“He’s going dreaming! He’s going dreaming!” cried the populace. “See, he has his dreaming-veil on! He looks like Serapis himself!”
Beggars crowded round the travellers:
“Divine lord and exalted prince! Image of Horus, the son of Osiris! May Serapis send you good dreams! May Serapis load you with blessings! May he keep bad dreams locked far from you, in the shadowy underworld!”
The stewards distributed money among the beggars. Lucius had gone on board. The slave-girls scattered flowers before his feet as he walked.
The song of the rowers was heard from the body of the boat. The creaking ropes were cast off; the barge glided towards the middle of the lake. She gleamed with blue, green and yellow lights and left a trail of brightness in her wake; the water was bright around her. On the banks the villas and palaces of light stood in gardens of light.
Hundreds of other barges were gliding slowly in the same direction. Above the monotonous drone of the rowers’ song rang ballads and hymns. The music of citharas was heard in descending chords; the harps rang out; the notes of double flutes quavered through the evening air with a magic intoxication of melody.
The waters of the lake stood high. It was the month when the kindly Nile stepped outside its banks with a moist foot and overflowed the Delta. The golden waters of the lake lapped higher than the marble steps of the villas down which the brilliant hetairæ descended, holding the lappets of their veils, to take their seats on the cushions of their barges.
Flowers fell on the water, in unison with the notes of hymn and song. All the craft, hundreds and hundreds, large and small, barges and coracles, square rafts and canoes, pressed gently forward towards the entrance of the Canopian Canal. On the banks were thousands of idlers and spectators, all the people of Alexandria.
The vessels glided to the harmony of the twanged strings into the broad canal. It was very full of water; the banks were flooded. Reeds tall as a man, biblos and cyamos, rose like pillars, blossoming during this month with thousands of waving plumes: the leaves of the biblos were long and bending over, as though each were languidly broken; those of the cyamos were round as scales and goblet-deep, stacked one above the other along the stems, like cups.[1] In the light on the barges, golden patches glowed among the stalks; and the reeds and rushes blossomed up as though out of molten gold.
Here lay the Canopian harbour, here the suburb of Eleusis; and the canal split into two branches. The narrower channel led to Schedia, on the Nile; the broader led past Nicopolis to Canopus.