And then, that monumental ocean of houses, palaces, temples, porticoes, colonnades, that swam before her eyes from the Necropolis of the west to the gardens of the Goddess: Brouchion, the Egyptian town, in front of which the gleaming Paneion reared itself aloft like a mountain acropolis; the Great Temple of Serapis, from the facade of which arose, horn-like, two long pink obelisks; the Great Temple of Aphrodite engirded by the rustling of three hundred thousand palm-trees and countless waves; the Temple of Persephone and the Temple of Arsinoë, the two sanctuaries of Poseidon, the three towers of Isis Lochias, and the theatre, and the Hippodrome, and the Stadium where Pittacos had run in competition with Nicosthenes, and the tomb of Stratonice, and the tomb of the god Alexander—Alexandria! Alexandria! the sea, the men, the colossal marble Pharos whose mirror saved men from the sea! Alexandria! the city of the eleven Ptolemies, Physcon, Philometor, Epiphanes, Philadelphos; Alexandria, the climax of all dreams, the diadem of all the glories conquered during three thousand years in Memphis, Thebes, Athens, Corinth, by the chisel, the pen, the compass, and the sword! Still farther away, the Delta, cloven by the seven tongues of Nile, Saïs, Boubastis, Heliopolis; then, travelling towards the South, that ribbon of fertile land, the Heptanomos with the long array of its twelve hundred riverside temples dedicated to all the gods, and further still, Thebaïs. Diospolis, the Isle of Elephants, the impassable cataracts, the Isle of Argo . . . Meroë . . . the unknown; and even, if it was permitted to believe the traditions of the Egyptians, the country of the fabulous lakes, whence escapes the antique Nile, lakes so vast that one loses sight of the horizon when crossing their purple flood, and perched so high upon the mountains that the stars are reflected in them like golden apples.—all this, all, should be the kingdom, the domain, the possession of Chrysis, the courtesan.
She almost choked, and threw her arms on high as if she thought to touch the heavens.
And simultaneously, she watched on her left the slow flight towards the open sea of a great bird with black wings.
VII
CLEOPATRA
Queen Berenice had a young sister called Cleopatra. Many other Egyptian princesses had borne the same name, but this girl became in later years the great Cleopatra who destroyed her kingdom, and killed herself, as one might say, on the corpse of her dead empire.
About this time, she was twelve years of age, and no one could tell what her beauty would be. Her body, tall and thin, seemed out of place in a family where all the females were plump. She was ripening like some badly-grafted, bastard fruit of foreign, obscure origin. Some of her lineaments were hard and bold, as seen in Macedonia; other traits appeared as if inherited from the depths of Nubia, where womankind is tender and swarthy, for her mother had been a female of inferior race whose pedigree was doubtful. It was surprising to see Cleopatra’s lips, almost thick, under an aquiline nose of rather delicate shape. Her young breasts, very round, small, and widely separated, were crowned with a swelling aureola, thereby showing she was a daughter of the Nile.
The little Princess lived in a spacious room, opening on to the vast sea and joined to the Queen’s apartment by a vestibule under a colonnade.
Cleopatra passed the hours of the night on a bed of bluish silk, where the skin of her young limbs, already of a dark hue, took on still deeper tints.
It came to pass that in the night when—far from her and her thoughts—the events already chronicled in these pages look place, Cleopatra rose long before dawn. She had slept but little and badly, being anxious about her troubles of puberty which she had just experienced, and disturbed by the extreme heat of the atmosphere.