Some thirty years before the Christian era, Egypt was not as now a barbarous and desert region, a strip of rudely cultivated land along the margin of the eternal Nile, and all beyond that semi-civilized district a waste of howling wilderness, shifting and fiery sands roamed by the wild hyena, or the wilder Arab, scattered here and there with those gigantic relics of a former race, which, while they recall the original magnificence of the kings, and priests yet mightier than kings, who ruled of yore with a sway revered and dreaded to the very limits of the earth in those huge halls, are now avoided, or visited in fear and trembling by the adventurous traveler, as haunts of the ferocious Bedouin. Her cities were not then the sinks of mingled filthiness and luxury; a foreign rule had not then paralyzed her commerce, desolated her fields, and brutified her men. The Moslem had not then poured upon her, the garden of the Mediterranean shore, a scourge more foul and loathsome than the most terrible of her ancient plagues.
Egypt, although even then shorn of a portion of her ancient glories, and sinking by slow steps into a Roman province, was still the garden, and the glory of the universe. It was a glorious sight to look upon those almost boundless plains, or on those wondrous valleys, bounded on either hand by mountains then clothed with artificial verdure even to their summits, in the early summer, when the tender herbage of the young grain had spread them with an interminable carpet of the brightest green, or in the genial noon of autumn, when the tall wheat and bearded barley undulated in every breeze, a sea of golden fertility.
It was a yet more wondrous sight, and savoring of enchantment, to view her thousand cities blazing with the barbaric splendors of the East—her temples far surpassing in strange, awful magnificence, in gloomy mysticism, and terrific splendor, the simpler and more classic shrines of Greece—her groves of palm, her thickets of acacia, her canals embowered with the broad leaves and lovely blossoms of the azure lotus, her coppices blushing with the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate, or rich with the bursting fig—her palaces, her libraries, her quays, trodden by the mariners of every known realm, her galleys, that had braved the tempests of the “ocean stream,” and visited, in their adventurous roamings, the dark and stormy Cassiterides, or yet more wonderful, had been favored with glimpses of those “Edens of the western wave,” those islands of the blest, in whose remote and uncertain shores the imaginative poets of the Greeks had placed the residence of the departed good.
It was about the period above mentioned, that a war-galley of that construction which had been recently adopted by the Romans, in preference to the lofty and cumbrous castles of the deep, only used for purposes of display and pleasure, was to be seen beating in for the Egyptian shore. She was a noble trireme, and it would seem that the builder had exerted his utmost skill to render her not only seaworthy, and formidable as a ship of war, but rich even to magnificence in her decorations.
Her upturned prow, with its wonted equipage of brazen beaks, to shatter the bows of an adversary, and brazen plates to protect her own, all polished till they flashed back the rays of the summer sun with almost intolerable brightness, displayed along its bulwarks exquisitely moulded railings of a richer metal; while high in front stood a statue, the presiding deity of Rome, a helmed and crested Mars, sculptured with the utmost finish of the Grecian chisel in pure gold. The shields, suspended from the channels, were charged with thunderbolts of the same precious material, upon the dark blue steel of Iberia. The oars were gilded, and from the castled stern floated beneath a golden effigy of the guardian wolf and the twin founders of the Imperial City, a broad sheet of silk, blushing with the crimson effulgence of the Tyrian dye, and, as it was tossed aloft by the light breath of the sirocco, displaying the initials at which the universe trembled—those dread initials S. P. Q. R.—the Senate and People of Rome—at whose edicts the remote Indian and nomadic Scythian shook with unwonted awe.
Gorgeous, however, as were the decorations, perfect as the entire equipment of the galley, there was something in her motions which betrayed even at a nearer inspection, it was evident that while several of her oars were entirely missing, a yet greater number were sprung, and so far weakened as to give her that slow and crippled progress through the water, which the master of the Latin Epic has so aptly compared to the painful writhings of a wounded serpent.
Her prow was in several places pierced and shattered, the sails bore evident marks of having met with rougher treatment than under so bright a sky was likely to have been inflicted by the waves. The breeze though not exactly favorable was not adverse, blowing freshly on her beam. It was such a wind as would now be hailed with delight; but, in those days of imperfect navigation, when all weather was considered foul which would not allow a vessel to run dead before it—though not actually contrary, it was looked upon with distrust at least, and deprecated as producing difficulty at the least, if not danger.
In her disabled state, therefore, this noble galley toiled long and wearily before the lofty pharos of Alexandria was seen towering, like a vast column of snow, from the bosom of the placid sea. For many an hour after this splendid landmark had been visible, did she struggle onward, ere the quays of Parian marble, the long breakwaters, and gigantic moles at its base, could be distinguished on the horizon.
Gradually the inner shores of the harbor opened, a vista of pillared porticoes, architrave and frieze, of Corinthian, Ionic, Tuscan structure, mingled with massive and fantastic forms of the earlier style of Egypt, sphynx and colossus, obelisk and pyramid, blended with the everlasting verdure of the palmy gardens that invested the glorious city with a belt of aromatic verdure.
High on her prow stood the form of a noble-looking leader, in the very prime of strength and manhood, his frame displaying all the graces of Antinous mingled with all the sinewy strength of Hercules. To the first might be referred the massive brow, the short curled, clustering locks that shaded it, and the somewhat effeminate cast of his singularly beautiful features—to the latter, the broad shoulders, the brawny neck, and the firmness of the muscular development that was displayed at every motion. His eyes were of that long-cut narrow form which has been supposed to be typical of a soft luxurious character; but in the dark orbs themselves there lurked, when they were raised, a sparkle, which might easily be kindled into lightning splendidly different from the dream-like softness of their wonted expression.