This scurrilous information was quite enough for Cleopatra. She had her plans accordingly. She would see Cæsar. More to the point, she would be seen by Cæsar. But how? Cæsar was in Alexandria, the stronghold of her enemies. It would mean capture and subsequent death for Cleopatra to be found in the city. Yet she planned not only to enter Alexandria, but to make her first appearance before Cæsar in a way designed to catch his attention and more than friendly interest from the very start.
Julius Cæsar sat in the great audience hall of the Alexandria palace, whose use he had commandeered as his temporary headquarters. Behind him stood his guards; heavy armored, tanned of face; short, thick swords at hip. Before his dais trailed a procession of folk who hated him as starkly as they feared him.
They were Egyptians with favors to ask, and they bore gifts to indorse their pleas. They were Greeks who sought to outwit the barbarian victor, or to trick him into the granting of concessions. One by one the suppliants crawled past, each crying out an appeal or a grievance. Nearly every one made a peace offering, until the mass of gifts was stacked high on the stone floor of the audience hall.
Presently entered two black porters, (strapping Nubian giants), who bore lightly between them a roll of rare Persian carpet. They halted, laid down their burden on the floor at Cæsar's feet, fell on their knees in obeisance, and—waited. On the floor lay the roll of priceless weave, no one coming forward to make the rich gift an excuse for the urging of some boon.
Cæsar grew inquisitive. He leaned forward to examine the tight-folded, shimmering rug more carefully. As he did so, the folds were suddenly flung aside, and a girl leaped to her feet from among them. Thus had Cleopatra entered Alexandria. Thus had she penetrated to Cæsar's presence. Thus, too, by her craft and daring, had she won the attention of the man whose daring and craft had conquered the world.
Cæsar stared in delighted interest. He saw, standing gracefully—and wholly undraped—before him, a slender, red-haired girl, snub-nosed and of no special beauty. But, at a glance, this man who saw everything, saw, too, that she possessed an unnameable fascination—a magnetism—that was greater by far than that of any other woman he had known in all his fifty-eight years.
It was Julius Cæsar's first introduction to a super-woman; to the super-woman of super-women; to a woman beside whose snub-nosed, plain face, under its shock of red hair, the memory of the Roman beauties who had so often charmed his idle hours grew dim and confused.
Cleopatra, on her part, saw nothing so impressive as an elephant-tiger-dragon monster. She beheld a thin, undersized man, nearly sixty years old, hawk-nosed, inscrutable of eye, on whose thin gray locks, to mask his fast-growing baldness, rested a chaplet of laurel leaves.
This was the hero whose cunning and whose war genius had caused sceptered men to grovel at his feet, and had made stubborn republican Rome his cringing servant. But he was also the man whose weakness was an attractive woman. And on this weakness Cleopatra at once proceeded to play.
Yet she speedily found that Cæsar's was but a surface weakness, and that beneath it lay iron. Gladly he consented to save her from her foes, and even in a measure to let her punish such of those foes as were of no use to him. But as for making her the undisputed Queen of Egypt and setting her triumphantly and independently on the throne of her ancestors, at Rome's expense—he had not the remotest idea of doing that.