“Now come back.”
And he went back to the oasis; but Tarrar, before following him, stamped down the sand under which the casket lay buried and overwhelmed it, amid violent gestures of delight, with native curses, curses not to be averted, in the Libyan tongue.
Chapter XXIII
The travellers had returned to Memphis and Caleb displayed the skin of a lion which had been shot in the desert and told the people in the thalamegus terrible tales of desert ghosts and dread visions. The barge was now gliding up the Nile in the night; the sky was softly blue, like dark byssus; the water was a pale blue, like rippling silk; and the waning moon hung above the palm-clusters and country-mansions on the river-bank like a great, overripe fruit which threatened to burst in the sky and whose juice was already trickling in thick orange drops that flowed far over the Nile.
And, while the rowers’ monotonous chant resounded with the regular beat of the oars, Thrasyllus, sitting beside Lucius, gave way to melancholy and said:
“Egypt is Egypt no longer. Alexandria is a commercial town; Memphis is a decaying greatness; and the priests are venal and no longer know the Hermetic wisdom. I have sought for five days among the dusty papyri of the neglected library in the temple of Ammon; it is as though all that is worth knowing were hiding itself.”
“The priests must be hiding the Hermetic wisdom on purpose,” said Lucius.
“They used to do so in other days for Plato and Pythagoras, when their souls were lofty and incorruptible. Nowadays they show what they have and tell what they know for money. But what they have is not more than we in Rome possess in the temple of Isis; and what they know is not the key to happiness. And yet ... and yet I believe in a sacred word, handed down in the wisdom of the Kabbala by word of mouth, from father to son. But I have not yet received it from any priest, neither at Memphis nor in the oasis. And yet I have hopes. There is Thebes; and there are the secrets of Ethiopia ... down to the pillars of Sesostris.”
Lucius smiled gently: