowledged him as his father in emotional moments when he needed forgiveness for some high-thinking and low-dealing treachery or other, and was incapable of greatness. He was mistrustful of his legally adopted nephew and heir, Octavian, an anemic youth, apparently incapable of popularity, a personal coward, and not particularly friendly to himself. So he was amused and interested, if not convinced by Cleopatra’s notion. To bequeath his genius and hers to a successor was a form of immortality that he could understand: a form less boring and exacting than the routine of temple ritual and priestly interference that were reputed otherwise to be the doubtful pre-essentials to a life beyond the grave.
So he agreed to an expedition up the Nile; but with the thought in mind that Cleopatra’s mysterious friends at Philae might be contemplating mischief he stipulated that a large body of Roman troops should accompany it, and orders were given to Tros to make ready no less than four hundred shallow-draft vessels capable of making the long journey and of being hauled over the cataracts if required. That needed time, and meanwhile Cleopatra occupied her energy in replanning the ruined portion of the city, rebuilding the burned section of the library on the Bruchium, and in laying the foundations of a temple in honor of Caesar himself. Her energy was as contagious as her grasp of the financial and technical problems was quick and comprehensive. She had a passion for building — for making everything she touched more splendid than it had been; assuring Caesar that it was only amid magnificent surroundings that a people’s greatness had a chance to demonstrate itself.
“Rome,” he answered, smiling, “is like an old hag by the Tiber. But Rome bore me, and many another. There was Scipio, who overthrew the Carthaginians, when Carthage excelled Rome more than Alexandria does to-day. It seems to me that splendor is less a predisposing cause than an occasional consequence.”
“It shall be the consequence of you and me,” she answered.
She superintended personally the equipment of the thalamegos — the royal barge in which she and Caesar were to travel. It was a floating palace, containing colonnaded courts and banqueting salons — shrines dedicated to the gods — a winter garden, glorious with flowers — galleries for the musicians — fountains worked by a complicated system of pumps — apartments for herself and Caesar, and for her attendant ladies and for his staff officers, as sumptuous as any on the Lochias. In fact, it was a thing so little like a ship that Tros despised it. But it was manned by hundreds of oarsmen who were such experts that in spite of its size and unwieldiness it was able to lead the fleet and to look, with its silken sails and golden prow, like the glorious bark of Chons ascending the Nile to bless the Land of Khem with new fertility. The spectacle, as the fleet left Alexandria and headed up the Nile-mouth, was like a glorious dream departing at the break of day.
All Caesar’s ideas ripened on that wonder-journey. From the moment when they went ashore at Memphis, to visit the Sphinx and the three great Pyramids, his combative instinct — his intolerance of any intellect or power greater than his own — obliged him either to confess his insignificance or to accept his deification and then lift himself to measureless new levels of imagination. The signs of the grandeur of ancient Egypt dwarfed even his imperial visions.
“I begin to see,” he said, “that we limit ourselves and reduce ourselves to the level of animals by neglecting to perceive that we are gods. Perhaps the difference between a god and a man is after all only one of self-recognition. Only the gods could have thought of these things. Only gods could have erected them.”
By night, together, with a Roman guard, like specters, hovering at a respectful distance to protect them from marauding Arabs, they sat on a hillock of sand and viewed the bulk of Gizeh looming dark against a jeweled sky. It numbed even Caesar’s senses. It reduced even him to speechless contemplation and to the recognition that his standards of deed and dignity had hitherto been no more than a candle to the moon. Hour after hour they sat together meditating, until finally the Roman in him burst the overbrooding awe and he would have ended the journey there, to set his men to opening the pyramid and dragging forth its secrets to the light.
But Cleopatra was its guardian — anointed for the purpose, crowned with the double crown and subtler than any serpent — willing to sacrifice herself a thousand times, and to any ignominy, rather than fail the olden gods of Egypt. She told him how the priest-kings had erected Gizeh thirty thousand years ago to register the standards of all attainments and to be a guide-post to the Gates of Wisdom.
“You would find nothing in there, Caesar, and you would only have committed sacrilege. They used the Pyramid for their initiations. Kings were crowned in it. And it was sealed in Cheops’ time because there were no more kings being born into the world who could face the ordeals, and see their own souls, and be wise beyond mortal limits. Cheops covered it with legends of his own achievement, as having built it, but that was only a blind to keep later generations, who would still revere their kings but who might have forgotten the mysteries, from breaking in and defiling the sanctuary. They say that Cheops was allowed to place his secret mark, inside somewhere, away up above the hall of initiation, so that he might have enduring credit for having sealed and protected the most sacred shrine on earth. There are no statues in there — no symbols — no treasure — nothing but the empty chambers and the stone font, out of which after terrible ordeals the initiate
stepped as one reborn into eternity and godliness. The legend is, Caesar, that the Land of Khem may sleep, but will reawake if the seal of that shrine is unbroken. And then there will come again gods upon earth, who will know how to open the seal and to renew the mysteries, that are too dangerous and too intimate for modern men. Perhaps our Caesarian may do it!”
But Caesar saw plunder: “If that is the home of the mysteries,” he said, “whoever opens it will possess the fountain of authority. Will the world not come and bow down? Is there any easier way to number ourselves among the gods? I know how reverent men are toward tradition, which is an excellent influence if rightly used. Who is more capable than you and I of doing justice to this grandeur? Are we not gods on earth? You have said so, and I confess I begin to believe it.”
It was beyond him to guess to what lengths she would go to protect that fane from desecration. She tried on him first one argument and then another, until she found the right one:
“Caesar, it would take a thousand men, and none know how many months, to force an entrance into Gizeh. How shall they find the entrance? They must hack their way through hundreds of paces of solid rock.”
But he thought that Roman engineers could undo anything that other men had sealed up.
“A few siege engines,” he said. “Fire and water. Leverage. Determination—”
She risked revealing one mystery to protect another: “Caesar,” she said, “it is taught, by them who know, that if the entrance should be forced before the proper time, then the spirit of Khem will no longer sleep here but will go away forever. It is like the mummies of ancient kings; if they are undisturbed, their souls will be reborn into Egypt, none knows when — not even they; but if their mummies are broken up and robbed, they will prefer to be born elsewhere and even the waters of the Nile may dry up if that time comes. If you destroy the Pyramid, or if you desecrate it, shall the spirit of the olden times return? It will be like a bird that finds its nest destroyed and wings elsewhere to look for peace.”
“It might fly to Rome,” he answered, smiling. “As for the ancient kings, I think they had their day on earth. If they are not so dead that they cannot be touched by ambition, they may be glad of merciful release from these boundaries, that perhaps are a source to them of weariness.”
So she told the ancient fable that had served since long before the day when Herodotus saw life and set down what men told him — the fable that had kept at least one Ptolemy from committing sacrilege:
“They buried Cheops in there, Caesar. Are you a plunderer of tombs? If you should disturb the quietness within, what hope have you that other men will not defile your grave when your time comes? Would you plunder the tomb of Alexander? If so, then do that first, and learn how that feels. It might not be too late then to stop before you descend too deep into your baser self. For I tell you: whoever shall burst into Gizeh is doomed, and his nation is doomed, and Egypt with him. It is even worse for him than for the one who spoils the tomb of any olden king over whose portals the curse was set; such an one suffers alone, but he who opens Gizeh before the time—”
This was a new phase of her that Caesar studied thoughtfully — a phase in which fear was included. He was more impressed by that and by her earnestness than by any of her arguments, although she had touched his personal dignity when she spoke about robbers of tombs. Curses were imaginary shadows of superstition that he had ignored all his life with impunity, and he had often taken shrewd advantage of other peoples’ dread of them. If Cleopatra dreaded the curse of Gizeh — she with her normal fearlessness and brilliant intellect — it began to be apparent to him that the same superstition must have a prodigious grip on the minds of less intelligent people. How should he make use of it? By smashing his way into the Pyramid to demonstrate his power and his immunity from the effects of curses?
He thought not, although he knew how it would have pleased his officers, who were robbers of alien tombs by predilection and only to be restrained by strict injunction and the threat of penalties. A hundred mummies of the ancient kings of Egypt would be a novel and impressive feature of his triumph when he entered Rome at last. But his thought, under Cleopatra’s influence, was groping upward, just as hers, under his influence, was descending and losing its way. He sensed a less tangible but more real advantage to be gained by restraining the hand of sacrilege, and her last argument, that she offered as the moon rose bathing the great Pyramid in pale, effulgent light, did more to convince him than all the others, although he did not rightly understand her:
“Caesar, the way to win Gizeh’s secret is from within, not from without. Force — what did force ever accomplish? Can you win a woman’s secret that way? But you can cause the woman to reveal herself, and you can make her eager to reveal herself, by loving her. It is so with mysteries. The love one feels for them is the key that opens them; and there are seven doors, one within the other.”
He understood her to mean that if he should love her well enough she might betray to him seven entrances to Gizeh. He was willing to wait. He had, meanwhile, the added hold over her that she must submit herself, and her very will, to him without any reserves whatever, if she would keep him from breaking into all the mysteries of Egypt; and he felt that that threat, though unspoken, would suggest to her mind arguments that she would use to persuade the hierophants to open to him doors that otherwise he might see fit to force.
He had an epileptic fit, that dawn, on their return to the thalamegos. It was the first time that Cleopatra had seen him in that condition; hitherto his attendants had always contrived to keep a screen around him, and Olympus had applied restoratives that worked very swiftly. But thanks to Olympus’ treatments he had been feeling so well of late that he had agreed to leave Olympus in Alexandria to watch over Cleopatra’s interests, and the doctors they had brought had none of Olympus’ almost superhuman skill. Cleopatra, ignorant of the danger she was running, but aware of the nearness of a man in epilepsy to the psychic forces on another plane of consciousness, sought with such spells as she knew to make him speak to her of what he saw — that he stared at with the pupils of his eyes distended — that he seemed to recognize as near and real and yet not comprehensible to people in normal consciousness. She knew that Heracles, a hero subsequently deified, and now known to the rabble as a great god, had been afflicted with the falling sickness, and that the Pythoness of Delphi, in common with many another oracular priestess, possessed somewhat similar means of reaching supersensual discernment. Failing to get him to speak, for his jaws were rigid and his attendants had had to set a pad between his teeth to keep him from self-inflicted injury, she tried to heighten his realization of whatever it was that he saw, so that he might remember it and bring it back with him to tell her afterward.
“You are a god!” she murmured in his ear. “Caesar you are a god among gods. Your soul sees everything. Your soul knows everything. It will tell you everything. You are gathering strength and knowledge for return to earth, where you will remember it all. You will remember it for Cleopatra’s sake, who awaits you, and who loves you, and who is your comrade in the world.”
The horror of the symptoms made no impression on her, although several of her women fainted at the sight. She was far too sure that Caesar was in touch with other worlds to let mere physical symptoms take her mind off opportunity. Her whole will was concentrated on making Caesar, in that malleable condition, realize and remember his association with normally unseen influences; and, wiping the bloodstained froth from his lips, she watched his return to consciousness with ears strained to catch the first words he should utter.
But when his lips moved at last it was only to send her away from him. He was morbidly sensitive about anything that touched his physical condition or his dignity. His first gesture was to order everyone away except the slave whose duty it was to attend to him; and although the epilepsy always left him feeling abnormally intellectually alert and energetic, it was two days before he was willing to be alone again with Cleopatra. The
n he preferred not to speak of the incident, and was irritable when she tried to question him.
“It is bad enough to be afflicted, without having to discuss it afterward.”
But she watched. Every word he let drop, every chance expression of his thought were turned over in her mind for indications of a change of consciousness in him. She was so eager for him to grow aware of his divinity that she deified him in her own mind and he became to her the god that she intended he should be to other people. She caused him to be acclaimed as a god on earth at every village they passed. At the temple of Luxor at Thebes she persuaded him to sit on a granite throne between the effigies of gods and kings to receive the worship of the populace. And to prove to Caesar that her respect for pyramids and tombs and temples was nothing personal, she caused a great obelisk to be removed from Luxor and floated to Alexandria down the Nile. It was an obelisk that had been erected by one of her own ancestors — a Ptolemy. There was nothing ultra-sacred about that. He might move all Egypt if he would leave the really ancient monuments alone.
Meanwhile, Caesar gathered information regarding the trade route that led from the Nile to Berenice and thence to India — and the routes that led to Meroe, and Nepata, and the mysterious kingdom of Ethiopia, pondering the possibility of invading India by sea and growing more and more determined to conquer the whole world the more Cleopatra’s theories, whose real meaning he only dimly glimpsed at any time, took hold of his imagination.
Before they reached Aswan he had made up his mind about his eastward march of conquest. He would not go by way of Egypt. Egypt should be his private treasury — his own personal ally and source of wealth and splendor, which it would not be likely to remain for long if he should use the country as a highway between Rome and India, with Roman senators intruding themselves as committees of investigation. He could count, he was sure, on Cleopatra’s loyalty. Why share it with a Roman Senate, that he despised, and, that he felt sure would work day and night to steal away his power if given the least encouragement?