One of Cleopatra's Nights Read Free Page B

funereal symbols alone meet the eye—the emblems of the
pedum,
the
tau
, allegorical globes, coiling serpents, and the scales
in which souls are weighed—the Unknown, death, nothingness. In the
place of any vegetation only
stelæ
limned with weird characters;
instead of avenues of trees, avenues of granite obelisks; in lieu of
soil, vast pavements of granite for which whole mountains could each
furnish but one slab; in place of a sky, ceilings of granite—eternity
made palpable, a bitter and everlasting sarcasm upon the frailty and
brevity of life—stairways built only for the limbs of Titans, which the
human foot cannot ascend save by the aid of ladders; columns that a
hundred arms cannot encircle; labyrinths in which one might travel for
years without discovering the termination—the vertigo of enormity, the
drunkenness of the gigantic, the reckless efforts of that pride which
would at any cost engrave its name deeply upon the face of the world.
    "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