Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVAnd so it happened. Uncle Catullus thought that Caleb’s suggestion was really not bad; and so he remained on board the thalamegus with Rufus the under-steward and a number of male and female slaves and was to go from Apollonopolis Magna to Berenice, there to meet the quadrireme, while Lucius, Thrasyllus and Caleb took ship in a simple barge which brought them to Syene. Tarrar was with them; and Cora was with them.“Cora,” Lucius had asked, “do you dare undertake the journey through the forest and the wilderness?”“My lord, I am your slave,” Cora had answered, gladly; and she had gone with them.“When we come back at night from hunting, Cora, you shall sing to us under the twinkling stars of Ethiopia....”At Syene the travellers saw the last Roman soldiers: there were always three cohorts stationed at this spot, on the Egyptian frontier. At Elephantina was the LittleCataract, in the middle of the river, falling over rocky steps, across whose smooth surface the water first shot forward quickly, to come shooting next over a rocky rampart, roaring and clattering in a deep dive. And the travellers saw the watermen come up from Philæ in light boats and then shoot, with the powerful, brawling stream, over the steps and raise themselves over the rocky wall and slip, boat and all, with joyful cries, down the waterfall into the depths; and it looked such a safe sport that first Caleb, next Lucius, next even Cora, strapped into a little skiff, shot the rapids, raising themselves over the wall and slipping down the waterfall.From Syene to Philæ the journey was done in carts. There was an end to any luxurious comfort; the road led for hundreds of stadia through a level plain with strange big rocks, like statues of Hermes in a Greek city, along the road. They were round and cylindrical, like polished black stones, three on top of one another, from large to small. The travellers were conveyed to the island in a raft of laths and wickerwork, on which the water lapped over their feet.“Herodotus tells us,” said Thrasyllus,“that the mysterious sources of the Nile ought to be here, near Syene and Elephantina, and that the canal which leads to them is an abyss and a bottomless sea! But Herodotus often tells us fairy-tales! For observe, the abyss, the bottomless sea, is covered all over with islands; and they are inhabited; and the sources of the Nile are certainly not here!”At Tachampso the travellers again took a boat. But the Ethiopian forests were now to be traversed. Lucius mounted his elephant; the others mounted camels; more camels carried tents and luggage, of which there was now only a little; and Caleb had hired a strongly-armed escort of powerful Libyans and swift-footed Arabs. For, though the Ethiopians themselves were not warlike and offered no danger to the travellers, there were the savage races, the Troglodytæ, the Blemmyes, the Nubians, the Megabari, and, above all, the Ochthyophagi and Macrobii, who, if they were not overawed by the sight of a strong and numerous force, might surprise and plunder the travellers. The civilized world ended here. This was the very end of the world. True, on the Nile there was still Napata and the Ethiopiancapital, Meroe; but beyond that was buried the secret of the world’s end, the secret of the sources of the Nile, the secret of the horizons of the earth, the secret of the endless sea surrounding the world. Here, in these forests, began the temptation merely to go on and on, to go on in order to learn what the end would be, with what temptations and with what dread perils. Caleb told of travellers who had gone on and on and who had seen Typhon’s awful giant head appear above the edge of the world, with gaping mouth; and he had swallowed them up. One guide had escaped and had told it to Caleb, who said that he was worthy of belief. There also, in the immeasurable ocean that washed the world’s edge, lay the great serpent, which coiled itself in spirals and then covered the whole surface of the water, as far as the eye could reach, when it came up to bask in the scorching heat of the southern sun. Once, said Caleb, some daring travellers, who thought that the snake was a sort of dark desert, had walked over its scales, for miles on end, until the snake moved and they realized the terror and slipped into the sea in which you sinkand sink and sink, for three centuries, before reaching the bottom of Typhon’s Hell.These were the terrible tales which Caleb knew how to tell, one after the other, while the sun set over the forest and the stars twinkled and the fires blazed high and the tents were pitched and a sheep roasted on the spit. And Caleb made himself so much afraid and the guards and drivers so very much afraid that, shivering with fear, they asked Cora to sing. Then Cora would play on her harp and sing to them; and at the sound of her voice the dread visions, the uncanny phantoms, the giants and pygmies vanished and sleep came over them all, except Thrasyllus, who remained awake, smiling and thoughtful, and looked up at the stars and reflected that, thanks to his studies, he knew the occult secret, that the world was not a disk, washed by the sea, but a sphere, which glowed with internal fire and moved round the sun, the centre of the universe....It was as though a new health were making Lucius strong and cheerful. Yes, it seemed to Thrasyllus that Lucius was no longer thinking of Ilia and that he was cured of hiscarking grief. In the Ethiopian forests, which now almost surrounded them with an impenetrable wall of huge trees and dense foliage and tangled creepers, he abandoned himself enthusiastically to the delights of the great hunts which Caleb organized, with the aid of the mighty hunters whom he had hired for his noble client. These hunters included five Elephantophagi, with whom Lucius hunted the elephants which sometimes pass through the forests in herds. The elephants were often shot by archers, three of whom served one heavy bow: two men, leg forward, held the bow; the third drew back the string; and the arrow, dipped in snake poison, struck the elephant, who fell stunned. If the elephant was not killed, he was surrounded with a network of ropes; and, when he recovered consciousness, he was tamed and made to lure other elephants. If the elephant, however, was not to be tamed and if, after recovering his senses, he relapsed into a dangerous rage, then he was driven, amid much shouting and yelling, against a tree, which had purposely been sawn through at the foot. Elephants are accustomed to rest against trees; but, as soon as the untamable elephant leant againstthis tree, it fell over him and prevented him from rising, so that he broke the bone of his leg and was killed. This often implied cruelty, but it also implied danger; and Lucius’ newly aroused manhood found satisfaction in this robust, virile sport.But there was also the hunting of the swift-footed ostriches, with hunters selected from the tribe of the Struthophagi; and this hunt provided the maddest enjoyment and excited Caleb and Tarrar in particular; and Thrasyllus and Cora also came to look on, for it was a most diverting spectacle, in which the hunters disguised themselves as ostriches, with little skirts of feathers and with one hand stuck into a stuffed ostrich-neck, with the stuffed head sticking out on top. There were first wild bird-dances; then the hunters darted forward and scattered corn and lured the real birds, which rushed after them and pecked at the grains, until they were caught in ravines from which they could find no issue and were shot with arrows. And with their precious feathers, bleached and curled, the Struthophagi made costly coverings, soft and white and downy, which Caleb bought for a song to send to Alexandria and Rome, where they were agreat luxury, so that Caleb made a pretty penny by the transaction.Sometimes there was danger in the forest. There was danger when the Struthophagi met the Sionians, a tribe of nomads with whom they were always at war; it was dangerous when the Acridophagi appeared, the verminous locust-eaters; but the travellers’ strong escort, the huge Libyans and nimble Arabs, inspired respect and the wild nomads fled at the first bow-shot. And Caleb was afraid of nobody; he feared only the wood-nymphs, who, when they have caught you in their arms, which are pythons, laugh and laugh into your ears, until you go mad, and then dance round with you, until you drop dead. And, when he lay down at night to sleep under a black ostrich-feather covering, he also feared the scorpions, which have no fewer than four jaws and whose bite is not fatal but produces a slow, incurable canker.They also caught lions, in nets, and hippopotami, in pits, and wild buffaloes, which they pursued with the huge hounds of the Cynamolgian hunters. They hunted from tall trees and they hunted from the reeds in the water. It was a rude andstimulating life; and Caleb once said to Lucius, seriously, that he felt the courage to go on and to go on again ... to fight the great snake in the ocean that encompassed the earth....It did not come to that, however. But the caravan was approaching Napata and the Ethiopian emerald-mines and topaz-rocks. The emerald-mines were like marvellous green, magic caves, in which thousands of slaves were working; the topaz-rocks were visited at night time: the stones, because of their yellow sheen, are almost invisible by day, but glitter in the dark night; then little metal tubes are planted over each stone that is found, so as to make it easier to recognize the stones in the daytime and to grub them out. In former ages, the Egyptian and Ethiopian kings maintained separate guards around these mines and rocks.At Napata, where the travellers now arrived, they saw their first entirely native, barbarian town. There was not a word of Latin spoken here; Lucius and Thrasyllus could not have made themselves understood without Tarrar and Caleb; and even then the little Libyan slave and the Sabæan guidefound it difficult to grapple with the language. The Ethiopians, who wore no clothing save the skin of some animal round their waist, surprised the travellers by the smallness of their stature. Everything about them was small: their houses built of palm-leaves and bamboo, their oxen and goats and sheep; and Thrasyllus was of opinion that the legend of the Pygmæi, or nations of dwarfs, had originated because of Ethiopia.The natives ate hardly any meat, but mainly vegetables and fruits, or young shoots of trees, or they would suck reed-stalks and lotus-flowers. But they also took blood and milk and cheese; and there was no other food. No, Uncle Catullus would never have stood it here, thought Lucius, when the travellers went still farther south, to the capital of Ethiopia, Meroe, on the island of the same name. And here Lucius discovered that the famous date-wines and topaz-yellow liqueurs of Napata and Meroe were a sheer hoax, that there was no wine or liqueur whatever distilled in Ethiopia and that the delicious drinks with which Master Ghizla and Caleb had provided him andUncle Catullus came from no farther than Lake Mareotis at Alexandria!A fabulous vegetation, however, grew luxuriantly over the island. If the people and animals were small, the trees shot up with amazing vigour: the huge palm-trees, the ebony-trees, the ceratia and persea, under whose gigantic domes of thick foliage the green villages of little plaited wicker huts disappeared from view. In the marshes round Lake Psebo the travellers hunted, if not the great snake, at any rate the terrible boa, which even ventures to attack the elephant. And the natives showed them a fight between one of these boas and an elephant and a hippopotamus.They visited the gold-mines, the copper-mines, the jewel-mines, the temples of Hercules and Pan and of a strange barbaric deity. The dead were buried in the Nile, or else they were kept in the houses under a mica slab of human form. In the middle of the town stood the Golden Temple, where the king dwelt in sacred mystery. There were slabs of gold between bamboo columns. In former ages the priests elected the kings and deposed them at will; but a certain king had caused all the priests to be strangledand since then a law had been passed that, if the king were maimed or lost a limb, all the people of his court had to inflict the same injury on themselves, for which reason the king’s person was guarded with great care and was divine and sacred; and the travellers did not see him.Chapter XXVIAfter the fierce hunting by day, the nights were twinkling mysteries of great shining, diamond stars; and Sirius shone like a white sun. The rustling silence, the audible stillness of the vast forests lapped the encampment of the caravan, where the fires died out but still glowed sufficiently to keep the wild animals at a distance and where the guards and drivers lay immersed in sound sleep. Lucius was happy in that mystery; and in the silvery sheen of the night the last memories of his grief seemed to lift like wisps of disappearing mist.The travellers had approached the Land of Ophir; and the pillars of Sesostris would be reached next day. In this last twinkling night of forest-life, with the stars shining through the foliage like a diamond cupola above an emerald dome, Lucius had left his tent while all the others slept. Next to his tent were those of Thrasyllus, Caleb and Cora. And he saw Cora sitting outside her tent, which was the biggest, because she wasa woman, and made of spotted lynx-hides, whose warmth resisted the plentiful dew. And she rose and stretched her hands to the ground, in salutation, and preserved that attitude, shyly.“Are you not sleeping, Cora?” asked Lucius.“No, my lord. I cannot sleep when the nights twinkle like this, when the stars send forth such rays that it is really as though they were moving to and fro. I feel that I must go on gazing at them until they fade away.”“Life here in the forest is too wild for you, too lonely....”“Life in the forest is paradise, my lord. By day Thrasyllus tells me wonderful things about the mountains and the plants and the animals and the savage tribes; and so the hours pass till you return from hunting....”“And you sing to us and dance in the light of the fire and charm the rude hunters and Caleb in particular....”She smiled and made no reply.Then she continued:“And the nights are such strange mysteries of sounds and silence and of radiantstars; and it is as though Sirius grew bigger nightly.”“And you are never frightened?”“I am not frightened, my lord.”“Not even at night?”“Least of all at night, because ...”“Because what?”“Because then you have returned; and I feel safest where you are.”“From that height yonder, Cora, one can see the sea. I love the sea and I often miss the sea in the forest. I am glad that we are near the sea again. As I returned from hunting, I could just catch sight of a streak of sea from there. I should like to see the sea now, at night, with all those twinkling stars above it.”“Yes, my lord.”“Come with me ... that is, if you are not frightened.”“I am not frightened, my lord, where you are.”And her heart throbbed in her throat, but not with fear.They went past the sleeping guards and left the circle of the watch-fires. She nearly stumbled over the creepers and stones; and he said:“Give me your hand.”It was the first time that his hand had met hers. He had never touched her before. When she felt the warm strength of his hand around her own small hand, hers lay passive like a captive dove.“Why are you trembling so?” he asked.“I don’t know, my lord,” she stammered.He smiled and did not speak again.They climbed the rocky height and he helped her, with his fingers still grasping hers. He even put his arm round her slim waist, to support her, and he felt that she was still trembling, as in a fever.“Look,” he said, pointing, “there is the sea.”They both looked out. Around them stretched the forests, all shadow and denseness and gloom and loneliness and mystery. On one horizon, gleaming darkly in the night, lay the line of the sea, the Arabian Gulf, the Erythræan or Red Sea.“The sea,” she stammered. “Yes, the sea, I love it too. I always had it around me, at Cos. I also miss it in the forest, as you do, my lord.”“To-morrow we shall reach the sea again, Cora.... Cora, I want you, to-night, thislast night ... to dance to me ... here, in the starlight.”“Yes, my lord,” said the slave.She danced. She softly hummed a tune between scarce-parted lips. The thin folds of her garment flew to either side; and with her veils she mimicked the movements of birds’ wings. She hovered round and round on the upland, circling like a swallow.He stepped towards her; and she ceased dancing.“Cora,” he said, “to-morrow we shall be at Dire, by the pillars of Sesostris. On the opposite side are Ebal and Usal and Saba, Caleb’s country, to which he wants to return when he is rich.”“Yes, my lord.”“Cora, if you are really fond of Caleb, I will resign you to him.”She trembled and clasped her hands. She fell on her knees and gave one loud sob.“What’s the matter, Cora?”“My lord, let me stay with you! Let me dance and sing for you, let me serve you, let me wash your feet; kick me, beat me, torture me! But do not send me away! Do not send me away! Keep me! Keep me with you!... I come from Dryope’sslave-school, I have cost you a fortune, my lord! I am not beautiful, but my voice is good and, my lord, I am a clever dancer. But, if your lordship is tired of my voice and my dancing, I will wash your feet; and, when you are angry and want to beat a slave, you shall beatmeand ill-treat me! But keep me, keep me, wherever you may be!”She had thrown herself before him and was sobbing and kissing his feet.And he said:“Then, Cora, don’t you love Caleb?”“My lord,” she said, “I love you—if I must say it!—and I have loved you from the first moment when Thrasyllus brought me to you. And, if it please you, my lord, I will die for you. But keep me and do not give me to Caleb!”“And if it pleased me, Cora ... that you should not die for me but live for me? Not only to sing to me and dance to me, but also to throw your arms around my neck, to lay your breast upon my breast and your lips upon my lips?...”She gave a cry as of incredible happiness. Smiling, he raised her very tenderly and folded her in his arms, close against him.“Oh!” she cried, in ecstasy, when his lips sought hers. “Aphrodite! Aphrodite! She has heard my prayer!”Her little hands ventured to reach out for his head and take it by the temples. Around them was the solitude of the Ethiopian night; from out of the forests the flowers filled the air with incense; a spice-laden aroma was wafted from the sea; and the radiant stars hung above them, like white suns, with the dazzling glory that was Sirius....Chapter XXVIICape Dire! The sea was reached; and there rose the obelisks, the shafts, the pillars of Sesostris, whose sacred writings immortalized the remembrance of the passage of the Egyptian world-ruler who for nine years had linked conquest to conquest, even to Arabia, even to Bactriana, even to India. And Caleb approached Lucius with a smile and said:“Most noble lord, I wished to keep it for you as a surprise and would not tell you before, but this little diversorium at Cape Dire, overlooking my beloved native land, belongs tous, to Ghizla and me, and is a small branch of our great Hermes House at Alexandria; and to-night you need no longer sleep in a tent, but will have a worthy apartment and sleep on a soft couch of skins. For, though you are still without your own furniture and your sumptuous utensils and treasures of art and though this little guest-house is not to be compared with our big diversorium, it is nevertheless comfortable and clean and it has bathrooms and kitchensand we built it here for the accommodation of any noble lords who travel from Alexandria to the pillars of Sesostris or from the pillars of Sesostris to Alexandria.”And Caleb, swaggering gaily and elegantly on the tips of his red boots, led the travellers into his guest-house; and Lucius, for the first time for weeks, bathed not in a rustling stream but in a bathroom, where his slaves rubbed and kneaded his body.Caleb stood on the cape, with his hand above his eyes, and looked out in astonishment. He was surprised that the quadrireme, with Uncle Catullus on board, had not arrived from the Gulf of Acathantus, nay, was not even in sight. Could there have been an accident? He told his fears to no one but Thrasyllus; and the two stood looking long on the point of Cape Dire, gazing into the distance, each with his hand above his eyes.But at last, when night began to fall, the great, graceful sea-monster appeared on the horizon, with her prow erect like a swan’s neck and her hundreds of slender legs moving in unison; and the rose-yellow sails bellied in the breeze; and the silver statue of Aphrodite shot forth its silver spark of light; andthe rowers’ long, melancholy chant, the soft, monotonous accompaniment of tiring work, was borne long and wistfully over the sea, together with the cheerful song of the sailors. And the travellers, who now all stood on the cape waiting for the ship, saw the figures of Uncle Catullus, of the stewards Vettius and Rufus, of the master and the steersman.And they waved again and again; and Cora, with her harp pressed to her bosom, sang the song of welcome to the ship; and her voice sounded jubilant and clear, full of happiness and full of gladness. The ropes were flung ashore, the ship lay moored....But what was the anxiety that covered the faces of all on board, who were now preparing to walk across the gangway to the jetty? Why did Uncle Catullus lift his hands on high and shake his head, pinned round so comically in his travelling-veil? And what was it that Vettius and Rufus were saying to each other with much gesticulation and why did they now all land with such embarrassed faces?“Well, Lucius,” said Uncle Catullus, embracing him, “you’re looking splendid, my dear fellow, splendid, brown and bronzed as a Nimrod; and your arms feel hard andyour eyes are bright and your mouth is laughing happily and you look very different from what you were when we left Baiæ.... Ah, my dear, dear Lucius! Fortune is blind and fate is a riddle and we poor mortals are the playthings of the cruel gods; and we never know, in the midst of our delight and gladness, what is hanging over our heads ... especially when travelling, dear boy: my dear boy,especiallywhen travelling!”“But why especially when travelling, my dear uncle?” asked Lucius, laughing.And he led his uncle into the diversorium; and his uncle was now weeping; and his slaves unpinned his travelling-veil for him and relieved him of his travelling-cloak; and Vettius and Rufus also looked so strange and so gloomy and solemn; and it was as though the air were filled with dread.“But, Uncle Catullus,” said Lucius, “what has happened?”“My dear, dear boy,” Uncle Catullus kept on tediously repeating, “I ... I really cannottell you.”And he wrung his hands and wept; and Thrasyllus turned pale and Cora turned pale and Rufus looked gloomy.“No,” repeated Uncle Catullus, “I reallycannottell Lucius. You tell him, Vettius, you tell him.”“My Lord Catullus,” said Vettius, at last, in despair, “howcanI tell my Lord Lucius? If I do, he will fly into a passion and kill me; but, perhaps, if Rufus will tell him ...”“I will not, I willnot,” said Rufus, warding off the suggestion with both hands. “By all the gods, Vettius, I willnottell him.”“Nor will I,” said Uncle Catullus, moaning and weeping.Lucius now knitted his brows and said:“But I must know, Vettius. I order you to tell me what has happened—for something has happened—I order you to tell me and I swear not to kill you.... Has it to do with the quadrireme, a mutiny among the rowers?”“Worse than that, my lord!” wailed Vettius.“Has there been a theft of our baggage or jewels or plate?”“Worse, my lord, much worse!”“Has there been a fire at our insula in Rome? Is the villa burned down?”“Worse, worse, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried in chorus.And they flung themselves at Lucius’ feetand embraced his knees; and Uncle Catullus fell sobbing on Thrasyllus’ breast.“But whatisit? By all the gods, speak up!” cried Lucius, in a fury. “Whatisit? Speak up, or I will have you whipped till you do!”“We will tell you, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried.And Uncle Catullus cried:“Yes, tell him, tell him; after all, hemustbe told.”“Are we alone, my lord?” whined Vettius. “Are there no slaves listening at the doors and is Caleb out of hearing?”Cora opened the doors and peeped out:“There is no one there,” she said. “I will withdraw, my lord.”“No, stay,” commanded Lucius.She stayed.“Speak up,” Lucius commanded Vettius, lifting him up.“My lord,” said Vettius, again falling at Lucius’ feet, “if I must tell you, let me do so on my knees. For I have not the strength left to tell you, my lord, if I stand face to face with your anger.”“Speak!” roared Lucius, in a voice of thunder.“My lord,” said Vettius, at last, clasping Lucius’ knees in his hands and kissing them continually, “my lord, our gracious emperor, Augustus Tiberius, is wroth with you, we know not for what reason, and....”“Well?” shouted Lucius.“And he has confiscated all your possessions, O my lord, everything that you possess: all your insula in Rome, your villa, your estates and domains, your horses and chariots and cattle, your slaves and treasures of art, your library and your jewels ... and has attached all the sums which you had lodged with your bankers and money-changers in various towns! You are penniless, my lord, for you own nothing except what your ship contains; and, if I had not succeeded in keeping Tiberius’ displeasure secret by means of a precipitate flight and by continuing to drift about in the Great Sea and the Arabian Gulf, your quadrireme also would have been seized at Alexandria and you would now have been without your ship, without your rowers, without your slaves, without a single penny. By bribing the authorities at Pelusium with the money that remained in my hands, I managed secretly to pass through the Nechao Canal toArsinoe; and at Berenice we met your Uncle Catullus and informed him of the terrible news. My lord, do not slay me and do not be wroth with me, for I have saved for you what I could!”And Vettius writhed at Lucius’ feet and sobbed; and they all sobbed: Uncle Catullus, Thrasyllus, Rufus and Cora....And Caleb, who had been listening at the door, turned very pale.For there was still a long, long, long papyrus scroll of a bill awaiting payment, for the big hunts in the Ethiopian forests!Chapter XXVIIICaleb was pale when he appeared before Lucius, who had sent for him.“Caleb,” said Lucius, “perhaps you already know ...”“I know nothing, my lord,” said Caleb.“I am penniless, Caleb. The Emperor Tiberius has confiscated all my possessions; and even my title to the quadrireme is questionable.”“O my lord, O my lord!” Caleb began to lament. “O my poor, poor, noble lord! What a terrible fate to befall you! If only you had consented faithfully to wear the Sabæan amulets! O my poor, poor, noble lord! What will you do now? You, who always lived in the lap of luxury! And now! How now? Alas, my poor, poor, noble lord and alas, poor, poor Caleb! For who, my lord, my poor, poor noble lord, will now pay my bill?”And, wailing and lamenting and shaking his head and weeping, Caleb unfurled the long, long, long papyrus scroll of his bill, which uncoiled itself from his quiveringfingers right down to the floor, like a rustling snake.“We’ll look into your bill at once, Caleb,” said Lucius, encouragingly. “Call the stewards and Thrasyllus to me.”They came and examined the bill and shook their heads and thought the expenses of the great Ethiopian hunt terribly high; but Caleb swore that, because of his growing affection for Lucius, he had charged less than he did to other noble lords:“But there is a solution, my lord,” said Caleb, drawing Lucius aside. And he continued, “My lord, if you will make over Cora to me ... I will write off all the expenses of the Ethiopian hunt.”“Caleb,” said Lucius, earnestly, “I know that you are fond of Cora. But I also am very fond of her, Caleb, and I mean to keep her as my only treasure.”A loud sob came from a corner of the room. And Lucius, turning round, saw Tarrar sitting on the floor, looking profoundly dejected.“And me, my lord?” sobbed Tarrar. “Won’t you keepmeas your little slave, my lord?”Lucius smiled and laid his hand on Tarrar’s woolly head:“I am not forgetting you either, Tarrar,” he said, “and I shall keep you too. But, for the rest, Caleb, I shall have to sell the ship and all my slaves and anything that remains to me. I have some money as well, however, and I will try to pay you in full. But Cora shall not appear on the bill.”“Alas, my lord, this is an evil day and the end of the world is certainly near at hand, notwithstanding that I can see the blue coast of my dear Saba! I, like yourself, am losing everything: the hope of getting Cora, who loves you even as you love her, and the hope of getting my poor money!”“Come, Caleb, we must not repine. Let us just count the money that remains to us.”The stewards laid rows of gold coins on the table. And Caleb’s bill, despite the length which his papyrus scroll covered on the floor, was paid and receipted, after some quibbling between the stewards, who took exception to certain items, and Caleb, who was quite amenable to reason. And, when the money had been transferred to the purse which wound like a fat snake round Caleb’swaist, he became cheerful again and said:“My lord, my noble lord, for you are still a noble lord, listen to me. I am profoundly miserable that I can’t have Cora. Yes, my lord, really, I am profoundly miserable. But I am an honest fellow and at the same time I am a man of business. Listen, my lord, and let your stewards listen and your trusty Thrasyllus too. Listen, my lord. You wish to sell the quadrireme with all her contents. But where, my lord? It can’t be done at Alexandria, for any property of yours would be seized at once. Here, at Cape Dire, oh, there are only uncivilized Macrobii and no noble lords who could afford to buy the quadrireme! Listen, my lord, listen. Do you with all these your servants, free men and witnesses, sign a certificate, oh, my ever noble lord, a certificate ... dare I say it?”“Speak out, Caleb!”“A certificate that the quadrireme, with her rowers and all her contents, belongs to me; and I swear by the gods of Sabæa and of Egypt, by the eyes of Cora, whom I love, by the friendship which I, my lord, your guide and companion in the chase, venture to cherish for you, I swear, my lord, that Iwill myself endeavour to dispose of the quadrireme to a noble lord and pay you honestly, to the last penny, after deducting my expenses!”Thus spoke Caleb; and he stood up in the exalted attitude in which he had taken his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven, and waited.Vettius and Rufus thought it rather risky, but Lucius said:“Caleb’s advice is excellent. It is the only thing to do. If I delay, Tiberius’ minions will discover where I am and take the last remnant of my belongings from me. Caleb, I will do as you say. I will sign the document certifying that the ship is your property, together with the slaves, the rowers, the furniture, the jewels, the very valuable plate....”But Caleb did not move. He continued to stand in the solemn, rapt attitude of his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven. And he now said, slowly:“I thank you, my lord, for your confidence. It will certainly not be abused. If I do not render you an equitable account in whatever place of exile you may be, may the awful jaws of Typhon, whose tongue is aserpent and whose teeth are blazing flames, swallow me and devour me!”And Caleb himself trembled at his terrific oath and then fell on his knees before Lucius—a thing which he, a free Sabæan, had never yet done—and kissed the foot of the suddenly impoverished noble lord!Chapter XXIXNear the pillars of Sesostris, near the little diversorium, there lay moored, beside the quadrireme, a merchant trireme, which was sailing past Ophir to the Persian Gulf and which was to go up the Euphrates to Babylon. And Lucius asked to speak to the master and said:“Master, can I have room in your ship for myself, my father, my young wife and my little black slave? I am a sculptor; and I am on my way to Babylon.”And he pointed to Thrasyllus, Cora and Tarrar, who approached, each carrying a small bundle of luggage.“Certainly,” said the master. “My one cabin is still unoccupied. It is small and perhaps inconvenient; but people like you, who are sculptors, are not accustomed to luxury, I dare say, and will be prepared to make shift.”Lucius answered that, if the cabin was suitable for his wife and his father, he and the little slave would do the best they could on the half-deck or in the hold; and hebeckoned to his family to come on board and paid the passage-money.For Caleb had advanced him a goodly sum on the value of the quadrireme, for the immediate needs of the voyage; and Caleb himself had set out, with a great following, for his dear Saba, first because he wanted to forget his love-sickness in the pleasures of Arabia Felix and then to make a start by selling many of Lucius’ slaves and jewels, his ornaments and furniture at Mariaba, the capital, because it was safer to get this done as quickly as possible. The sale of the great ship herself would be difficult enough.Uncle Catullus remained on board of her. He did not wish to be a burden on his poor nephew Lucius; he had contrived to hoard a modest capital with one gold piece after another that had accidentally slipped through Lucius’ fingers; and he was to sail to Alexandria in the ship, after she had been sold, and there, in the city of the finest cooking, to spend his old age in a small apartment in the Hermes House. And so he had taken a tearful leave of Lucius, Thrasyllus and Cora and had said to her:“Dear Cora, just as you were going to call me uncle, we part and perhaps for ever.Ah, Egypt is the death of me! Egypt will irrevocably be the death of me! For I can never go back to Rome, poor old exile that I am, because Tiberius—may he die a thousand deaths!—would rob me of my few pence even as he has robbed Lucius of his treasures....”The merchant trireme glided away over a smooth sea; and the travellers on the deck waved farewell to Uncle Catullus, who stood on the prow and waved back. It was a leave-taking for good. And the master asked, inquisitively:“Is that lord, who stands waving his hand to you, the owner of that splendid vessel?”“Yes, master,” Lucius lied, “and he’s my uncle. And one day I shall be his heir.”“Then you will do well to hold him in honour, sir,” said the master, growing very respectful. “Whew! That’s a prospect not to be sneezed at! What a noble ship! What a magnificent quadrireme! But tell me, master,” he continued, more and more inquisitively, “in that case why don’t youstaywith your uncle?”“Because it’s not a good thing, master, for poor relations to be always hanging round the rich. For then you only annoy them and they end by cutting you off with a shilling. And that is why, master,” said Lucius, pressing Cora, by his side, to him “after seeing and admiring Egypt at my rich uncle’s expense, I am now paying a visit to Babylon with my father, my wife and my little slave. From there we shall go through Assyria and Asia Minor to the island of Cos, where my wife was born and where I want to settle down as a sculptor.”The master thought this very natural; and, as the wind was now blowing a stiff breeze, with the first cold, autumnal gusts, Lucius, happy, gay and healthy, led Cora into her cabin, while Tarrar squatted outside, like a faithful, clever little monkey, and Thrasyllus, within, carefully rolled up the maps, books and itineraries which he had consulted during their tour.Postscript.Caleb of Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate, to the ever noble Lord Publius Lucius Sabinus, sculptor, at Cos.“Written at Alexandria, at the second hour of the fourteenth day of the month of Pacothi, in the ninth year of the benevolent reign of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus.“My ever noble Lord, greeting!“It is a pleasure to me, Caleb of Mariaba, to inform you by this letter, entrusted to Alexandros of Alexandria, master of the merchant triremeBerenice, that by chance and great good fortune I have succeeded in disposing of the valuable quadrireme, the pleasure-shipAphrodite, once your property, noble lord, and in the presence of witnesses, free men, transferred to me at Cape Dire,by the Pillars of Sesostris1... selling her at Arsinoe, previous to the passage through the Nechao Canal (which would probably have been liable to legal objections), at the very profitable price (as, considering all the circumstances, it appears to me, your most obedient, humble servant, friend, guide and companion in the chase) of (after deducting my commission and all my expenses) 900,000 (say, nine hundred thousand) sesterces, a sum reckoned according to the Roman value, item that noble quadriremeAphroditeand three hundred rowers (slaves), item all the necessary and most complete equipment, item costly furniture, carpets, plate and treasures of art, which would probably have produced large sums had it been possible to sell them separately, without danger of seizure in the name of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus, but the separate sale of which would, in the circumstances aforesaid, have entailed innumerable drawbacks;“Whereas I, Caleb of Mariaba, acting and appearing on my own behalf, as actual owner of the noble quadriremeAphrodite, have been able to sell this magnificent pleasure-ship to the noble Lord Baabab, a Persian satrap, residing at Susa;“Wishing, my noble Lord Lucius, companion of the chase and friend, to act to your ever noble advantage, I propose, in order to reduce to a minimum all risks of shipwreck and piracy and other fatal accidents (such as a jealous fate keeps ever hanging over the heads of us poor mortals), to remit to you at frequent intervals, by the intermediary of a master of merchant-vessels, one trusted by all and personally known to myself and sailing to and fro between Alexandria and the Archipelago, a small sum in gold coin or bar, with account and settlement, so that you, my noble lord, may at the earliest moment possess your whole capital in your own hands.“And I also send you, in memory of your most beautiful ship, a few pieces of furniture and valuables (withheld and smuggled away), including two bronze bedsteads, a citron-wood table, a Babylonian carpet, some Ethiopian ostrich-feather coverings, the silver statue of Aphrodite, patroness of your ship, and a few minor trifles of taste and convenience.“I take advantage of the opportunity, my noble lord, dear friend and stout companionof the chase, to tell you that at Mariaba, during a temporary stay in my beloved country, Sabæa, I bought myself a most beautiful slave, a Greek like Cora and excelling in many gifts, which slave, in order to bind her with greater certainty to my affection, I set free at Mariaba, leaving her, however, as my wife in my house in that city, where I hope one day, after achieving my fortune, to enjoy a life of bliss, fearing lest my brother Ghizla might allow his rights on her to prevail (according to the manners of our country) and hoping to visit her each time that my conduct of noble lords shall bring me to the pillars of Sesostris, from which my beloved country is easily reached.“Wishing you, my noble lord and friend and companion of the chase, the blessing of the gods upon your house, upon your new work and your household, upon your wife and your servants, the wise Thrasyllus and the faithful Tarrar, together with an always possible change of fortune, I bow low before you, in all humility and friendship, with one hand on my heart and one hand on my lips.“Your ever most obedient, humble servantand guide and friend and companion of the chase,“Calebof Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate.”The End1Here follow the hour, day and month.

Chapter XXVAnd so it happened. Uncle Catullus thought that Caleb’s suggestion was really not bad; and so he remained on board the thalamegus with Rufus the under-steward and a number of male and female slaves and was to go from Apollonopolis Magna to Berenice, there to meet the quadrireme, while Lucius, Thrasyllus and Caleb took ship in a simple barge which brought them to Syene. Tarrar was with them; and Cora was with them.“Cora,” Lucius had asked, “do you dare undertake the journey through the forest and the wilderness?”“My lord, I am your slave,” Cora had answered, gladly; and she had gone with them.“When we come back at night from hunting, Cora, you shall sing to us under the twinkling stars of Ethiopia....”At Syene the travellers saw the last Roman soldiers: there were always three cohorts stationed at this spot, on the Egyptian frontier. At Elephantina was the LittleCataract, in the middle of the river, falling over rocky steps, across whose smooth surface the water first shot forward quickly, to come shooting next over a rocky rampart, roaring and clattering in a deep dive. And the travellers saw the watermen come up from Philæ in light boats and then shoot, with the powerful, brawling stream, over the steps and raise themselves over the rocky wall and slip, boat and all, with joyful cries, down the waterfall into the depths; and it looked such a safe sport that first Caleb, next Lucius, next even Cora, strapped into a little skiff, shot the rapids, raising themselves over the wall and slipping down the waterfall.From Syene to Philæ the journey was done in carts. There was an end to any luxurious comfort; the road led for hundreds of stadia through a level plain with strange big rocks, like statues of Hermes in a Greek city, along the road. They were round and cylindrical, like polished black stones, three on top of one another, from large to small. The travellers were conveyed to the island in a raft of laths and wickerwork, on which the water lapped over their feet.“Herodotus tells us,” said Thrasyllus,“that the mysterious sources of the Nile ought to be here, near Syene and Elephantina, and that the canal which leads to them is an abyss and a bottomless sea! But Herodotus often tells us fairy-tales! For observe, the abyss, the bottomless sea, is covered all over with islands; and they are inhabited; and the sources of the Nile are certainly not here!”At Tachampso the travellers again took a boat. But the Ethiopian forests were now to be traversed. Lucius mounted his elephant; the others mounted camels; more camels carried tents and luggage, of which there was now only a little; and Caleb had hired a strongly-armed escort of powerful Libyans and swift-footed Arabs. For, though the Ethiopians themselves were not warlike and offered no danger to the travellers, there were the savage races, the Troglodytæ, the Blemmyes, the Nubians, the Megabari, and, above all, the Ochthyophagi and Macrobii, who, if they were not overawed by the sight of a strong and numerous force, might surprise and plunder the travellers. The civilized world ended here. This was the very end of the world. True, on the Nile there was still Napata and the Ethiopiancapital, Meroe; but beyond that was buried the secret of the world’s end, the secret of the sources of the Nile, the secret of the horizons of the earth, the secret of the endless sea surrounding the world. Here, in these forests, began the temptation merely to go on and on, to go on in order to learn what the end would be, with what temptations and with what dread perils. Caleb told of travellers who had gone on and on and who had seen Typhon’s awful giant head appear above the edge of the world, with gaping mouth; and he had swallowed them up. One guide had escaped and had told it to Caleb, who said that he was worthy of belief. There also, in the immeasurable ocean that washed the world’s edge, lay the great serpent, which coiled itself in spirals and then covered the whole surface of the water, as far as the eye could reach, when it came up to bask in the scorching heat of the southern sun. Once, said Caleb, some daring travellers, who thought that the snake was a sort of dark desert, had walked over its scales, for miles on end, until the snake moved and they realized the terror and slipped into the sea in which you sinkand sink and sink, for three centuries, before reaching the bottom of Typhon’s Hell.These were the terrible tales which Caleb knew how to tell, one after the other, while the sun set over the forest and the stars twinkled and the fires blazed high and the tents were pitched and a sheep roasted on the spit. And Caleb made himself so much afraid and the guards and drivers so very much afraid that, shivering with fear, they asked Cora to sing. Then Cora would play on her harp and sing to them; and at the sound of her voice the dread visions, the uncanny phantoms, the giants and pygmies vanished and sleep came over them all, except Thrasyllus, who remained awake, smiling and thoughtful, and looked up at the stars and reflected that, thanks to his studies, he knew the occult secret, that the world was not a disk, washed by the sea, but a sphere, which glowed with internal fire and moved round the sun, the centre of the universe....It was as though a new health were making Lucius strong and cheerful. Yes, it seemed to Thrasyllus that Lucius was no longer thinking of Ilia and that he was cured of hiscarking grief. In the Ethiopian forests, which now almost surrounded them with an impenetrable wall of huge trees and dense foliage and tangled creepers, he abandoned himself enthusiastically to the delights of the great hunts which Caleb organized, with the aid of the mighty hunters whom he had hired for his noble client. These hunters included five Elephantophagi, with whom Lucius hunted the elephants which sometimes pass through the forests in herds. The elephants were often shot by archers, three of whom served one heavy bow: two men, leg forward, held the bow; the third drew back the string; and the arrow, dipped in snake poison, struck the elephant, who fell stunned. If the elephant was not killed, he was surrounded with a network of ropes; and, when he recovered consciousness, he was tamed and made to lure other elephants. If the elephant, however, was not to be tamed and if, after recovering his senses, he relapsed into a dangerous rage, then he was driven, amid much shouting and yelling, against a tree, which had purposely been sawn through at the foot. Elephants are accustomed to rest against trees; but, as soon as the untamable elephant leant againstthis tree, it fell over him and prevented him from rising, so that he broke the bone of his leg and was killed. This often implied cruelty, but it also implied danger; and Lucius’ newly aroused manhood found satisfaction in this robust, virile sport.But there was also the hunting of the swift-footed ostriches, with hunters selected from the tribe of the Struthophagi; and this hunt provided the maddest enjoyment and excited Caleb and Tarrar in particular; and Thrasyllus and Cora also came to look on, for it was a most diverting spectacle, in which the hunters disguised themselves as ostriches, with little skirts of feathers and with one hand stuck into a stuffed ostrich-neck, with the stuffed head sticking out on top. There were first wild bird-dances; then the hunters darted forward and scattered corn and lured the real birds, which rushed after them and pecked at the grains, until they were caught in ravines from which they could find no issue and were shot with arrows. And with their precious feathers, bleached and curled, the Struthophagi made costly coverings, soft and white and downy, which Caleb bought for a song to send to Alexandria and Rome, where they were agreat luxury, so that Caleb made a pretty penny by the transaction.Sometimes there was danger in the forest. There was danger when the Struthophagi met the Sionians, a tribe of nomads with whom they were always at war; it was dangerous when the Acridophagi appeared, the verminous locust-eaters; but the travellers’ strong escort, the huge Libyans and nimble Arabs, inspired respect and the wild nomads fled at the first bow-shot. And Caleb was afraid of nobody; he feared only the wood-nymphs, who, when they have caught you in their arms, which are pythons, laugh and laugh into your ears, until you go mad, and then dance round with you, until you drop dead. And, when he lay down at night to sleep under a black ostrich-feather covering, he also feared the scorpions, which have no fewer than four jaws and whose bite is not fatal but produces a slow, incurable canker.They also caught lions, in nets, and hippopotami, in pits, and wild buffaloes, which they pursued with the huge hounds of the Cynamolgian hunters. They hunted from tall trees and they hunted from the reeds in the water. It was a rude andstimulating life; and Caleb once said to Lucius, seriously, that he felt the courage to go on and to go on again ... to fight the great snake in the ocean that encompassed the earth....It did not come to that, however. But the caravan was approaching Napata and the Ethiopian emerald-mines and topaz-rocks. The emerald-mines were like marvellous green, magic caves, in which thousands of slaves were working; the topaz-rocks were visited at night time: the stones, because of their yellow sheen, are almost invisible by day, but glitter in the dark night; then little metal tubes are planted over each stone that is found, so as to make it easier to recognize the stones in the daytime and to grub them out. In former ages, the Egyptian and Ethiopian kings maintained separate guards around these mines and rocks.At Napata, where the travellers now arrived, they saw their first entirely native, barbarian town. There was not a word of Latin spoken here; Lucius and Thrasyllus could not have made themselves understood without Tarrar and Caleb; and even then the little Libyan slave and the Sabæan guidefound it difficult to grapple with the language. The Ethiopians, who wore no clothing save the skin of some animal round their waist, surprised the travellers by the smallness of their stature. Everything about them was small: their houses built of palm-leaves and bamboo, their oxen and goats and sheep; and Thrasyllus was of opinion that the legend of the Pygmæi, or nations of dwarfs, had originated because of Ethiopia.The natives ate hardly any meat, but mainly vegetables and fruits, or young shoots of trees, or they would suck reed-stalks and lotus-flowers. But they also took blood and milk and cheese; and there was no other food. No, Uncle Catullus would never have stood it here, thought Lucius, when the travellers went still farther south, to the capital of Ethiopia, Meroe, on the island of the same name. And here Lucius discovered that the famous date-wines and topaz-yellow liqueurs of Napata and Meroe were a sheer hoax, that there was no wine or liqueur whatever distilled in Ethiopia and that the delicious drinks with which Master Ghizla and Caleb had provided him andUncle Catullus came from no farther than Lake Mareotis at Alexandria!A fabulous vegetation, however, grew luxuriantly over the island. If the people and animals were small, the trees shot up with amazing vigour: the huge palm-trees, the ebony-trees, the ceratia and persea, under whose gigantic domes of thick foliage the green villages of little plaited wicker huts disappeared from view. In the marshes round Lake Psebo the travellers hunted, if not the great snake, at any rate the terrible boa, which even ventures to attack the elephant. And the natives showed them a fight between one of these boas and an elephant and a hippopotamus.They visited the gold-mines, the copper-mines, the jewel-mines, the temples of Hercules and Pan and of a strange barbaric deity. The dead were buried in the Nile, or else they were kept in the houses under a mica slab of human form. In the middle of the town stood the Golden Temple, where the king dwelt in sacred mystery. There were slabs of gold between bamboo columns. In former ages the priests elected the kings and deposed them at will; but a certain king had caused all the priests to be strangledand since then a law had been passed that, if the king were maimed or lost a limb, all the people of his court had to inflict the same injury on themselves, for which reason the king’s person was guarded with great care and was divine and sacred; and the travellers did not see him.

Chapter XXV

And so it happened. Uncle Catullus thought that Caleb’s suggestion was really not bad; and so he remained on board the thalamegus with Rufus the under-steward and a number of male and female slaves and was to go from Apollonopolis Magna to Berenice, there to meet the quadrireme, while Lucius, Thrasyllus and Caleb took ship in a simple barge which brought them to Syene. Tarrar was with them; and Cora was with them.“Cora,” Lucius had asked, “do you dare undertake the journey through the forest and the wilderness?”“My lord, I am your slave,” Cora had answered, gladly; and she had gone with them.“When we come back at night from hunting, Cora, you shall sing to us under the twinkling stars of Ethiopia....”At Syene the travellers saw the last Roman soldiers: there were always three cohorts stationed at this spot, on the Egyptian frontier. At Elephantina was the LittleCataract, in the middle of the river, falling over rocky steps, across whose smooth surface the water first shot forward quickly, to come shooting next over a rocky rampart, roaring and clattering in a deep dive. And the travellers saw the watermen come up from Philæ in light boats and then shoot, with the powerful, brawling stream, over the steps and raise themselves over the rocky wall and slip, boat and all, with joyful cries, down the waterfall into the depths; and it looked such a safe sport that first Caleb, next Lucius, next even Cora, strapped into a little skiff, shot the rapids, raising themselves over the wall and slipping down the waterfall.From Syene to Philæ the journey was done in carts. There was an end to any luxurious comfort; the road led for hundreds of stadia through a level plain with strange big rocks, like statues of Hermes in a Greek city, along the road. They were round and cylindrical, like polished black stones, three on top of one another, from large to small. The travellers were conveyed to the island in a raft of laths and wickerwork, on which the water lapped over their feet.“Herodotus tells us,” said Thrasyllus,“that the mysterious sources of the Nile ought to be here, near Syene and Elephantina, and that the canal which leads to them is an abyss and a bottomless sea! But Herodotus often tells us fairy-tales! For observe, the abyss, the bottomless sea, is covered all over with islands; and they are inhabited; and the sources of the Nile are certainly not here!”At Tachampso the travellers again took a boat. But the Ethiopian forests were now to be traversed. Lucius mounted his elephant; the others mounted camels; more camels carried tents and luggage, of which there was now only a little; and Caleb had hired a strongly-armed escort of powerful Libyans and swift-footed Arabs. For, though the Ethiopians themselves were not warlike and offered no danger to the travellers, there were the savage races, the Troglodytæ, the Blemmyes, the Nubians, the Megabari, and, above all, the Ochthyophagi and Macrobii, who, if they were not overawed by the sight of a strong and numerous force, might surprise and plunder the travellers. The civilized world ended here. This was the very end of the world. True, on the Nile there was still Napata and the Ethiopiancapital, Meroe; but beyond that was buried the secret of the world’s end, the secret of the sources of the Nile, the secret of the horizons of the earth, the secret of the endless sea surrounding the world. Here, in these forests, began the temptation merely to go on and on, to go on in order to learn what the end would be, with what temptations and with what dread perils. Caleb told of travellers who had gone on and on and who had seen Typhon’s awful giant head appear above the edge of the world, with gaping mouth; and he had swallowed them up. One guide had escaped and had told it to Caleb, who said that he was worthy of belief. There also, in the immeasurable ocean that washed the world’s edge, lay the great serpent, which coiled itself in spirals and then covered the whole surface of the water, as far as the eye could reach, when it came up to bask in the scorching heat of the southern sun. Once, said Caleb, some daring travellers, who thought that the snake was a sort of dark desert, had walked over its scales, for miles on end, until the snake moved and they realized the terror and slipped into the sea in which you sinkand sink and sink, for three centuries, before reaching the bottom of Typhon’s Hell.These were the terrible tales which Caleb knew how to tell, one after the other, while the sun set over the forest and the stars twinkled and the fires blazed high and the tents were pitched and a sheep roasted on the spit. And Caleb made himself so much afraid and the guards and drivers so very much afraid that, shivering with fear, they asked Cora to sing. Then Cora would play on her harp and sing to them; and at the sound of her voice the dread visions, the uncanny phantoms, the giants and pygmies vanished and sleep came over them all, except Thrasyllus, who remained awake, smiling and thoughtful, and looked up at the stars and reflected that, thanks to his studies, he knew the occult secret, that the world was not a disk, washed by the sea, but a sphere, which glowed with internal fire and moved round the sun, the centre of the universe....It was as though a new health were making Lucius strong and cheerful. Yes, it seemed to Thrasyllus that Lucius was no longer thinking of Ilia and that he was cured of hiscarking grief. In the Ethiopian forests, which now almost surrounded them with an impenetrable wall of huge trees and dense foliage and tangled creepers, he abandoned himself enthusiastically to the delights of the great hunts which Caleb organized, with the aid of the mighty hunters whom he had hired for his noble client. These hunters included five Elephantophagi, with whom Lucius hunted the elephants which sometimes pass through the forests in herds. The elephants were often shot by archers, three of whom served one heavy bow: two men, leg forward, held the bow; the third drew back the string; and the arrow, dipped in snake poison, struck the elephant, who fell stunned. If the elephant was not killed, he was surrounded with a network of ropes; and, when he recovered consciousness, he was tamed and made to lure other elephants. If the elephant, however, was not to be tamed and if, after recovering his senses, he relapsed into a dangerous rage, then he was driven, amid much shouting and yelling, against a tree, which had purposely been sawn through at the foot. Elephants are accustomed to rest against trees; but, as soon as the untamable elephant leant againstthis tree, it fell over him and prevented him from rising, so that he broke the bone of his leg and was killed. This often implied cruelty, but it also implied danger; and Lucius’ newly aroused manhood found satisfaction in this robust, virile sport.But there was also the hunting of the swift-footed ostriches, with hunters selected from the tribe of the Struthophagi; and this hunt provided the maddest enjoyment and excited Caleb and Tarrar in particular; and Thrasyllus and Cora also came to look on, for it was a most diverting spectacle, in which the hunters disguised themselves as ostriches, with little skirts of feathers and with one hand stuck into a stuffed ostrich-neck, with the stuffed head sticking out on top. There were first wild bird-dances; then the hunters darted forward and scattered corn and lured the real birds, which rushed after them and pecked at the grains, until they were caught in ravines from which they could find no issue and were shot with arrows. And with their precious feathers, bleached and curled, the Struthophagi made costly coverings, soft and white and downy, which Caleb bought for a song to send to Alexandria and Rome, where they were agreat luxury, so that Caleb made a pretty penny by the transaction.Sometimes there was danger in the forest. There was danger when the Struthophagi met the Sionians, a tribe of nomads with whom they were always at war; it was dangerous when the Acridophagi appeared, the verminous locust-eaters; but the travellers’ strong escort, the huge Libyans and nimble Arabs, inspired respect and the wild nomads fled at the first bow-shot. And Caleb was afraid of nobody; he feared only the wood-nymphs, who, when they have caught you in their arms, which are pythons, laugh and laugh into your ears, until you go mad, and then dance round with you, until you drop dead. And, when he lay down at night to sleep under a black ostrich-feather covering, he also feared the scorpions, which have no fewer than four jaws and whose bite is not fatal but produces a slow, incurable canker.They also caught lions, in nets, and hippopotami, in pits, and wild buffaloes, which they pursued with the huge hounds of the Cynamolgian hunters. They hunted from tall trees and they hunted from the reeds in the water. It was a rude andstimulating life; and Caleb once said to Lucius, seriously, that he felt the courage to go on and to go on again ... to fight the great snake in the ocean that encompassed the earth....It did not come to that, however. But the caravan was approaching Napata and the Ethiopian emerald-mines and topaz-rocks. The emerald-mines were like marvellous green, magic caves, in which thousands of slaves were working; the topaz-rocks were visited at night time: the stones, because of their yellow sheen, are almost invisible by day, but glitter in the dark night; then little metal tubes are planted over each stone that is found, so as to make it easier to recognize the stones in the daytime and to grub them out. In former ages, the Egyptian and Ethiopian kings maintained separate guards around these mines and rocks.At Napata, where the travellers now arrived, they saw their first entirely native, barbarian town. There was not a word of Latin spoken here; Lucius and Thrasyllus could not have made themselves understood without Tarrar and Caleb; and even then the little Libyan slave and the Sabæan guidefound it difficult to grapple with the language. The Ethiopians, who wore no clothing save the skin of some animal round their waist, surprised the travellers by the smallness of their stature. Everything about them was small: their houses built of palm-leaves and bamboo, their oxen and goats and sheep; and Thrasyllus was of opinion that the legend of the Pygmæi, or nations of dwarfs, had originated because of Ethiopia.The natives ate hardly any meat, but mainly vegetables and fruits, or young shoots of trees, or they would suck reed-stalks and lotus-flowers. But they also took blood and milk and cheese; and there was no other food. No, Uncle Catullus would never have stood it here, thought Lucius, when the travellers went still farther south, to the capital of Ethiopia, Meroe, on the island of the same name. And here Lucius discovered that the famous date-wines and topaz-yellow liqueurs of Napata and Meroe were a sheer hoax, that there was no wine or liqueur whatever distilled in Ethiopia and that the delicious drinks with which Master Ghizla and Caleb had provided him andUncle Catullus came from no farther than Lake Mareotis at Alexandria!A fabulous vegetation, however, grew luxuriantly over the island. If the people and animals were small, the trees shot up with amazing vigour: the huge palm-trees, the ebony-trees, the ceratia and persea, under whose gigantic domes of thick foliage the green villages of little plaited wicker huts disappeared from view. In the marshes round Lake Psebo the travellers hunted, if not the great snake, at any rate the terrible boa, which even ventures to attack the elephant. And the natives showed them a fight between one of these boas and an elephant and a hippopotamus.They visited the gold-mines, the copper-mines, the jewel-mines, the temples of Hercules and Pan and of a strange barbaric deity. The dead were buried in the Nile, or else they were kept in the houses under a mica slab of human form. In the middle of the town stood the Golden Temple, where the king dwelt in sacred mystery. There were slabs of gold between bamboo columns. In former ages the priests elected the kings and deposed them at will; but a certain king had caused all the priests to be strangledand since then a law had been passed that, if the king were maimed or lost a limb, all the people of his court had to inflict the same injury on themselves, for which reason the king’s person was guarded with great care and was divine and sacred; and the travellers did not see him.

And so it happened. Uncle Catullus thought that Caleb’s suggestion was really not bad; and so he remained on board the thalamegus with Rufus the under-steward and a number of male and female slaves and was to go from Apollonopolis Magna to Berenice, there to meet the quadrireme, while Lucius, Thrasyllus and Caleb took ship in a simple barge which brought them to Syene. Tarrar was with them; and Cora was with them.

“Cora,” Lucius had asked, “do you dare undertake the journey through the forest and the wilderness?”

“My lord, I am your slave,” Cora had answered, gladly; and she had gone with them.

“When we come back at night from hunting, Cora, you shall sing to us under the twinkling stars of Ethiopia....”

At Syene the travellers saw the last Roman soldiers: there were always three cohorts stationed at this spot, on the Egyptian frontier. At Elephantina was the LittleCataract, in the middle of the river, falling over rocky steps, across whose smooth surface the water first shot forward quickly, to come shooting next over a rocky rampart, roaring and clattering in a deep dive. And the travellers saw the watermen come up from Philæ in light boats and then shoot, with the powerful, brawling stream, over the steps and raise themselves over the rocky wall and slip, boat and all, with joyful cries, down the waterfall into the depths; and it looked such a safe sport that first Caleb, next Lucius, next even Cora, strapped into a little skiff, shot the rapids, raising themselves over the wall and slipping down the waterfall.

From Syene to Philæ the journey was done in carts. There was an end to any luxurious comfort; the road led for hundreds of stadia through a level plain with strange big rocks, like statues of Hermes in a Greek city, along the road. They were round and cylindrical, like polished black stones, three on top of one another, from large to small. The travellers were conveyed to the island in a raft of laths and wickerwork, on which the water lapped over their feet.

“Herodotus tells us,” said Thrasyllus,“that the mysterious sources of the Nile ought to be here, near Syene and Elephantina, and that the canal which leads to them is an abyss and a bottomless sea! But Herodotus often tells us fairy-tales! For observe, the abyss, the bottomless sea, is covered all over with islands; and they are inhabited; and the sources of the Nile are certainly not here!”

At Tachampso the travellers again took a boat. But the Ethiopian forests were now to be traversed. Lucius mounted his elephant; the others mounted camels; more camels carried tents and luggage, of which there was now only a little; and Caleb had hired a strongly-armed escort of powerful Libyans and swift-footed Arabs. For, though the Ethiopians themselves were not warlike and offered no danger to the travellers, there were the savage races, the Troglodytæ, the Blemmyes, the Nubians, the Megabari, and, above all, the Ochthyophagi and Macrobii, who, if they were not overawed by the sight of a strong and numerous force, might surprise and plunder the travellers. The civilized world ended here. This was the very end of the world. True, on the Nile there was still Napata and the Ethiopiancapital, Meroe; but beyond that was buried the secret of the world’s end, the secret of the sources of the Nile, the secret of the horizons of the earth, the secret of the endless sea surrounding the world. Here, in these forests, began the temptation merely to go on and on, to go on in order to learn what the end would be, with what temptations and with what dread perils. Caleb told of travellers who had gone on and on and who had seen Typhon’s awful giant head appear above the edge of the world, with gaping mouth; and he had swallowed them up. One guide had escaped and had told it to Caleb, who said that he was worthy of belief. There also, in the immeasurable ocean that washed the world’s edge, lay the great serpent, which coiled itself in spirals and then covered the whole surface of the water, as far as the eye could reach, when it came up to bask in the scorching heat of the southern sun. Once, said Caleb, some daring travellers, who thought that the snake was a sort of dark desert, had walked over its scales, for miles on end, until the snake moved and they realized the terror and slipped into the sea in which you sinkand sink and sink, for three centuries, before reaching the bottom of Typhon’s Hell.

These were the terrible tales which Caleb knew how to tell, one after the other, while the sun set over the forest and the stars twinkled and the fires blazed high and the tents were pitched and a sheep roasted on the spit. And Caleb made himself so much afraid and the guards and drivers so very much afraid that, shivering with fear, they asked Cora to sing. Then Cora would play on her harp and sing to them; and at the sound of her voice the dread visions, the uncanny phantoms, the giants and pygmies vanished and sleep came over them all, except Thrasyllus, who remained awake, smiling and thoughtful, and looked up at the stars and reflected that, thanks to his studies, he knew the occult secret, that the world was not a disk, washed by the sea, but a sphere, which glowed with internal fire and moved round the sun, the centre of the universe....

It was as though a new health were making Lucius strong and cheerful. Yes, it seemed to Thrasyllus that Lucius was no longer thinking of Ilia and that he was cured of hiscarking grief. In the Ethiopian forests, which now almost surrounded them with an impenetrable wall of huge trees and dense foliage and tangled creepers, he abandoned himself enthusiastically to the delights of the great hunts which Caleb organized, with the aid of the mighty hunters whom he had hired for his noble client. These hunters included five Elephantophagi, with whom Lucius hunted the elephants which sometimes pass through the forests in herds. The elephants were often shot by archers, three of whom served one heavy bow: two men, leg forward, held the bow; the third drew back the string; and the arrow, dipped in snake poison, struck the elephant, who fell stunned. If the elephant was not killed, he was surrounded with a network of ropes; and, when he recovered consciousness, he was tamed and made to lure other elephants. If the elephant, however, was not to be tamed and if, after recovering his senses, he relapsed into a dangerous rage, then he was driven, amid much shouting and yelling, against a tree, which had purposely been sawn through at the foot. Elephants are accustomed to rest against trees; but, as soon as the untamable elephant leant againstthis tree, it fell over him and prevented him from rising, so that he broke the bone of his leg and was killed. This often implied cruelty, but it also implied danger; and Lucius’ newly aroused manhood found satisfaction in this robust, virile sport.

But there was also the hunting of the swift-footed ostriches, with hunters selected from the tribe of the Struthophagi; and this hunt provided the maddest enjoyment and excited Caleb and Tarrar in particular; and Thrasyllus and Cora also came to look on, for it was a most diverting spectacle, in which the hunters disguised themselves as ostriches, with little skirts of feathers and with one hand stuck into a stuffed ostrich-neck, with the stuffed head sticking out on top. There were first wild bird-dances; then the hunters darted forward and scattered corn and lured the real birds, which rushed after them and pecked at the grains, until they were caught in ravines from which they could find no issue and were shot with arrows. And with their precious feathers, bleached and curled, the Struthophagi made costly coverings, soft and white and downy, which Caleb bought for a song to send to Alexandria and Rome, where they were agreat luxury, so that Caleb made a pretty penny by the transaction.

Sometimes there was danger in the forest. There was danger when the Struthophagi met the Sionians, a tribe of nomads with whom they were always at war; it was dangerous when the Acridophagi appeared, the verminous locust-eaters; but the travellers’ strong escort, the huge Libyans and nimble Arabs, inspired respect and the wild nomads fled at the first bow-shot. And Caleb was afraid of nobody; he feared only the wood-nymphs, who, when they have caught you in their arms, which are pythons, laugh and laugh into your ears, until you go mad, and then dance round with you, until you drop dead. And, when he lay down at night to sleep under a black ostrich-feather covering, he also feared the scorpions, which have no fewer than four jaws and whose bite is not fatal but produces a slow, incurable canker.

They also caught lions, in nets, and hippopotami, in pits, and wild buffaloes, which they pursued with the huge hounds of the Cynamolgian hunters. They hunted from tall trees and they hunted from the reeds in the water. It was a rude andstimulating life; and Caleb once said to Lucius, seriously, that he felt the courage to go on and to go on again ... to fight the great snake in the ocean that encompassed the earth....

It did not come to that, however. But the caravan was approaching Napata and the Ethiopian emerald-mines and topaz-rocks. The emerald-mines were like marvellous green, magic caves, in which thousands of slaves were working; the topaz-rocks were visited at night time: the stones, because of their yellow sheen, are almost invisible by day, but glitter in the dark night; then little metal tubes are planted over each stone that is found, so as to make it easier to recognize the stones in the daytime and to grub them out. In former ages, the Egyptian and Ethiopian kings maintained separate guards around these mines and rocks.

At Napata, where the travellers now arrived, they saw their first entirely native, barbarian town. There was not a word of Latin spoken here; Lucius and Thrasyllus could not have made themselves understood without Tarrar and Caleb; and even then the little Libyan slave and the Sabæan guidefound it difficult to grapple with the language. The Ethiopians, who wore no clothing save the skin of some animal round their waist, surprised the travellers by the smallness of their stature. Everything about them was small: their houses built of palm-leaves and bamboo, their oxen and goats and sheep; and Thrasyllus was of opinion that the legend of the Pygmæi, or nations of dwarfs, had originated because of Ethiopia.

The natives ate hardly any meat, but mainly vegetables and fruits, or young shoots of trees, or they would suck reed-stalks and lotus-flowers. But they also took blood and milk and cheese; and there was no other food. No, Uncle Catullus would never have stood it here, thought Lucius, when the travellers went still farther south, to the capital of Ethiopia, Meroe, on the island of the same name. And here Lucius discovered that the famous date-wines and topaz-yellow liqueurs of Napata and Meroe were a sheer hoax, that there was no wine or liqueur whatever distilled in Ethiopia and that the delicious drinks with which Master Ghizla and Caleb had provided him andUncle Catullus came from no farther than Lake Mareotis at Alexandria!

A fabulous vegetation, however, grew luxuriantly over the island. If the people and animals were small, the trees shot up with amazing vigour: the huge palm-trees, the ebony-trees, the ceratia and persea, under whose gigantic domes of thick foliage the green villages of little plaited wicker huts disappeared from view. In the marshes round Lake Psebo the travellers hunted, if not the great snake, at any rate the terrible boa, which even ventures to attack the elephant. And the natives showed them a fight between one of these boas and an elephant and a hippopotamus.

They visited the gold-mines, the copper-mines, the jewel-mines, the temples of Hercules and Pan and of a strange barbaric deity. The dead were buried in the Nile, or else they were kept in the houses under a mica slab of human form. In the middle of the town stood the Golden Temple, where the king dwelt in sacred mystery. There were slabs of gold between bamboo columns. In former ages the priests elected the kings and deposed them at will; but a certain king had caused all the priests to be strangledand since then a law had been passed that, if the king were maimed or lost a limb, all the people of his court had to inflict the same injury on themselves, for which reason the king’s person was guarded with great care and was divine and sacred; and the travellers did not see him.

Chapter XXVIAfter the fierce hunting by day, the nights were twinkling mysteries of great shining, diamond stars; and Sirius shone like a white sun. The rustling silence, the audible stillness of the vast forests lapped the encampment of the caravan, where the fires died out but still glowed sufficiently to keep the wild animals at a distance and where the guards and drivers lay immersed in sound sleep. Lucius was happy in that mystery; and in the silvery sheen of the night the last memories of his grief seemed to lift like wisps of disappearing mist.The travellers had approached the Land of Ophir; and the pillars of Sesostris would be reached next day. In this last twinkling night of forest-life, with the stars shining through the foliage like a diamond cupola above an emerald dome, Lucius had left his tent while all the others slept. Next to his tent were those of Thrasyllus, Caleb and Cora. And he saw Cora sitting outside her tent, which was the biggest, because she wasa woman, and made of spotted lynx-hides, whose warmth resisted the plentiful dew. And she rose and stretched her hands to the ground, in salutation, and preserved that attitude, shyly.“Are you not sleeping, Cora?” asked Lucius.“No, my lord. I cannot sleep when the nights twinkle like this, when the stars send forth such rays that it is really as though they were moving to and fro. I feel that I must go on gazing at them until they fade away.”“Life here in the forest is too wild for you, too lonely....”“Life in the forest is paradise, my lord. By day Thrasyllus tells me wonderful things about the mountains and the plants and the animals and the savage tribes; and so the hours pass till you return from hunting....”“And you sing to us and dance in the light of the fire and charm the rude hunters and Caleb in particular....”She smiled and made no reply.Then she continued:“And the nights are such strange mysteries of sounds and silence and of radiantstars; and it is as though Sirius grew bigger nightly.”“And you are never frightened?”“I am not frightened, my lord.”“Not even at night?”“Least of all at night, because ...”“Because what?”“Because then you have returned; and I feel safest where you are.”“From that height yonder, Cora, one can see the sea. I love the sea and I often miss the sea in the forest. I am glad that we are near the sea again. As I returned from hunting, I could just catch sight of a streak of sea from there. I should like to see the sea now, at night, with all those twinkling stars above it.”“Yes, my lord.”“Come with me ... that is, if you are not frightened.”“I am not frightened, my lord, where you are.”And her heart throbbed in her throat, but not with fear.They went past the sleeping guards and left the circle of the watch-fires. She nearly stumbled over the creepers and stones; and he said:“Give me your hand.”It was the first time that his hand had met hers. He had never touched her before. When she felt the warm strength of his hand around her own small hand, hers lay passive like a captive dove.“Why are you trembling so?” he asked.“I don’t know, my lord,” she stammered.He smiled and did not speak again.They climbed the rocky height and he helped her, with his fingers still grasping hers. He even put his arm round her slim waist, to support her, and he felt that she was still trembling, as in a fever.“Look,” he said, pointing, “there is the sea.”They both looked out. Around them stretched the forests, all shadow and denseness and gloom and loneliness and mystery. On one horizon, gleaming darkly in the night, lay the line of the sea, the Arabian Gulf, the Erythræan or Red Sea.“The sea,” she stammered. “Yes, the sea, I love it too. I always had it around me, at Cos. I also miss it in the forest, as you do, my lord.”“To-morrow we shall reach the sea again, Cora.... Cora, I want you, to-night, thislast night ... to dance to me ... here, in the starlight.”“Yes, my lord,” said the slave.She danced. She softly hummed a tune between scarce-parted lips. The thin folds of her garment flew to either side; and with her veils she mimicked the movements of birds’ wings. She hovered round and round on the upland, circling like a swallow.He stepped towards her; and she ceased dancing.“Cora,” he said, “to-morrow we shall be at Dire, by the pillars of Sesostris. On the opposite side are Ebal and Usal and Saba, Caleb’s country, to which he wants to return when he is rich.”“Yes, my lord.”“Cora, if you are really fond of Caleb, I will resign you to him.”She trembled and clasped her hands. She fell on her knees and gave one loud sob.“What’s the matter, Cora?”“My lord, let me stay with you! Let me dance and sing for you, let me serve you, let me wash your feet; kick me, beat me, torture me! But do not send me away! Do not send me away! Keep me! Keep me with you!... I come from Dryope’sslave-school, I have cost you a fortune, my lord! I am not beautiful, but my voice is good and, my lord, I am a clever dancer. But, if your lordship is tired of my voice and my dancing, I will wash your feet; and, when you are angry and want to beat a slave, you shall beatmeand ill-treat me! But keep me, keep me, wherever you may be!”She had thrown herself before him and was sobbing and kissing his feet.And he said:“Then, Cora, don’t you love Caleb?”“My lord,” she said, “I love you—if I must say it!—and I have loved you from the first moment when Thrasyllus brought me to you. And, if it please you, my lord, I will die for you. But keep me and do not give me to Caleb!”“And if it pleased me, Cora ... that you should not die for me but live for me? Not only to sing to me and dance to me, but also to throw your arms around my neck, to lay your breast upon my breast and your lips upon my lips?...”She gave a cry as of incredible happiness. Smiling, he raised her very tenderly and folded her in his arms, close against him.“Oh!” she cried, in ecstasy, when his lips sought hers. “Aphrodite! Aphrodite! She has heard my prayer!”Her little hands ventured to reach out for his head and take it by the temples. Around them was the solitude of the Ethiopian night; from out of the forests the flowers filled the air with incense; a spice-laden aroma was wafted from the sea; and the radiant stars hung above them, like white suns, with the dazzling glory that was Sirius....

Chapter XXVI

After the fierce hunting by day, the nights were twinkling mysteries of great shining, diamond stars; and Sirius shone like a white sun. The rustling silence, the audible stillness of the vast forests lapped the encampment of the caravan, where the fires died out but still glowed sufficiently to keep the wild animals at a distance and where the guards and drivers lay immersed in sound sleep. Lucius was happy in that mystery; and in the silvery sheen of the night the last memories of his grief seemed to lift like wisps of disappearing mist.The travellers had approached the Land of Ophir; and the pillars of Sesostris would be reached next day. In this last twinkling night of forest-life, with the stars shining through the foliage like a diamond cupola above an emerald dome, Lucius had left his tent while all the others slept. Next to his tent were those of Thrasyllus, Caleb and Cora. And he saw Cora sitting outside her tent, which was the biggest, because she wasa woman, and made of spotted lynx-hides, whose warmth resisted the plentiful dew. And she rose and stretched her hands to the ground, in salutation, and preserved that attitude, shyly.“Are you not sleeping, Cora?” asked Lucius.“No, my lord. I cannot sleep when the nights twinkle like this, when the stars send forth such rays that it is really as though they were moving to and fro. I feel that I must go on gazing at them until they fade away.”“Life here in the forest is too wild for you, too lonely....”“Life in the forest is paradise, my lord. By day Thrasyllus tells me wonderful things about the mountains and the plants and the animals and the savage tribes; and so the hours pass till you return from hunting....”“And you sing to us and dance in the light of the fire and charm the rude hunters and Caleb in particular....”She smiled and made no reply.Then she continued:“And the nights are such strange mysteries of sounds and silence and of radiantstars; and it is as though Sirius grew bigger nightly.”“And you are never frightened?”“I am not frightened, my lord.”“Not even at night?”“Least of all at night, because ...”“Because what?”“Because then you have returned; and I feel safest where you are.”“From that height yonder, Cora, one can see the sea. I love the sea and I often miss the sea in the forest. I am glad that we are near the sea again. As I returned from hunting, I could just catch sight of a streak of sea from there. I should like to see the sea now, at night, with all those twinkling stars above it.”“Yes, my lord.”“Come with me ... that is, if you are not frightened.”“I am not frightened, my lord, where you are.”And her heart throbbed in her throat, but not with fear.They went past the sleeping guards and left the circle of the watch-fires. She nearly stumbled over the creepers and stones; and he said:“Give me your hand.”It was the first time that his hand had met hers. He had never touched her before. When she felt the warm strength of his hand around her own small hand, hers lay passive like a captive dove.“Why are you trembling so?” he asked.“I don’t know, my lord,” she stammered.He smiled and did not speak again.They climbed the rocky height and he helped her, with his fingers still grasping hers. He even put his arm round her slim waist, to support her, and he felt that she was still trembling, as in a fever.“Look,” he said, pointing, “there is the sea.”They both looked out. Around them stretched the forests, all shadow and denseness and gloom and loneliness and mystery. On one horizon, gleaming darkly in the night, lay the line of the sea, the Arabian Gulf, the Erythræan or Red Sea.“The sea,” she stammered. “Yes, the sea, I love it too. I always had it around me, at Cos. I also miss it in the forest, as you do, my lord.”“To-morrow we shall reach the sea again, Cora.... Cora, I want you, to-night, thislast night ... to dance to me ... here, in the starlight.”“Yes, my lord,” said the slave.She danced. She softly hummed a tune between scarce-parted lips. The thin folds of her garment flew to either side; and with her veils she mimicked the movements of birds’ wings. She hovered round and round on the upland, circling like a swallow.He stepped towards her; and she ceased dancing.“Cora,” he said, “to-morrow we shall be at Dire, by the pillars of Sesostris. On the opposite side are Ebal and Usal and Saba, Caleb’s country, to which he wants to return when he is rich.”“Yes, my lord.”“Cora, if you are really fond of Caleb, I will resign you to him.”She trembled and clasped her hands. She fell on her knees and gave one loud sob.“What’s the matter, Cora?”“My lord, let me stay with you! Let me dance and sing for you, let me serve you, let me wash your feet; kick me, beat me, torture me! But do not send me away! Do not send me away! Keep me! Keep me with you!... I come from Dryope’sslave-school, I have cost you a fortune, my lord! I am not beautiful, but my voice is good and, my lord, I am a clever dancer. But, if your lordship is tired of my voice and my dancing, I will wash your feet; and, when you are angry and want to beat a slave, you shall beatmeand ill-treat me! But keep me, keep me, wherever you may be!”She had thrown herself before him and was sobbing and kissing his feet.And he said:“Then, Cora, don’t you love Caleb?”“My lord,” she said, “I love you—if I must say it!—and I have loved you from the first moment when Thrasyllus brought me to you. And, if it please you, my lord, I will die for you. But keep me and do not give me to Caleb!”“And if it pleased me, Cora ... that you should not die for me but live for me? Not only to sing to me and dance to me, but also to throw your arms around my neck, to lay your breast upon my breast and your lips upon my lips?...”She gave a cry as of incredible happiness. Smiling, he raised her very tenderly and folded her in his arms, close against him.“Oh!” she cried, in ecstasy, when his lips sought hers. “Aphrodite! Aphrodite! She has heard my prayer!”Her little hands ventured to reach out for his head and take it by the temples. Around them was the solitude of the Ethiopian night; from out of the forests the flowers filled the air with incense; a spice-laden aroma was wafted from the sea; and the radiant stars hung above them, like white suns, with the dazzling glory that was Sirius....

After the fierce hunting by day, the nights were twinkling mysteries of great shining, diamond stars; and Sirius shone like a white sun. The rustling silence, the audible stillness of the vast forests lapped the encampment of the caravan, where the fires died out but still glowed sufficiently to keep the wild animals at a distance and where the guards and drivers lay immersed in sound sleep. Lucius was happy in that mystery; and in the silvery sheen of the night the last memories of his grief seemed to lift like wisps of disappearing mist.

The travellers had approached the Land of Ophir; and the pillars of Sesostris would be reached next day. In this last twinkling night of forest-life, with the stars shining through the foliage like a diamond cupola above an emerald dome, Lucius had left his tent while all the others slept. Next to his tent were those of Thrasyllus, Caleb and Cora. And he saw Cora sitting outside her tent, which was the biggest, because she wasa woman, and made of spotted lynx-hides, whose warmth resisted the plentiful dew. And she rose and stretched her hands to the ground, in salutation, and preserved that attitude, shyly.

“Are you not sleeping, Cora?” asked Lucius.

“No, my lord. I cannot sleep when the nights twinkle like this, when the stars send forth such rays that it is really as though they were moving to and fro. I feel that I must go on gazing at them until they fade away.”

“Life here in the forest is too wild for you, too lonely....”

“Life in the forest is paradise, my lord. By day Thrasyllus tells me wonderful things about the mountains and the plants and the animals and the savage tribes; and so the hours pass till you return from hunting....”

“And you sing to us and dance in the light of the fire and charm the rude hunters and Caleb in particular....”

She smiled and made no reply.

Then she continued:

“And the nights are such strange mysteries of sounds and silence and of radiantstars; and it is as though Sirius grew bigger nightly.”

“And you are never frightened?”

“I am not frightened, my lord.”

“Not even at night?”

“Least of all at night, because ...”

“Because what?”

“Because then you have returned; and I feel safest where you are.”

“From that height yonder, Cora, one can see the sea. I love the sea and I often miss the sea in the forest. I am glad that we are near the sea again. As I returned from hunting, I could just catch sight of a streak of sea from there. I should like to see the sea now, at night, with all those twinkling stars above it.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Come with me ... that is, if you are not frightened.”

“I am not frightened, my lord, where you are.”

And her heart throbbed in her throat, but not with fear.

They went past the sleeping guards and left the circle of the watch-fires. She nearly stumbled over the creepers and stones; and he said:

“Give me your hand.”

It was the first time that his hand had met hers. He had never touched her before. When she felt the warm strength of his hand around her own small hand, hers lay passive like a captive dove.

“Why are you trembling so?” he asked.

“I don’t know, my lord,” she stammered.

He smiled and did not speak again.

They climbed the rocky height and he helped her, with his fingers still grasping hers. He even put his arm round her slim waist, to support her, and he felt that she was still trembling, as in a fever.

“Look,” he said, pointing, “there is the sea.”

They both looked out. Around them stretched the forests, all shadow and denseness and gloom and loneliness and mystery. On one horizon, gleaming darkly in the night, lay the line of the sea, the Arabian Gulf, the Erythræan or Red Sea.

“The sea,” she stammered. “Yes, the sea, I love it too. I always had it around me, at Cos. I also miss it in the forest, as you do, my lord.”

“To-morrow we shall reach the sea again, Cora.... Cora, I want you, to-night, thislast night ... to dance to me ... here, in the starlight.”

“Yes, my lord,” said the slave.

She danced. She softly hummed a tune between scarce-parted lips. The thin folds of her garment flew to either side; and with her veils she mimicked the movements of birds’ wings. She hovered round and round on the upland, circling like a swallow.

He stepped towards her; and she ceased dancing.

“Cora,” he said, “to-morrow we shall be at Dire, by the pillars of Sesostris. On the opposite side are Ebal and Usal and Saba, Caleb’s country, to which he wants to return when he is rich.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Cora, if you are really fond of Caleb, I will resign you to him.”

She trembled and clasped her hands. She fell on her knees and gave one loud sob.

“What’s the matter, Cora?”

“My lord, let me stay with you! Let me dance and sing for you, let me serve you, let me wash your feet; kick me, beat me, torture me! But do not send me away! Do not send me away! Keep me! Keep me with you!... I come from Dryope’sslave-school, I have cost you a fortune, my lord! I am not beautiful, but my voice is good and, my lord, I am a clever dancer. But, if your lordship is tired of my voice and my dancing, I will wash your feet; and, when you are angry and want to beat a slave, you shall beatmeand ill-treat me! But keep me, keep me, wherever you may be!”

She had thrown herself before him and was sobbing and kissing his feet.

And he said:

“Then, Cora, don’t you love Caleb?”

“My lord,” she said, “I love you—if I must say it!—and I have loved you from the first moment when Thrasyllus brought me to you. And, if it please you, my lord, I will die for you. But keep me and do not give me to Caleb!”

“And if it pleased me, Cora ... that you should not die for me but live for me? Not only to sing to me and dance to me, but also to throw your arms around my neck, to lay your breast upon my breast and your lips upon my lips?...”

She gave a cry as of incredible happiness. Smiling, he raised her very tenderly and folded her in his arms, close against him.

“Oh!” she cried, in ecstasy, when his lips sought hers. “Aphrodite! Aphrodite! She has heard my prayer!”

Her little hands ventured to reach out for his head and take it by the temples. Around them was the solitude of the Ethiopian night; from out of the forests the flowers filled the air with incense; a spice-laden aroma was wafted from the sea; and the radiant stars hung above them, like white suns, with the dazzling glory that was Sirius....

Chapter XXVIICape Dire! The sea was reached; and there rose the obelisks, the shafts, the pillars of Sesostris, whose sacred writings immortalized the remembrance of the passage of the Egyptian world-ruler who for nine years had linked conquest to conquest, even to Arabia, even to Bactriana, even to India. And Caleb approached Lucius with a smile and said:“Most noble lord, I wished to keep it for you as a surprise and would not tell you before, but this little diversorium at Cape Dire, overlooking my beloved native land, belongs tous, to Ghizla and me, and is a small branch of our great Hermes House at Alexandria; and to-night you need no longer sleep in a tent, but will have a worthy apartment and sleep on a soft couch of skins. For, though you are still without your own furniture and your sumptuous utensils and treasures of art and though this little guest-house is not to be compared with our big diversorium, it is nevertheless comfortable and clean and it has bathrooms and kitchensand we built it here for the accommodation of any noble lords who travel from Alexandria to the pillars of Sesostris or from the pillars of Sesostris to Alexandria.”And Caleb, swaggering gaily and elegantly on the tips of his red boots, led the travellers into his guest-house; and Lucius, for the first time for weeks, bathed not in a rustling stream but in a bathroom, where his slaves rubbed and kneaded his body.Caleb stood on the cape, with his hand above his eyes, and looked out in astonishment. He was surprised that the quadrireme, with Uncle Catullus on board, had not arrived from the Gulf of Acathantus, nay, was not even in sight. Could there have been an accident? He told his fears to no one but Thrasyllus; and the two stood looking long on the point of Cape Dire, gazing into the distance, each with his hand above his eyes.But at last, when night began to fall, the great, graceful sea-monster appeared on the horizon, with her prow erect like a swan’s neck and her hundreds of slender legs moving in unison; and the rose-yellow sails bellied in the breeze; and the silver statue of Aphrodite shot forth its silver spark of light; andthe rowers’ long, melancholy chant, the soft, monotonous accompaniment of tiring work, was borne long and wistfully over the sea, together with the cheerful song of the sailors. And the travellers, who now all stood on the cape waiting for the ship, saw the figures of Uncle Catullus, of the stewards Vettius and Rufus, of the master and the steersman.And they waved again and again; and Cora, with her harp pressed to her bosom, sang the song of welcome to the ship; and her voice sounded jubilant and clear, full of happiness and full of gladness. The ropes were flung ashore, the ship lay moored....But what was the anxiety that covered the faces of all on board, who were now preparing to walk across the gangway to the jetty? Why did Uncle Catullus lift his hands on high and shake his head, pinned round so comically in his travelling-veil? And what was it that Vettius and Rufus were saying to each other with much gesticulation and why did they now all land with such embarrassed faces?“Well, Lucius,” said Uncle Catullus, embracing him, “you’re looking splendid, my dear fellow, splendid, brown and bronzed as a Nimrod; and your arms feel hard andyour eyes are bright and your mouth is laughing happily and you look very different from what you were when we left Baiæ.... Ah, my dear, dear Lucius! Fortune is blind and fate is a riddle and we poor mortals are the playthings of the cruel gods; and we never know, in the midst of our delight and gladness, what is hanging over our heads ... especially when travelling, dear boy: my dear boy,especiallywhen travelling!”“But why especially when travelling, my dear uncle?” asked Lucius, laughing.And he led his uncle into the diversorium; and his uncle was now weeping; and his slaves unpinned his travelling-veil for him and relieved him of his travelling-cloak; and Vettius and Rufus also looked so strange and so gloomy and solemn; and it was as though the air were filled with dread.“But, Uncle Catullus,” said Lucius, “what has happened?”“My dear, dear boy,” Uncle Catullus kept on tediously repeating, “I ... I really cannottell you.”And he wrung his hands and wept; and Thrasyllus turned pale and Cora turned pale and Rufus looked gloomy.“No,” repeated Uncle Catullus, “I reallycannottell Lucius. You tell him, Vettius, you tell him.”“My Lord Catullus,” said Vettius, at last, in despair, “howcanI tell my Lord Lucius? If I do, he will fly into a passion and kill me; but, perhaps, if Rufus will tell him ...”“I will not, I willnot,” said Rufus, warding off the suggestion with both hands. “By all the gods, Vettius, I willnottell him.”“Nor will I,” said Uncle Catullus, moaning and weeping.Lucius now knitted his brows and said:“But I must know, Vettius. I order you to tell me what has happened—for something has happened—I order you to tell me and I swear not to kill you.... Has it to do with the quadrireme, a mutiny among the rowers?”“Worse than that, my lord!” wailed Vettius.“Has there been a theft of our baggage or jewels or plate?”“Worse, my lord, much worse!”“Has there been a fire at our insula in Rome? Is the villa burned down?”“Worse, worse, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried in chorus.And they flung themselves at Lucius’ feetand embraced his knees; and Uncle Catullus fell sobbing on Thrasyllus’ breast.“But whatisit? By all the gods, speak up!” cried Lucius, in a fury. “Whatisit? Speak up, or I will have you whipped till you do!”“We will tell you, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried.And Uncle Catullus cried:“Yes, tell him, tell him; after all, hemustbe told.”“Are we alone, my lord?” whined Vettius. “Are there no slaves listening at the doors and is Caleb out of hearing?”Cora opened the doors and peeped out:“There is no one there,” she said. “I will withdraw, my lord.”“No, stay,” commanded Lucius.She stayed.“Speak up,” Lucius commanded Vettius, lifting him up.“My lord,” said Vettius, again falling at Lucius’ feet, “if I must tell you, let me do so on my knees. For I have not the strength left to tell you, my lord, if I stand face to face with your anger.”“Speak!” roared Lucius, in a voice of thunder.“My lord,” said Vettius, at last, clasping Lucius’ knees in his hands and kissing them continually, “my lord, our gracious emperor, Augustus Tiberius, is wroth with you, we know not for what reason, and....”“Well?” shouted Lucius.“And he has confiscated all your possessions, O my lord, everything that you possess: all your insula in Rome, your villa, your estates and domains, your horses and chariots and cattle, your slaves and treasures of art, your library and your jewels ... and has attached all the sums which you had lodged with your bankers and money-changers in various towns! You are penniless, my lord, for you own nothing except what your ship contains; and, if I had not succeeded in keeping Tiberius’ displeasure secret by means of a precipitate flight and by continuing to drift about in the Great Sea and the Arabian Gulf, your quadrireme also would have been seized at Alexandria and you would now have been without your ship, without your rowers, without your slaves, without a single penny. By bribing the authorities at Pelusium with the money that remained in my hands, I managed secretly to pass through the Nechao Canal toArsinoe; and at Berenice we met your Uncle Catullus and informed him of the terrible news. My lord, do not slay me and do not be wroth with me, for I have saved for you what I could!”And Vettius writhed at Lucius’ feet and sobbed; and they all sobbed: Uncle Catullus, Thrasyllus, Rufus and Cora....And Caleb, who had been listening at the door, turned very pale.For there was still a long, long, long papyrus scroll of a bill awaiting payment, for the big hunts in the Ethiopian forests!

Chapter XXVII

Cape Dire! The sea was reached; and there rose the obelisks, the shafts, the pillars of Sesostris, whose sacred writings immortalized the remembrance of the passage of the Egyptian world-ruler who for nine years had linked conquest to conquest, even to Arabia, even to Bactriana, even to India. And Caleb approached Lucius with a smile and said:“Most noble lord, I wished to keep it for you as a surprise and would not tell you before, but this little diversorium at Cape Dire, overlooking my beloved native land, belongs tous, to Ghizla and me, and is a small branch of our great Hermes House at Alexandria; and to-night you need no longer sleep in a tent, but will have a worthy apartment and sleep on a soft couch of skins. For, though you are still without your own furniture and your sumptuous utensils and treasures of art and though this little guest-house is not to be compared with our big diversorium, it is nevertheless comfortable and clean and it has bathrooms and kitchensand we built it here for the accommodation of any noble lords who travel from Alexandria to the pillars of Sesostris or from the pillars of Sesostris to Alexandria.”And Caleb, swaggering gaily and elegantly on the tips of his red boots, led the travellers into his guest-house; and Lucius, for the first time for weeks, bathed not in a rustling stream but in a bathroom, where his slaves rubbed and kneaded his body.Caleb stood on the cape, with his hand above his eyes, and looked out in astonishment. He was surprised that the quadrireme, with Uncle Catullus on board, had not arrived from the Gulf of Acathantus, nay, was not even in sight. Could there have been an accident? He told his fears to no one but Thrasyllus; and the two stood looking long on the point of Cape Dire, gazing into the distance, each with his hand above his eyes.But at last, when night began to fall, the great, graceful sea-monster appeared on the horizon, with her prow erect like a swan’s neck and her hundreds of slender legs moving in unison; and the rose-yellow sails bellied in the breeze; and the silver statue of Aphrodite shot forth its silver spark of light; andthe rowers’ long, melancholy chant, the soft, monotonous accompaniment of tiring work, was borne long and wistfully over the sea, together with the cheerful song of the sailors. And the travellers, who now all stood on the cape waiting for the ship, saw the figures of Uncle Catullus, of the stewards Vettius and Rufus, of the master and the steersman.And they waved again and again; and Cora, with her harp pressed to her bosom, sang the song of welcome to the ship; and her voice sounded jubilant and clear, full of happiness and full of gladness. The ropes were flung ashore, the ship lay moored....But what was the anxiety that covered the faces of all on board, who were now preparing to walk across the gangway to the jetty? Why did Uncle Catullus lift his hands on high and shake his head, pinned round so comically in his travelling-veil? And what was it that Vettius and Rufus were saying to each other with much gesticulation and why did they now all land with such embarrassed faces?“Well, Lucius,” said Uncle Catullus, embracing him, “you’re looking splendid, my dear fellow, splendid, brown and bronzed as a Nimrod; and your arms feel hard andyour eyes are bright and your mouth is laughing happily and you look very different from what you were when we left Baiæ.... Ah, my dear, dear Lucius! Fortune is blind and fate is a riddle and we poor mortals are the playthings of the cruel gods; and we never know, in the midst of our delight and gladness, what is hanging over our heads ... especially when travelling, dear boy: my dear boy,especiallywhen travelling!”“But why especially when travelling, my dear uncle?” asked Lucius, laughing.And he led his uncle into the diversorium; and his uncle was now weeping; and his slaves unpinned his travelling-veil for him and relieved him of his travelling-cloak; and Vettius and Rufus also looked so strange and so gloomy and solemn; and it was as though the air were filled with dread.“But, Uncle Catullus,” said Lucius, “what has happened?”“My dear, dear boy,” Uncle Catullus kept on tediously repeating, “I ... I really cannottell you.”And he wrung his hands and wept; and Thrasyllus turned pale and Cora turned pale and Rufus looked gloomy.“No,” repeated Uncle Catullus, “I reallycannottell Lucius. You tell him, Vettius, you tell him.”“My Lord Catullus,” said Vettius, at last, in despair, “howcanI tell my Lord Lucius? If I do, he will fly into a passion and kill me; but, perhaps, if Rufus will tell him ...”“I will not, I willnot,” said Rufus, warding off the suggestion with both hands. “By all the gods, Vettius, I willnottell him.”“Nor will I,” said Uncle Catullus, moaning and weeping.Lucius now knitted his brows and said:“But I must know, Vettius. I order you to tell me what has happened—for something has happened—I order you to tell me and I swear not to kill you.... Has it to do with the quadrireme, a mutiny among the rowers?”“Worse than that, my lord!” wailed Vettius.“Has there been a theft of our baggage or jewels or plate?”“Worse, my lord, much worse!”“Has there been a fire at our insula in Rome? Is the villa burned down?”“Worse, worse, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried in chorus.And they flung themselves at Lucius’ feetand embraced his knees; and Uncle Catullus fell sobbing on Thrasyllus’ breast.“But whatisit? By all the gods, speak up!” cried Lucius, in a fury. “Whatisit? Speak up, or I will have you whipped till you do!”“We will tell you, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried.And Uncle Catullus cried:“Yes, tell him, tell him; after all, hemustbe told.”“Are we alone, my lord?” whined Vettius. “Are there no slaves listening at the doors and is Caleb out of hearing?”Cora opened the doors and peeped out:“There is no one there,” she said. “I will withdraw, my lord.”“No, stay,” commanded Lucius.She stayed.“Speak up,” Lucius commanded Vettius, lifting him up.“My lord,” said Vettius, again falling at Lucius’ feet, “if I must tell you, let me do so on my knees. For I have not the strength left to tell you, my lord, if I stand face to face with your anger.”“Speak!” roared Lucius, in a voice of thunder.“My lord,” said Vettius, at last, clasping Lucius’ knees in his hands and kissing them continually, “my lord, our gracious emperor, Augustus Tiberius, is wroth with you, we know not for what reason, and....”“Well?” shouted Lucius.“And he has confiscated all your possessions, O my lord, everything that you possess: all your insula in Rome, your villa, your estates and domains, your horses and chariots and cattle, your slaves and treasures of art, your library and your jewels ... and has attached all the sums which you had lodged with your bankers and money-changers in various towns! You are penniless, my lord, for you own nothing except what your ship contains; and, if I had not succeeded in keeping Tiberius’ displeasure secret by means of a precipitate flight and by continuing to drift about in the Great Sea and the Arabian Gulf, your quadrireme also would have been seized at Alexandria and you would now have been without your ship, without your rowers, without your slaves, without a single penny. By bribing the authorities at Pelusium with the money that remained in my hands, I managed secretly to pass through the Nechao Canal toArsinoe; and at Berenice we met your Uncle Catullus and informed him of the terrible news. My lord, do not slay me and do not be wroth with me, for I have saved for you what I could!”And Vettius writhed at Lucius’ feet and sobbed; and they all sobbed: Uncle Catullus, Thrasyllus, Rufus and Cora....And Caleb, who had been listening at the door, turned very pale.For there was still a long, long, long papyrus scroll of a bill awaiting payment, for the big hunts in the Ethiopian forests!

Cape Dire! The sea was reached; and there rose the obelisks, the shafts, the pillars of Sesostris, whose sacred writings immortalized the remembrance of the passage of the Egyptian world-ruler who for nine years had linked conquest to conquest, even to Arabia, even to Bactriana, even to India. And Caleb approached Lucius with a smile and said:

“Most noble lord, I wished to keep it for you as a surprise and would not tell you before, but this little diversorium at Cape Dire, overlooking my beloved native land, belongs tous, to Ghizla and me, and is a small branch of our great Hermes House at Alexandria; and to-night you need no longer sleep in a tent, but will have a worthy apartment and sleep on a soft couch of skins. For, though you are still without your own furniture and your sumptuous utensils and treasures of art and though this little guest-house is not to be compared with our big diversorium, it is nevertheless comfortable and clean and it has bathrooms and kitchensand we built it here for the accommodation of any noble lords who travel from Alexandria to the pillars of Sesostris or from the pillars of Sesostris to Alexandria.”

And Caleb, swaggering gaily and elegantly on the tips of his red boots, led the travellers into his guest-house; and Lucius, for the first time for weeks, bathed not in a rustling stream but in a bathroom, where his slaves rubbed and kneaded his body.

Caleb stood on the cape, with his hand above his eyes, and looked out in astonishment. He was surprised that the quadrireme, with Uncle Catullus on board, had not arrived from the Gulf of Acathantus, nay, was not even in sight. Could there have been an accident? He told his fears to no one but Thrasyllus; and the two stood looking long on the point of Cape Dire, gazing into the distance, each with his hand above his eyes.

But at last, when night began to fall, the great, graceful sea-monster appeared on the horizon, with her prow erect like a swan’s neck and her hundreds of slender legs moving in unison; and the rose-yellow sails bellied in the breeze; and the silver statue of Aphrodite shot forth its silver spark of light; andthe rowers’ long, melancholy chant, the soft, monotonous accompaniment of tiring work, was borne long and wistfully over the sea, together with the cheerful song of the sailors. And the travellers, who now all stood on the cape waiting for the ship, saw the figures of Uncle Catullus, of the stewards Vettius and Rufus, of the master and the steersman.

And they waved again and again; and Cora, with her harp pressed to her bosom, sang the song of welcome to the ship; and her voice sounded jubilant and clear, full of happiness and full of gladness. The ropes were flung ashore, the ship lay moored....

But what was the anxiety that covered the faces of all on board, who were now preparing to walk across the gangway to the jetty? Why did Uncle Catullus lift his hands on high and shake his head, pinned round so comically in his travelling-veil? And what was it that Vettius and Rufus were saying to each other with much gesticulation and why did they now all land with such embarrassed faces?

“Well, Lucius,” said Uncle Catullus, embracing him, “you’re looking splendid, my dear fellow, splendid, brown and bronzed as a Nimrod; and your arms feel hard andyour eyes are bright and your mouth is laughing happily and you look very different from what you were when we left Baiæ.... Ah, my dear, dear Lucius! Fortune is blind and fate is a riddle and we poor mortals are the playthings of the cruel gods; and we never know, in the midst of our delight and gladness, what is hanging over our heads ... especially when travelling, dear boy: my dear boy,especiallywhen travelling!”

“But why especially when travelling, my dear uncle?” asked Lucius, laughing.

And he led his uncle into the diversorium; and his uncle was now weeping; and his slaves unpinned his travelling-veil for him and relieved him of his travelling-cloak; and Vettius and Rufus also looked so strange and so gloomy and solemn; and it was as though the air were filled with dread.

“But, Uncle Catullus,” said Lucius, “what has happened?”

“My dear, dear boy,” Uncle Catullus kept on tediously repeating, “I ... I really cannottell you.”

And he wrung his hands and wept; and Thrasyllus turned pale and Cora turned pale and Rufus looked gloomy.

“No,” repeated Uncle Catullus, “I reallycannottell Lucius. You tell him, Vettius, you tell him.”

“My Lord Catullus,” said Vettius, at last, in despair, “howcanI tell my Lord Lucius? If I do, he will fly into a passion and kill me; but, perhaps, if Rufus will tell him ...”

“I will not, I willnot,” said Rufus, warding off the suggestion with both hands. “By all the gods, Vettius, I willnottell him.”

“Nor will I,” said Uncle Catullus, moaning and weeping.

Lucius now knitted his brows and said:

“But I must know, Vettius. I order you to tell me what has happened—for something has happened—I order you to tell me and I swear not to kill you.... Has it to do with the quadrireme, a mutiny among the rowers?”

“Worse than that, my lord!” wailed Vettius.

“Has there been a theft of our baggage or jewels or plate?”

“Worse, my lord, much worse!”

“Has there been a fire at our insula in Rome? Is the villa burned down?”

“Worse, worse, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried in chorus.

And they flung themselves at Lucius’ feetand embraced his knees; and Uncle Catullus fell sobbing on Thrasyllus’ breast.

“But whatisit? By all the gods, speak up!” cried Lucius, in a fury. “Whatisit? Speak up, or I will have you whipped till you do!”

“We will tell you, my lord!” Vettius and Rufus now cried.

And Uncle Catullus cried:

“Yes, tell him, tell him; after all, hemustbe told.”

“Are we alone, my lord?” whined Vettius. “Are there no slaves listening at the doors and is Caleb out of hearing?”

Cora opened the doors and peeped out:

“There is no one there,” she said. “I will withdraw, my lord.”

“No, stay,” commanded Lucius.

She stayed.

“Speak up,” Lucius commanded Vettius, lifting him up.

“My lord,” said Vettius, again falling at Lucius’ feet, “if I must tell you, let me do so on my knees. For I have not the strength left to tell you, my lord, if I stand face to face with your anger.”

“Speak!” roared Lucius, in a voice of thunder.

“My lord,” said Vettius, at last, clasping Lucius’ knees in his hands and kissing them continually, “my lord, our gracious emperor, Augustus Tiberius, is wroth with you, we know not for what reason, and....”

“Well?” shouted Lucius.

“And he has confiscated all your possessions, O my lord, everything that you possess: all your insula in Rome, your villa, your estates and domains, your horses and chariots and cattle, your slaves and treasures of art, your library and your jewels ... and has attached all the sums which you had lodged with your bankers and money-changers in various towns! You are penniless, my lord, for you own nothing except what your ship contains; and, if I had not succeeded in keeping Tiberius’ displeasure secret by means of a precipitate flight and by continuing to drift about in the Great Sea and the Arabian Gulf, your quadrireme also would have been seized at Alexandria and you would now have been without your ship, without your rowers, without your slaves, without a single penny. By bribing the authorities at Pelusium with the money that remained in my hands, I managed secretly to pass through the Nechao Canal toArsinoe; and at Berenice we met your Uncle Catullus and informed him of the terrible news. My lord, do not slay me and do not be wroth with me, for I have saved for you what I could!”

And Vettius writhed at Lucius’ feet and sobbed; and they all sobbed: Uncle Catullus, Thrasyllus, Rufus and Cora....

And Caleb, who had been listening at the door, turned very pale.

For there was still a long, long, long papyrus scroll of a bill awaiting payment, for the big hunts in the Ethiopian forests!

Chapter XXVIIICaleb was pale when he appeared before Lucius, who had sent for him.“Caleb,” said Lucius, “perhaps you already know ...”“I know nothing, my lord,” said Caleb.“I am penniless, Caleb. The Emperor Tiberius has confiscated all my possessions; and even my title to the quadrireme is questionable.”“O my lord, O my lord!” Caleb began to lament. “O my poor, poor, noble lord! What a terrible fate to befall you! If only you had consented faithfully to wear the Sabæan amulets! O my poor, poor, noble lord! What will you do now? You, who always lived in the lap of luxury! And now! How now? Alas, my poor, poor, noble lord and alas, poor, poor Caleb! For who, my lord, my poor, poor noble lord, will now pay my bill?”And, wailing and lamenting and shaking his head and weeping, Caleb unfurled the long, long, long papyrus scroll of his bill, which uncoiled itself from his quiveringfingers right down to the floor, like a rustling snake.“We’ll look into your bill at once, Caleb,” said Lucius, encouragingly. “Call the stewards and Thrasyllus to me.”They came and examined the bill and shook their heads and thought the expenses of the great Ethiopian hunt terribly high; but Caleb swore that, because of his growing affection for Lucius, he had charged less than he did to other noble lords:“But there is a solution, my lord,” said Caleb, drawing Lucius aside. And he continued, “My lord, if you will make over Cora to me ... I will write off all the expenses of the Ethiopian hunt.”“Caleb,” said Lucius, earnestly, “I know that you are fond of Cora. But I also am very fond of her, Caleb, and I mean to keep her as my only treasure.”A loud sob came from a corner of the room. And Lucius, turning round, saw Tarrar sitting on the floor, looking profoundly dejected.“And me, my lord?” sobbed Tarrar. “Won’t you keepmeas your little slave, my lord?”Lucius smiled and laid his hand on Tarrar’s woolly head:“I am not forgetting you either, Tarrar,” he said, “and I shall keep you too. But, for the rest, Caleb, I shall have to sell the ship and all my slaves and anything that remains to me. I have some money as well, however, and I will try to pay you in full. But Cora shall not appear on the bill.”“Alas, my lord, this is an evil day and the end of the world is certainly near at hand, notwithstanding that I can see the blue coast of my dear Saba! I, like yourself, am losing everything: the hope of getting Cora, who loves you even as you love her, and the hope of getting my poor money!”“Come, Caleb, we must not repine. Let us just count the money that remains to us.”The stewards laid rows of gold coins on the table. And Caleb’s bill, despite the length which his papyrus scroll covered on the floor, was paid and receipted, after some quibbling between the stewards, who took exception to certain items, and Caleb, who was quite amenable to reason. And, when the money had been transferred to the purse which wound like a fat snake round Caleb’swaist, he became cheerful again and said:“My lord, my noble lord, for you are still a noble lord, listen to me. I am profoundly miserable that I can’t have Cora. Yes, my lord, really, I am profoundly miserable. But I am an honest fellow and at the same time I am a man of business. Listen, my lord, and let your stewards listen and your trusty Thrasyllus too. Listen, my lord. You wish to sell the quadrireme with all her contents. But where, my lord? It can’t be done at Alexandria, for any property of yours would be seized at once. Here, at Cape Dire, oh, there are only uncivilized Macrobii and no noble lords who could afford to buy the quadrireme! Listen, my lord, listen. Do you with all these your servants, free men and witnesses, sign a certificate, oh, my ever noble lord, a certificate ... dare I say it?”“Speak out, Caleb!”“A certificate that the quadrireme, with her rowers and all her contents, belongs to me; and I swear by the gods of Sabæa and of Egypt, by the eyes of Cora, whom I love, by the friendship which I, my lord, your guide and companion in the chase, venture to cherish for you, I swear, my lord, that Iwill myself endeavour to dispose of the quadrireme to a noble lord and pay you honestly, to the last penny, after deducting my expenses!”Thus spoke Caleb; and he stood up in the exalted attitude in which he had taken his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven, and waited.Vettius and Rufus thought it rather risky, but Lucius said:“Caleb’s advice is excellent. It is the only thing to do. If I delay, Tiberius’ minions will discover where I am and take the last remnant of my belongings from me. Caleb, I will do as you say. I will sign the document certifying that the ship is your property, together with the slaves, the rowers, the furniture, the jewels, the very valuable plate....”But Caleb did not move. He continued to stand in the solemn, rapt attitude of his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven. And he now said, slowly:“I thank you, my lord, for your confidence. It will certainly not be abused. If I do not render you an equitable account in whatever place of exile you may be, may the awful jaws of Typhon, whose tongue is aserpent and whose teeth are blazing flames, swallow me and devour me!”And Caleb himself trembled at his terrific oath and then fell on his knees before Lucius—a thing which he, a free Sabæan, had never yet done—and kissed the foot of the suddenly impoverished noble lord!

Chapter XXVIII

Caleb was pale when he appeared before Lucius, who had sent for him.“Caleb,” said Lucius, “perhaps you already know ...”“I know nothing, my lord,” said Caleb.“I am penniless, Caleb. The Emperor Tiberius has confiscated all my possessions; and even my title to the quadrireme is questionable.”“O my lord, O my lord!” Caleb began to lament. “O my poor, poor, noble lord! What a terrible fate to befall you! If only you had consented faithfully to wear the Sabæan amulets! O my poor, poor, noble lord! What will you do now? You, who always lived in the lap of luxury! And now! How now? Alas, my poor, poor, noble lord and alas, poor, poor Caleb! For who, my lord, my poor, poor noble lord, will now pay my bill?”And, wailing and lamenting and shaking his head and weeping, Caleb unfurled the long, long, long papyrus scroll of his bill, which uncoiled itself from his quiveringfingers right down to the floor, like a rustling snake.“We’ll look into your bill at once, Caleb,” said Lucius, encouragingly. “Call the stewards and Thrasyllus to me.”They came and examined the bill and shook their heads and thought the expenses of the great Ethiopian hunt terribly high; but Caleb swore that, because of his growing affection for Lucius, he had charged less than he did to other noble lords:“But there is a solution, my lord,” said Caleb, drawing Lucius aside. And he continued, “My lord, if you will make over Cora to me ... I will write off all the expenses of the Ethiopian hunt.”“Caleb,” said Lucius, earnestly, “I know that you are fond of Cora. But I also am very fond of her, Caleb, and I mean to keep her as my only treasure.”A loud sob came from a corner of the room. And Lucius, turning round, saw Tarrar sitting on the floor, looking profoundly dejected.“And me, my lord?” sobbed Tarrar. “Won’t you keepmeas your little slave, my lord?”Lucius smiled and laid his hand on Tarrar’s woolly head:“I am not forgetting you either, Tarrar,” he said, “and I shall keep you too. But, for the rest, Caleb, I shall have to sell the ship and all my slaves and anything that remains to me. I have some money as well, however, and I will try to pay you in full. But Cora shall not appear on the bill.”“Alas, my lord, this is an evil day and the end of the world is certainly near at hand, notwithstanding that I can see the blue coast of my dear Saba! I, like yourself, am losing everything: the hope of getting Cora, who loves you even as you love her, and the hope of getting my poor money!”“Come, Caleb, we must not repine. Let us just count the money that remains to us.”The stewards laid rows of gold coins on the table. And Caleb’s bill, despite the length which his papyrus scroll covered on the floor, was paid and receipted, after some quibbling between the stewards, who took exception to certain items, and Caleb, who was quite amenable to reason. And, when the money had been transferred to the purse which wound like a fat snake round Caleb’swaist, he became cheerful again and said:“My lord, my noble lord, for you are still a noble lord, listen to me. I am profoundly miserable that I can’t have Cora. Yes, my lord, really, I am profoundly miserable. But I am an honest fellow and at the same time I am a man of business. Listen, my lord, and let your stewards listen and your trusty Thrasyllus too. Listen, my lord. You wish to sell the quadrireme with all her contents. But where, my lord? It can’t be done at Alexandria, for any property of yours would be seized at once. Here, at Cape Dire, oh, there are only uncivilized Macrobii and no noble lords who could afford to buy the quadrireme! Listen, my lord, listen. Do you with all these your servants, free men and witnesses, sign a certificate, oh, my ever noble lord, a certificate ... dare I say it?”“Speak out, Caleb!”“A certificate that the quadrireme, with her rowers and all her contents, belongs to me; and I swear by the gods of Sabæa and of Egypt, by the eyes of Cora, whom I love, by the friendship which I, my lord, your guide and companion in the chase, venture to cherish for you, I swear, my lord, that Iwill myself endeavour to dispose of the quadrireme to a noble lord and pay you honestly, to the last penny, after deducting my expenses!”Thus spoke Caleb; and he stood up in the exalted attitude in which he had taken his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven, and waited.Vettius and Rufus thought it rather risky, but Lucius said:“Caleb’s advice is excellent. It is the only thing to do. If I delay, Tiberius’ minions will discover where I am and take the last remnant of my belongings from me. Caleb, I will do as you say. I will sign the document certifying that the ship is your property, together with the slaves, the rowers, the furniture, the jewels, the very valuable plate....”But Caleb did not move. He continued to stand in the solemn, rapt attitude of his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven. And he now said, slowly:“I thank you, my lord, for your confidence. It will certainly not be abused. If I do not render you an equitable account in whatever place of exile you may be, may the awful jaws of Typhon, whose tongue is aserpent and whose teeth are blazing flames, swallow me and devour me!”And Caleb himself trembled at his terrific oath and then fell on his knees before Lucius—a thing which he, a free Sabæan, had never yet done—and kissed the foot of the suddenly impoverished noble lord!

Caleb was pale when he appeared before Lucius, who had sent for him.

“Caleb,” said Lucius, “perhaps you already know ...”

“I know nothing, my lord,” said Caleb.

“I am penniless, Caleb. The Emperor Tiberius has confiscated all my possessions; and even my title to the quadrireme is questionable.”

“O my lord, O my lord!” Caleb began to lament. “O my poor, poor, noble lord! What a terrible fate to befall you! If only you had consented faithfully to wear the Sabæan amulets! O my poor, poor, noble lord! What will you do now? You, who always lived in the lap of luxury! And now! How now? Alas, my poor, poor, noble lord and alas, poor, poor Caleb! For who, my lord, my poor, poor noble lord, will now pay my bill?”

And, wailing and lamenting and shaking his head and weeping, Caleb unfurled the long, long, long papyrus scroll of his bill, which uncoiled itself from his quiveringfingers right down to the floor, like a rustling snake.

“We’ll look into your bill at once, Caleb,” said Lucius, encouragingly. “Call the stewards and Thrasyllus to me.”

They came and examined the bill and shook their heads and thought the expenses of the great Ethiopian hunt terribly high; but Caleb swore that, because of his growing affection for Lucius, he had charged less than he did to other noble lords:

“But there is a solution, my lord,” said Caleb, drawing Lucius aside. And he continued, “My lord, if you will make over Cora to me ... I will write off all the expenses of the Ethiopian hunt.”

“Caleb,” said Lucius, earnestly, “I know that you are fond of Cora. But I also am very fond of her, Caleb, and I mean to keep her as my only treasure.”

A loud sob came from a corner of the room. And Lucius, turning round, saw Tarrar sitting on the floor, looking profoundly dejected.

“And me, my lord?” sobbed Tarrar. “Won’t you keepmeas your little slave, my lord?”

Lucius smiled and laid his hand on Tarrar’s woolly head:

“I am not forgetting you either, Tarrar,” he said, “and I shall keep you too. But, for the rest, Caleb, I shall have to sell the ship and all my slaves and anything that remains to me. I have some money as well, however, and I will try to pay you in full. But Cora shall not appear on the bill.”

“Alas, my lord, this is an evil day and the end of the world is certainly near at hand, notwithstanding that I can see the blue coast of my dear Saba! I, like yourself, am losing everything: the hope of getting Cora, who loves you even as you love her, and the hope of getting my poor money!”

“Come, Caleb, we must not repine. Let us just count the money that remains to us.”

The stewards laid rows of gold coins on the table. And Caleb’s bill, despite the length which his papyrus scroll covered on the floor, was paid and receipted, after some quibbling between the stewards, who took exception to certain items, and Caleb, who was quite amenable to reason. And, when the money had been transferred to the purse which wound like a fat snake round Caleb’swaist, he became cheerful again and said:

“My lord, my noble lord, for you are still a noble lord, listen to me. I am profoundly miserable that I can’t have Cora. Yes, my lord, really, I am profoundly miserable. But I am an honest fellow and at the same time I am a man of business. Listen, my lord, and let your stewards listen and your trusty Thrasyllus too. Listen, my lord. You wish to sell the quadrireme with all her contents. But where, my lord? It can’t be done at Alexandria, for any property of yours would be seized at once. Here, at Cape Dire, oh, there are only uncivilized Macrobii and no noble lords who could afford to buy the quadrireme! Listen, my lord, listen. Do you with all these your servants, free men and witnesses, sign a certificate, oh, my ever noble lord, a certificate ... dare I say it?”

“Speak out, Caleb!”

“A certificate that the quadrireme, with her rowers and all her contents, belongs to me; and I swear by the gods of Sabæa and of Egypt, by the eyes of Cora, whom I love, by the friendship which I, my lord, your guide and companion in the chase, venture to cherish for you, I swear, my lord, that Iwill myself endeavour to dispose of the quadrireme to a noble lord and pay you honestly, to the last penny, after deducting my expenses!”

Thus spoke Caleb; and he stood up in the exalted attitude in which he had taken his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven, and waited.

Vettius and Rufus thought it rather risky, but Lucius said:

“Caleb’s advice is excellent. It is the only thing to do. If I delay, Tiberius’ minions will discover where I am and take the last remnant of my belongings from me. Caleb, I will do as you say. I will sign the document certifying that the ship is your property, together with the slaves, the rowers, the furniture, the jewels, the very valuable plate....”

But Caleb did not move. He continued to stand in the solemn, rapt attitude of his oath, with his eyes and hands raised to heaven. And he now said, slowly:

“I thank you, my lord, for your confidence. It will certainly not be abused. If I do not render you an equitable account in whatever place of exile you may be, may the awful jaws of Typhon, whose tongue is aserpent and whose teeth are blazing flames, swallow me and devour me!”

And Caleb himself trembled at his terrific oath and then fell on his knees before Lucius—a thing which he, a free Sabæan, had never yet done—and kissed the foot of the suddenly impoverished noble lord!

Chapter XXIXNear the pillars of Sesostris, near the little diversorium, there lay moored, beside the quadrireme, a merchant trireme, which was sailing past Ophir to the Persian Gulf and which was to go up the Euphrates to Babylon. And Lucius asked to speak to the master and said:“Master, can I have room in your ship for myself, my father, my young wife and my little black slave? I am a sculptor; and I am on my way to Babylon.”And he pointed to Thrasyllus, Cora and Tarrar, who approached, each carrying a small bundle of luggage.“Certainly,” said the master. “My one cabin is still unoccupied. It is small and perhaps inconvenient; but people like you, who are sculptors, are not accustomed to luxury, I dare say, and will be prepared to make shift.”Lucius answered that, if the cabin was suitable for his wife and his father, he and the little slave would do the best they could on the half-deck or in the hold; and hebeckoned to his family to come on board and paid the passage-money.For Caleb had advanced him a goodly sum on the value of the quadrireme, for the immediate needs of the voyage; and Caleb himself had set out, with a great following, for his dear Saba, first because he wanted to forget his love-sickness in the pleasures of Arabia Felix and then to make a start by selling many of Lucius’ slaves and jewels, his ornaments and furniture at Mariaba, the capital, because it was safer to get this done as quickly as possible. The sale of the great ship herself would be difficult enough.Uncle Catullus remained on board of her. He did not wish to be a burden on his poor nephew Lucius; he had contrived to hoard a modest capital with one gold piece after another that had accidentally slipped through Lucius’ fingers; and he was to sail to Alexandria in the ship, after she had been sold, and there, in the city of the finest cooking, to spend his old age in a small apartment in the Hermes House. And so he had taken a tearful leave of Lucius, Thrasyllus and Cora and had said to her:“Dear Cora, just as you were going to call me uncle, we part and perhaps for ever.Ah, Egypt is the death of me! Egypt will irrevocably be the death of me! For I can never go back to Rome, poor old exile that I am, because Tiberius—may he die a thousand deaths!—would rob me of my few pence even as he has robbed Lucius of his treasures....”The merchant trireme glided away over a smooth sea; and the travellers on the deck waved farewell to Uncle Catullus, who stood on the prow and waved back. It was a leave-taking for good. And the master asked, inquisitively:“Is that lord, who stands waving his hand to you, the owner of that splendid vessel?”“Yes, master,” Lucius lied, “and he’s my uncle. And one day I shall be his heir.”“Then you will do well to hold him in honour, sir,” said the master, growing very respectful. “Whew! That’s a prospect not to be sneezed at! What a noble ship! What a magnificent quadrireme! But tell me, master,” he continued, more and more inquisitively, “in that case why don’t youstaywith your uncle?”“Because it’s not a good thing, master, for poor relations to be always hanging round the rich. For then you only annoy them and they end by cutting you off with a shilling. And that is why, master,” said Lucius, pressing Cora, by his side, to him “after seeing and admiring Egypt at my rich uncle’s expense, I am now paying a visit to Babylon with my father, my wife and my little slave. From there we shall go through Assyria and Asia Minor to the island of Cos, where my wife was born and where I want to settle down as a sculptor.”The master thought this very natural; and, as the wind was now blowing a stiff breeze, with the first cold, autumnal gusts, Lucius, happy, gay and healthy, led Cora into her cabin, while Tarrar squatted outside, like a faithful, clever little monkey, and Thrasyllus, within, carefully rolled up the maps, books and itineraries which he had consulted during their tour.

Chapter XXIX

Near the pillars of Sesostris, near the little diversorium, there lay moored, beside the quadrireme, a merchant trireme, which was sailing past Ophir to the Persian Gulf and which was to go up the Euphrates to Babylon. And Lucius asked to speak to the master and said:“Master, can I have room in your ship for myself, my father, my young wife and my little black slave? I am a sculptor; and I am on my way to Babylon.”And he pointed to Thrasyllus, Cora and Tarrar, who approached, each carrying a small bundle of luggage.“Certainly,” said the master. “My one cabin is still unoccupied. It is small and perhaps inconvenient; but people like you, who are sculptors, are not accustomed to luxury, I dare say, and will be prepared to make shift.”Lucius answered that, if the cabin was suitable for his wife and his father, he and the little slave would do the best they could on the half-deck or in the hold; and hebeckoned to his family to come on board and paid the passage-money.For Caleb had advanced him a goodly sum on the value of the quadrireme, for the immediate needs of the voyage; and Caleb himself had set out, with a great following, for his dear Saba, first because he wanted to forget his love-sickness in the pleasures of Arabia Felix and then to make a start by selling many of Lucius’ slaves and jewels, his ornaments and furniture at Mariaba, the capital, because it was safer to get this done as quickly as possible. The sale of the great ship herself would be difficult enough.Uncle Catullus remained on board of her. He did not wish to be a burden on his poor nephew Lucius; he had contrived to hoard a modest capital with one gold piece after another that had accidentally slipped through Lucius’ fingers; and he was to sail to Alexandria in the ship, after she had been sold, and there, in the city of the finest cooking, to spend his old age in a small apartment in the Hermes House. And so he had taken a tearful leave of Lucius, Thrasyllus and Cora and had said to her:“Dear Cora, just as you were going to call me uncle, we part and perhaps for ever.Ah, Egypt is the death of me! Egypt will irrevocably be the death of me! For I can never go back to Rome, poor old exile that I am, because Tiberius—may he die a thousand deaths!—would rob me of my few pence even as he has robbed Lucius of his treasures....”The merchant trireme glided away over a smooth sea; and the travellers on the deck waved farewell to Uncle Catullus, who stood on the prow and waved back. It was a leave-taking for good. And the master asked, inquisitively:“Is that lord, who stands waving his hand to you, the owner of that splendid vessel?”“Yes, master,” Lucius lied, “and he’s my uncle. And one day I shall be his heir.”“Then you will do well to hold him in honour, sir,” said the master, growing very respectful. “Whew! That’s a prospect not to be sneezed at! What a noble ship! What a magnificent quadrireme! But tell me, master,” he continued, more and more inquisitively, “in that case why don’t youstaywith your uncle?”“Because it’s not a good thing, master, for poor relations to be always hanging round the rich. For then you only annoy them and they end by cutting you off with a shilling. And that is why, master,” said Lucius, pressing Cora, by his side, to him “after seeing and admiring Egypt at my rich uncle’s expense, I am now paying a visit to Babylon with my father, my wife and my little slave. From there we shall go through Assyria and Asia Minor to the island of Cos, where my wife was born and where I want to settle down as a sculptor.”The master thought this very natural; and, as the wind was now blowing a stiff breeze, with the first cold, autumnal gusts, Lucius, happy, gay and healthy, led Cora into her cabin, while Tarrar squatted outside, like a faithful, clever little monkey, and Thrasyllus, within, carefully rolled up the maps, books and itineraries which he had consulted during their tour.

Near the pillars of Sesostris, near the little diversorium, there lay moored, beside the quadrireme, a merchant trireme, which was sailing past Ophir to the Persian Gulf and which was to go up the Euphrates to Babylon. And Lucius asked to speak to the master and said:

“Master, can I have room in your ship for myself, my father, my young wife and my little black slave? I am a sculptor; and I am on my way to Babylon.”

And he pointed to Thrasyllus, Cora and Tarrar, who approached, each carrying a small bundle of luggage.

“Certainly,” said the master. “My one cabin is still unoccupied. It is small and perhaps inconvenient; but people like you, who are sculptors, are not accustomed to luxury, I dare say, and will be prepared to make shift.”

Lucius answered that, if the cabin was suitable for his wife and his father, he and the little slave would do the best they could on the half-deck or in the hold; and hebeckoned to his family to come on board and paid the passage-money.

For Caleb had advanced him a goodly sum on the value of the quadrireme, for the immediate needs of the voyage; and Caleb himself had set out, with a great following, for his dear Saba, first because he wanted to forget his love-sickness in the pleasures of Arabia Felix and then to make a start by selling many of Lucius’ slaves and jewels, his ornaments and furniture at Mariaba, the capital, because it was safer to get this done as quickly as possible. The sale of the great ship herself would be difficult enough.

Uncle Catullus remained on board of her. He did not wish to be a burden on his poor nephew Lucius; he had contrived to hoard a modest capital with one gold piece after another that had accidentally slipped through Lucius’ fingers; and he was to sail to Alexandria in the ship, after she had been sold, and there, in the city of the finest cooking, to spend his old age in a small apartment in the Hermes House. And so he had taken a tearful leave of Lucius, Thrasyllus and Cora and had said to her:

“Dear Cora, just as you were going to call me uncle, we part and perhaps for ever.Ah, Egypt is the death of me! Egypt will irrevocably be the death of me! For I can never go back to Rome, poor old exile that I am, because Tiberius—may he die a thousand deaths!—would rob me of my few pence even as he has robbed Lucius of his treasures....”

The merchant trireme glided away over a smooth sea; and the travellers on the deck waved farewell to Uncle Catullus, who stood on the prow and waved back. It was a leave-taking for good. And the master asked, inquisitively:

“Is that lord, who stands waving his hand to you, the owner of that splendid vessel?”

“Yes, master,” Lucius lied, “and he’s my uncle. And one day I shall be his heir.”

“Then you will do well to hold him in honour, sir,” said the master, growing very respectful. “Whew! That’s a prospect not to be sneezed at! What a noble ship! What a magnificent quadrireme! But tell me, master,” he continued, more and more inquisitively, “in that case why don’t youstaywith your uncle?”

“Because it’s not a good thing, master, for poor relations to be always hanging round the rich. For then you only annoy them and they end by cutting you off with a shilling. And that is why, master,” said Lucius, pressing Cora, by his side, to him “after seeing and admiring Egypt at my rich uncle’s expense, I am now paying a visit to Babylon with my father, my wife and my little slave. From there we shall go through Assyria and Asia Minor to the island of Cos, where my wife was born and where I want to settle down as a sculptor.”

The master thought this very natural; and, as the wind was now blowing a stiff breeze, with the first cold, autumnal gusts, Lucius, happy, gay and healthy, led Cora into her cabin, while Tarrar squatted outside, like a faithful, clever little monkey, and Thrasyllus, within, carefully rolled up the maps, books and itineraries which he had consulted during their tour.

Postscript.Caleb of Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate, to the ever noble Lord Publius Lucius Sabinus, sculptor, at Cos.“Written at Alexandria, at the second hour of the fourteenth day of the month of Pacothi, in the ninth year of the benevolent reign of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus.“My ever noble Lord, greeting!“It is a pleasure to me, Caleb of Mariaba, to inform you by this letter, entrusted to Alexandros of Alexandria, master of the merchant triremeBerenice, that by chance and great good fortune I have succeeded in disposing of the valuable quadrireme, the pleasure-shipAphrodite, once your property, noble lord, and in the presence of witnesses, free men, transferred to me at Cape Dire,by the Pillars of Sesostris1... selling her at Arsinoe, previous to the passage through the Nechao Canal (which would probably have been liable to legal objections), at the very profitable price (as, considering all the circumstances, it appears to me, your most obedient, humble servant, friend, guide and companion in the chase) of (after deducting my commission and all my expenses) 900,000 (say, nine hundred thousand) sesterces, a sum reckoned according to the Roman value, item that noble quadriremeAphroditeand three hundred rowers (slaves), item all the necessary and most complete equipment, item costly furniture, carpets, plate and treasures of art, which would probably have produced large sums had it been possible to sell them separately, without danger of seizure in the name of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus, but the separate sale of which would, in the circumstances aforesaid, have entailed innumerable drawbacks;“Whereas I, Caleb of Mariaba, acting and appearing on my own behalf, as actual owner of the noble quadriremeAphrodite, have been able to sell this magnificent pleasure-ship to the noble Lord Baabab, a Persian satrap, residing at Susa;“Wishing, my noble Lord Lucius, companion of the chase and friend, to act to your ever noble advantage, I propose, in order to reduce to a minimum all risks of shipwreck and piracy and other fatal accidents (such as a jealous fate keeps ever hanging over the heads of us poor mortals), to remit to you at frequent intervals, by the intermediary of a master of merchant-vessels, one trusted by all and personally known to myself and sailing to and fro between Alexandria and the Archipelago, a small sum in gold coin or bar, with account and settlement, so that you, my noble lord, may at the earliest moment possess your whole capital in your own hands.“And I also send you, in memory of your most beautiful ship, a few pieces of furniture and valuables (withheld and smuggled away), including two bronze bedsteads, a citron-wood table, a Babylonian carpet, some Ethiopian ostrich-feather coverings, the silver statue of Aphrodite, patroness of your ship, and a few minor trifles of taste and convenience.“I take advantage of the opportunity, my noble lord, dear friend and stout companionof the chase, to tell you that at Mariaba, during a temporary stay in my beloved country, Sabæa, I bought myself a most beautiful slave, a Greek like Cora and excelling in many gifts, which slave, in order to bind her with greater certainty to my affection, I set free at Mariaba, leaving her, however, as my wife in my house in that city, where I hope one day, after achieving my fortune, to enjoy a life of bliss, fearing lest my brother Ghizla might allow his rights on her to prevail (according to the manners of our country) and hoping to visit her each time that my conduct of noble lords shall bring me to the pillars of Sesostris, from which my beloved country is easily reached.“Wishing you, my noble lord and friend and companion of the chase, the blessing of the gods upon your house, upon your new work and your household, upon your wife and your servants, the wise Thrasyllus and the faithful Tarrar, together with an always possible change of fortune, I bow low before you, in all humility and friendship, with one hand on my heart and one hand on my lips.“Your ever most obedient, humble servantand guide and friend and companion of the chase,“Calebof Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate.”The End1Here follow the hour, day and month.

Postscript.

Caleb of Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate, to the ever noble Lord Publius Lucius Sabinus, sculptor, at Cos.“Written at Alexandria, at the second hour of the fourteenth day of the month of Pacothi, in the ninth year of the benevolent reign of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus.“My ever noble Lord, greeting!“It is a pleasure to me, Caleb of Mariaba, to inform you by this letter, entrusted to Alexandros of Alexandria, master of the merchant triremeBerenice, that by chance and great good fortune I have succeeded in disposing of the valuable quadrireme, the pleasure-shipAphrodite, once your property, noble lord, and in the presence of witnesses, free men, transferred to me at Cape Dire,by the Pillars of Sesostris1... selling her at Arsinoe, previous to the passage through the Nechao Canal (which would probably have been liable to legal objections), at the very profitable price (as, considering all the circumstances, it appears to me, your most obedient, humble servant, friend, guide and companion in the chase) of (after deducting my commission and all my expenses) 900,000 (say, nine hundred thousand) sesterces, a sum reckoned according to the Roman value, item that noble quadriremeAphroditeand three hundred rowers (slaves), item all the necessary and most complete equipment, item costly furniture, carpets, plate and treasures of art, which would probably have produced large sums had it been possible to sell them separately, without danger of seizure in the name of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus, but the separate sale of which would, in the circumstances aforesaid, have entailed innumerable drawbacks;“Whereas I, Caleb of Mariaba, acting and appearing on my own behalf, as actual owner of the noble quadriremeAphrodite, have been able to sell this magnificent pleasure-ship to the noble Lord Baabab, a Persian satrap, residing at Susa;“Wishing, my noble Lord Lucius, companion of the chase and friend, to act to your ever noble advantage, I propose, in order to reduce to a minimum all risks of shipwreck and piracy and other fatal accidents (such as a jealous fate keeps ever hanging over the heads of us poor mortals), to remit to you at frequent intervals, by the intermediary of a master of merchant-vessels, one trusted by all and personally known to myself and sailing to and fro between Alexandria and the Archipelago, a small sum in gold coin or bar, with account and settlement, so that you, my noble lord, may at the earliest moment possess your whole capital in your own hands.“And I also send you, in memory of your most beautiful ship, a few pieces of furniture and valuables (withheld and smuggled away), including two bronze bedsteads, a citron-wood table, a Babylonian carpet, some Ethiopian ostrich-feather coverings, the silver statue of Aphrodite, patroness of your ship, and a few minor trifles of taste and convenience.“I take advantage of the opportunity, my noble lord, dear friend and stout companionof the chase, to tell you that at Mariaba, during a temporary stay in my beloved country, Sabæa, I bought myself a most beautiful slave, a Greek like Cora and excelling in many gifts, which slave, in order to bind her with greater certainty to my affection, I set free at Mariaba, leaving her, however, as my wife in my house in that city, where I hope one day, after achieving my fortune, to enjoy a life of bliss, fearing lest my brother Ghizla might allow his rights on her to prevail (according to the manners of our country) and hoping to visit her each time that my conduct of noble lords shall bring me to the pillars of Sesostris, from which my beloved country is easily reached.“Wishing you, my noble lord and friend and companion of the chase, the blessing of the gods upon your house, upon your new work and your household, upon your wife and your servants, the wise Thrasyllus and the faithful Tarrar, together with an always possible change of fortune, I bow low before you, in all humility and friendship, with one hand on my heart and one hand on my lips.“Your ever most obedient, humble servantand guide and friend and companion of the chase,“Calebof Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate.”The End

Caleb of Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate, to the ever noble Lord Publius Lucius Sabinus, sculptor, at Cos.

“Written at Alexandria, at the second hour of the fourteenth day of the month of Pacothi, in the ninth year of the benevolent reign of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus.

“My ever noble Lord, greeting!

“It is a pleasure to me, Caleb of Mariaba, to inform you by this letter, entrusted to Alexandros of Alexandria, master of the merchant triremeBerenice, that by chance and great good fortune I have succeeded in disposing of the valuable quadrireme, the pleasure-shipAphrodite, once your property, noble lord, and in the presence of witnesses, free men, transferred to me at Cape Dire,by the Pillars of Sesostris1... selling her at Arsinoe, previous to the passage through the Nechao Canal (which would probably have been liable to legal objections), at the very profitable price (as, considering all the circumstances, it appears to me, your most obedient, humble servant, friend, guide and companion in the chase) of (after deducting my commission and all my expenses) 900,000 (say, nine hundred thousand) sesterces, a sum reckoned according to the Roman value, item that noble quadriremeAphroditeand three hundred rowers (slaves), item all the necessary and most complete equipment, item costly furniture, carpets, plate and treasures of art, which would probably have produced large sums had it been possible to sell them separately, without danger of seizure in the name of our gracious Emperor Tiberius Augustus, but the separate sale of which would, in the circumstances aforesaid, have entailed innumerable drawbacks;

“Whereas I, Caleb of Mariaba, acting and appearing on my own behalf, as actual owner of the noble quadriremeAphrodite, have been able to sell this magnificent pleasure-ship to the noble Lord Baabab, a Persian satrap, residing at Susa;

“Wishing, my noble Lord Lucius, companion of the chase and friend, to act to your ever noble advantage, I propose, in order to reduce to a minimum all risks of shipwreck and piracy and other fatal accidents (such as a jealous fate keeps ever hanging over the heads of us poor mortals), to remit to you at frequent intervals, by the intermediary of a master of merchant-vessels, one trusted by all and personally known to myself and sailing to and fro between Alexandria and the Archipelago, a small sum in gold coin or bar, with account and settlement, so that you, my noble lord, may at the earliest moment possess your whole capital in your own hands.

“And I also send you, in memory of your most beautiful ship, a few pieces of furniture and valuables (withheld and smuggled away), including two bronze bedsteads, a citron-wood table, a Babylonian carpet, some Ethiopian ostrich-feather coverings, the silver statue of Aphrodite, patroness of your ship, and a few minor trifles of taste and convenience.

“I take advantage of the opportunity, my noble lord, dear friend and stout companionof the chase, to tell you that at Mariaba, during a temporary stay in my beloved country, Sabæa, I bought myself a most beautiful slave, a Greek like Cora and excelling in many gifts, which slave, in order to bind her with greater certainty to my affection, I set free at Mariaba, leaving her, however, as my wife in my house in that city, where I hope one day, after achieving my fortune, to enjoy a life of bliss, fearing lest my brother Ghizla might allow his rights on her to prevail (according to the manners of our country) and hoping to visit her each time that my conduct of noble lords shall bring me to the pillars of Sesostris, from which my beloved country is easily reached.

“Wishing you, my noble lord and friend and companion of the chase, the blessing of the gods upon your house, upon your new work and your household, upon your wife and your servants, the wise Thrasyllus and the faithful Tarrar, together with an always possible change of fortune, I bow low before you, in all humility and friendship, with one hand on my heart and one hand on my lips.

“Your ever most obedient, humble servantand guide and friend and companion of the chase,

“Calebof Mariaba (Saba), joint proprietor of the Great Diversorium, the Hermes House, at Alexandria, near the Canopian Gate.”

The End

1Here follow the hour, day and month.

1Here follow the hour, day and month.

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