When Julian awoke it was night. Over the roofless quadrilateral stars were shining, and the crescent moon shedding her silver upon the head of the statue. Julian arose. Olympiodorus must have meanwhile been tending the temple, although he had either not observed or had refrained from waking the child; for now, on the bronze tripod, fresh charcoal was glowing, and a fillet of odorous smoke arising towards the goddess.
Julian smiling approached, and from the chrysolite cup, between the feet of the tripod, took a few grains of incense and flung them on the coals. Smoke rose more thickly, and the ruddy glow of the fire, like a pale flush of life, came over the face of the statue, contending with the soft new-born shine of the moon.
Julian bowed down and kissed the marble feet, and watered them with his tears, exclaiming—
"Aphrodite! Aphrodite! thou shalt be my everlasting love!"
VI
In one of the foul and dirty quarters of the Syrian Seleucia, the port for Antioch on the shores of the Inner Sea, narrow and tortuous alleys debouched into a market-place lying along the quays. The sea-horizon was invisible, so thick was the throng of masts and the tangle of rigging. The houses were a mass of miserable little shells, whitewashed within and encumbered with furniture. Their fronts were garnished with tattered carpets, dirty fragments of cloth, and ravelled matting. In every nook and hovel and crowded court, along kennels and gutters of dirty fever-stricken water from laundries and baths of the poor, there lay seething in its penury and hunger a populace strangely cosmopolitan.
The sun, after thoroughly baking the earth, had just descended below the horizon; wide-winged twilight was settling slowly down; a stifling heat of dust and fog still weighed on the spirits of the city. From the market square breathed a suffocating atmosphere of flesh and vegetables, becoming rotten through lying all day in the blaze of the sun. Half-naked slaves were carrying bales of merchandise from the ships. Their heads were close-shaven; through their rags could be seen horrible blotches on the skin; and the greater number bore on their faces, in brandings by red-hot iron, the Latin letters C. F., that is to say Cave Furem ('ware thief!).
Braziers were being slowly lighted. But notwithstanding the approach of night, traffic and discussion gave no sign of ceasing in the network of alleys. From a neighbouring forge piercing blows of the hammer resounded on bars of iron, and flames shot up the sooty draught-hole. Hard by, slaves of a bakery, naked, covered from head to foot in flour-dust, and with eyelids inflamed by heat, were putting loaves into an oven. A shoemaker sat in his open-air stall, amid an insupportable smell of cobbler's glue and leather, stitching shoes by the light of a smoky lamp. He was squatting on his heels, and chanting desert songs at the top of his voice. Two old hags like witches, with hair streaming in the wind, were slowly passing across the little square in front of a row of hovels. They were yelling at each other, wrangling and threatening each other with fists and stones. The subject of dispute was the ownership of a cord on which to dry linen. A huckster, from a distant village, was hurrying along to be in time for the morning market. He was mounted on an old mare, flanked with wicker paniers, each heaped with rotting fish; the fetid smell of his load made passers-by edge off to a distance. A loutish urchin, with red hair and skin, was solacing his soul by beating on a great pan, while other children, a sickly multitude coming into the world and leaving it by hundreds daily, marched amidst this scene of poverty, grunting like pigs, round the pools of the quay. The water was full of orange-peel and egg-shells. In yet more villainous passages, inhabited by thieves, the smell of sour wine came from wine-shops, and sailors from every beach of the world marched along arm in arm, shouting drunken songs.
Surrounding all that noise, that filth and spilth of human misery, there murmured, sighed, and grumbled, the infinite, distant, and invisible sea.