Istar of Babylon: A Phantasy

by Margaret Horton Potter

"Now, Charmides, you must rise at dawn; therefore I bid you go to rest. Be up with the earliest light, and I will go with you to the temple, where, before Archemides, you will renew your vow and offer sacrifice of the youngest lamb in our fold. Kabir will join us there after the service is ended, and with him you will go down to the ship. Good-night. The gods grant you sleep."

Before Charmides had left the room Kabir came in again, and presently went off to his couch with the brothers.

Charmides' rest was broken, filled with dreams of far countries and with uncertain visions of her whom he was to seek. Disconnected sounds of music, bells, and phrases of charmed melody rang through his unconsciousness. Only in the last hour before dawn did he sink into untroubled slumber, from which, with the first glimmer of day, he rose. His mind was at rest, his heart filled with peace in the inward knowledge that what he was going forth alone to seek was no chimera, but a marvellous reality. It was, then, with a great, confident joy written upon his face that, at the rising of the sun, he stood before the altar of Apollo, and, in the presence of Archemides, the high-priest, surrounded by his father, brother, and the elders of Selinous, renewed his solemn vow and offered prayer and sacrifice to the Olympian of the Silver Bow.

The hour following the ceremony was painful enough. As the boy looked back upon it afterwards, it was only a haze of tears, filled with his mother's incoherent words, his father's irrelevant advice, Phalaris' poor attempts at laughing at the rest: all of these things finally ending in a choked prayer and kiss from Heraia. Her last embrace, given as they stood upon the shore beside the little boat that was to row him out to the galley, sent a sharp pang through his heart. He knew that his father gently loosened her arms from his neck. He had a decided memory of the last mighty grip of Phalaris' fingers. Then he and the Phœnician, each with his bundle of clothes and money, stepped into the boat and were pulled over the smooth waters to the side of the Fish of Tyre, resplendent in her new rigging and furnishing.

They were the last to go on board. Eshmun awaited them anxiously, wishing to get away at once, into the fresh easterly breeze that was bellying out the ready-hoisted sail. Thus the pain of lingering in sight of the city, his home, was not protracted for the rhapsode. Ten minutes after he had stepped upon the deck of the ship her anchor was weighed, the tiller was pushed hard down, the sails sprang full, and the shore and rocky heights of the Greek city began slowly to recede from view.

Now came, for Charmides, twelve days of pure delight. He was alive and he was living upon the sea, that moving plain, every aspect of which was one of new beauty. From dawn to dusk, and back again in dreams to dawn, he fed his mind upon the all-abiding peace, the stillness made more still by the music of the ripples. Perfect freedom was his. He was as in the very centre of the world, the sea around him unbroken, as far as eye could reach, or perhaps some low-hanging, faintly olive-green cloud that others called an island, just touching the distant horizon-line, west or south. It was here and now, only, that the image of Istar, as he conceived her, took absolute possession of his soul. By day he walked with her, by night she watched over his light sleep. He talked to her, believing that she answered him. He sang to her and dreamed of her and prayed to her as something especially his own. Yet, near as was this image of his mind, Charmides never looked straight upon her face unveiled. Dimly, many times, he conjured up her features. Her eyes shone upon him out of the spangled night, but their color he did not know. Her cheek, smooth, warm, semi-transparent, tinted as the petal of the asphodel, was near his lips, but never desecrated by them. And while she thus moved near him, drawing him onward with intenser desire towards her far abiding-place, she was forever the goddess, in that she kept him always from all desire of a more human approach than this mystic, half-mental companionship.

During the voyage the sailors regarded Charmides with a curiosity tinged with dislike. Eshmun himself was at a loss to comprehend the unsociable and idle existence of the youth, who lay all day long on the high stern, under the awning, singing to his lyre and watching the sea. And Kabir passed a good deal of time studying this intense phase of the shepherd's malady, and seeking to think out its cure. Considering the trader's eminent practicality, he conceived, with remarkable penetration, the workings of a poetically unbalanced mind. Only he, out of all the ship's company, cared to listen to the rhapsode's music. Only he lay awake by night to listen to and piece together the strange words that Charmides spoke in his sleep. But even he, it must be confessed, did not respect the effeminate romance that could lead a grown man into such ecstasies over a divine ideal.

The Fish of Tyre took her course down the high coast of southern Sicily, halting once at Akragas and again at the easternmost point, Syracuse, where more water was taken on, and purchase made of a number of jars of a rosier, sweeter liquid. Then away to sea they sailed again, southward, round the heel of Italy, and north once more to the shores of Mother Greece herself, stopping finally at many-storied Crete, where the long sand-stretches on the coast yielded every year to the Phœnicians a store of their wonderful little dye-mollusks. Leaving the city of tyrant kings, the galley entered upon the waters that formed a setting for those jewels of the Mediterranean, the Grecian Isles, that rose like so many emeralds upon their amethystine waters, shot with gold by day, lying dim and murmurous by night under the dome of lapis-lazuli pricked with diamond stars. The galley, homeward bound, carrying her burden of homesick men, made no halt between Crete and Cyprus, which last was, to Tyrians, a second home. Charmides witnessed, with a little tug at his heart-strings, the great joy of his comrades, even Kabir and Eshmun, at once more beholding the familiar shores. A night was spent in the Karchenian harbor, for it was but one day's journey now to Tyre herself.

During that last night, while they were at anchor, Charmides, in his accustomed place on the deck, lay wide awake. The moon, half-grown, set about midnight over the land. The night was still and sweet, and the air warm with approaching summer. The planets shone like little moons, more radiant than Charmides had ever known them before. Now and then, from the town on shore, came the baying of a dog. The Greek's heart swelled with a painful longing that he could not define. It was the first twinge of homesickness, the first realization of the greatness of the world around him, and his own insignificance within it. Istar, the goddess, might indeed be near him; but the shepherd longed less for divinity than for the clasp of a warm human hand upon his own.

It was better when the dawn, red-robed, came up out of the east. There was a bustle of sailors on deck, a creaking of ropes, and a flapping of sail-cloth. Then came the hoarse shouts of Sydyk, rousing the slaves from their chained slumber, bidding them bend cheerily to their oars, for the end of their eight months of agony and toil was near its end. The little ship sped out of the friendly harbor, gallantly distancing the waves, sending forth two hissing curls of foam off her prow, her rudder cutting a deep, pale line in the smooth wake. As the morning star died on the crimson of the east, the breeze freshened. The whole long horizon was shot with rosy clouds and topped by a line of gold that paled into delicate green as it melted towards the fair blue of the upper sky, in which the white stars had now long since hidden themselves away.