But he drew his hand across his troubled forehead and smiled grimly. He had made his first decisive step against Saul!
CHAPTER VIII
AN ALEXANDRIAN CHARACTERISTIC
Nothing but prescience could have inspired Alexander, the young Macedonian conqueror, to decide to plant a city on the sandy peninsula which lay hot, flat, low and unproductive between the glassy waters of Lake Mareotis and the tumble of the Mediterranean.
For a century previous, a straggling Egyptian village, called Rhacotis, eked out a precarious existence by fisheries; the port was filled with shoals or clogged with water-growth, and the voluptuous fertility of the Nile margin followed the slow sweep of the great river into the sea twelve miles farther to the east. No other port along the coast presented a more unattractive appearance. But Alexander, having no more worlds to conquer, turned his opposition upon adverse conditions.
So he struck his spear into the sand, and there arose at the blow a city having the spirit of its founder—great, splendid, contentious, contradictory, impetuous and finally self-destructive through its excesses.
He enlarged and embellished Rhacotis, which lay to the west of the new city and left it to the tenantry of the Egyptians, poor remnants of that haughty race which had been aristocrats of the world before Troy. In its center arose that solemn triumph of Pharaonic architecture, the Serapeum.
But it was they who approached from the south, with the sand of the Libyan desert in their locks, who saw noble Alexandria. Between them and the city was first the strength of its fortifications, prodigious lengths of wall, beautiful with citadels and towers. Within was the Brucheum, with the splendor of the Library, for the Alexandrian spirit of contentiousness sharpened and forced the intellect of her disputants, till her learning was the most faultless of the time and its house a fit shape for its contents. After the Library the pillared façade of the Court of Justice; next the unparalleled Museum, and, interspersed between, were the glories of four hundred theaters, four thousand palaces, four thousand baths. Against the intense blue of the rainless Egyptian sky were imprinted the sun-white towers, pillars, arches and statues of the most comely city ever builded in Africa. Memphis, lost and buried in the sand, and Thebes, an echoing nave of roofless columns, were never so instinct with glory as Egypt's splendid recrudescence on the coast of the Middle Sea.
To the northeast, there was abatement of pagan grandeur. Here were quaint solid masses of Syriac architecture, with gowned and bearded dwellers and a general air of oriental decorum and religious rigor which did not mark the other quarters of the city. In this spot the Jews of the Diaspora had been planted, had multiplied and strengthened until there were forty thousand in the district.