Artazostra shook her head.
“Impossible. Your eyes were glazed like the blue of Egyptian beads. You were not listening to me. You were seeing sights and hearkening to voices far away.”
“You press me hard, lady,” he confessed; “how can I answer? No man is master of his roving thoughts,—at least, not I.”
“You were seeing Athens. Are you so enamoured of your stony country that you believe no other land can be so fair?”
“Stony it is, lady,—you have seen it,—but there is no sun like the sun that gilds the Acropolis; no birds sing like the nightingales from the grove by the Cephissus; no trees speak with the murmur of the olives at Colonus, or on the hill slope at Eleusis-by-the-Sea. I can answer you in the words of Homer, the singer of Hellas, the words he sets on the tongue of a wanderer and outcast, even as I. ‘A rugged land, yet nurse of noble men, and for myself I can see naught sweeter than a man’s own country.’ ”
The praise of his native land had brought the colour into the cheeks of the Athenian, his voice rose to enthusiasm. He knew that Roxana was watching him intently.
“Beautiful it must be, dear Hellene,” she spoke, as she sat upon the footstool below the couch of her brother, “yet you have not seen all the world. You have not seen the mystic Nile, Memphis, Thebes, and Saïs, our wondrous cities; have not seen how the sun rises over the desert, how it turns the [pg 193]sand hills to red gold, how at sunset the cliffs glow like walls of beryl and sard and golden jasper.”
“Tell then of Egypt,” said Glaucon, clearly taking pleasure in the music of her voice.
“Not to-night. I have praised it before. Rather I will praise also the rose valleys of Persia and Bactria, whither Mardonius took me after my dear father died.”
“Are they very beautiful also?”