Part 4

The king also put upon Sulamith’s neck carcanets of great price, of pearls that had been dived for in the Persian Sea by his subjects; and the pearls put on a living lustre and a soft colour from the warmth of her body. And corals became redder upon her swarthy breast; and turquoise came to life upon her fingers; and those baubles of yellow amber which were brought from far northern seas, in gift to the king, by the doughty ship-masters of Hiram, King of Tyre, emitted crackling sparks in her hands.

With marigolds and lilies did Sulamith deck her couch, preparing it for the night; and, reposing upon her breast, the king would say in the joyousness of his heart:

“Thou are like to the king’s decked, masted boat in the Land of Ophir, O my beloved; a light, golden boat that floats, swaying, upon the sacred river, among white fragrant blossoms.”

* * * * *

Thus did his first--and last--love come to Solomon, the greatest of kings and wisest of sages.

Many ages have passed since then. There have been kingdoms and kings, and of them no trace has been left, as of a wind that has sped over a desert. There have been prolonged, merciless wars, after which the names of the commanders shone through the ages, like ensanguined stars; but time has effaced even the very memory of them.

But the love of the lowly maiden of the vineyard and the great king shall never pass away nor be forgotten,--for love is strong as death; for every woman who loves is a queen; for love is beautiful.

IX.

Seven days had sped since Solomon,--poet, sage, and king,--had brought into his palace the lowly maiden he had met in the vineyard at dawn. For seven days did the king take joyance in her love, nor could be sated therewith. And a great joy irradiated his countenance, like to the golden light of the sun.

It was the time of light, warm, moonlit nights,--sweet nights of love.... Upon a couch of tiger fells lay the naked Sulamith; and the king, sitting upon the floor at her feet, filled his emerald goblet with the aureate wine of Mauretus, and drank to the health of his beloved, rejoicing with all his heart, and narrated to her the sage, strange legends of eld. And Sulamith’s hand rested upon his head, stroking his wavy black hair.

“Tell me, my king,” Sulamith had once asked, “is it not wonderful that I fell in love with thee so instantly? I now call all things to mind, and meseems I began belonging to thee from the very first moment, when I had not yet had time to behold thee, but had merely heard thy voice. My heart began to flutter and did open to meet thee, as a flower opens to the south wind on a night in summer. How hast thou taken me so, my beloved?”

And the king, quietly bending his head toward the soft knees of Sulamith, smiled tenderly and answered:

“Thousands of women before thee, O my comely one, have put this question to their beloveds, and hundreds of ages after thee will they be asking their beloveds about this. There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid. This is not my wisdom, Sulamith,--these are the words of Agur, son of Jakeh, heard from him by his disciples. But let us honour the wisdom of others also.”

“Yea,” said Sulamith pensively, “mayhap it is even true that man shall never comprehend this. To-day, during the banquet, I wore a sweet-smelling cluster of stacte upon my breast. But thou didst leave the table, and my flowers ceased to give out their smell. Meseems, thou must be beloved, O king, of women, and men, and beasts, and even of flowers. I oft ponder, yet comprehend not: how can one love any other save thee?”

“And any save thee, save thee, Sulamith! Every hour do I render thanks to God for that He has set thee in my path.”

“I remember, I was sitting upon a stone of the wall, and thou didst put thy hand on mine. Fire ran through my veins; my head was dizzied. I said within me: Behold, there is my lord, my king, my beloved!”

“I remember, Sulamith, how thou didst turn around to my call. Under the thin raiment I saw thy body, thy beautiful body, that I love as I love God. I love it,--covered with its golden down, as though the sun had left its kiss upon it. Thou art graceful, like to a filly in the Pharaoh’s chariot; thou art fair like the chariot of Ammi-nadib. Thy eyes are as two doves, sitting by the rivers of waters.”

“O, beloved, thy words stir me. Thy hand sears me sweetly. O, my king, thy legs are as pillars of marble. Thy belly is like an heap of wheat, set about with lilies.”

Surrounded, irradiated, by the silent light of the moon, they forgot time and place; and thus hours would pass, and they with wonder beheld the rosy dawn peeping through the latticed windows of the chamber.

Sulamith also said once:

“Thou hast known, my beloved, wives and virgins without number, and they were all the fairest women on earth. I become ashamed whenever I consider myself,--a simple, unschooled girl,--and my poor body, scorched of the sun.”

But, touching her lips with his, the king would say, with infinite love and gratefulness:

“Thou art a queen, Sulamith! Thou wast born a true queen. Thou art brave and generous in love. Seven hundred wives have I, and three hundred concubines, and virgins without number have I known; but thou, my timid one, art my only one,--thou fairest among women. I have found thee like as a diver in the Gulf of Persia, that filleth a great number of baskets with barren shells and pearls of little price, ere he get from the bed of the sea a pearl worthy a king’s crown. My child, a man may love thousands of times, yet he loveth but once. People without number think they love, yet only to two of them doth God send love. And when thou didst yield thyself up to me among the cypresses, under the rafters of cedars, upon the bed of green, I did with all my soul render thanks to God, so gracious to me.”

Sulamith also asked once:

“I know that they all loved thee, for not to love thee is impossible. The Queen of Sheba did come to thee from her domain. They say, that she was the wisest and fairest of all women that had ever been on earth. As in a dream, I recall her caravans. I know not why, but since my earliest childhood I have been drawn to the chariots of the great. I was then perhaps seven, perhaps eight. I remember the camels in golden harness, covered with caparisons of purple, laden with heavy burthens; I remember the mules with the little bells of gold between their ears; I remember the droll monkeys in silvern cages; and the wondrous peacocks. There was a multitude of servants in garments of white and blue, marching; they led tame tigers and panthers upon ribbands of red. I was but eight then.”

“O child, thou wert but eight then,” said Solomon with sadness.

“Didst thou love her more than me, Solomon? Wilt tell me something of her?”

And the king told her all pertaining to this amazing woman. Having heard much of the wisdom and beauty of the King of Israel, she had come to him from her domain with rich gifts, desiring to prove his wisdom and subdue his heart. This was a magnificent woman of forty, who was already beginning to fade. But through secret, magic means she contrived to make her body, that was growing flabby, seem graceful and supple, like a girl’s, while her face bore an impress of an awesome, inhuman beauty. But her wisdom was ordinary wisdom, and the petty wisdom of a woman to boot.

Desiring to test the king with riddles, she at first sent to him fifty youths of tenderest age, and fifty maidens. They were all so cunningly dressed that the keenest eye could not have discerned their sex. “I shall call thee wise, O King,” said Balkis, “if thou shalt tell me which of them is woman, and which man.”

But the king burst out laughing, and ordered that every he and she sent him be brought a separate bason of silver, and a separate ewer of silver, for laving. And whereas the boys bravely splashed in the water and cast it in handfuls at their faces, drying their skin vigorously, the girls acted as women always do at their ablutions. They lathered each hand gently and solicitously, bringing it closely to their eyes.

In so easy a manner did the king solve the first riddle of Balkis-Mâkkedah.

Next she sent Solomon a large diamond, the size of a hazel nut. This stone had a thin, exceedingly tortuous flaw, that perforated its entire body with a narrow, intricate path. The task was to put a silken thread through the jewel. And the wise king let into the opening a silk worm, which, having passed through, left the finest of silken webs in its wake.

Also, the beauteous Balkis sent King Solomon a precious goblet of carved sardonyx, of magnificent workmanship. “This goblet shall be thine,” she had commanded that the king be told, “if thou fillest it with moisture taken neither from earth nor heaven.” And Solomon, having filled the goblet with froth falling from the body of a fatigued steed, ordered it to be carried to the queen.

Many such hard questions did the queen put to Solomon, but could not belittle his wisdom; nor with all her secret charms of love’s passion in the night might she contrive to retain his love. And when she had finally palled upon the king, he had cruelly, hurtfully made mock of her.

Everybody knew that the Savvian queen never showed her lower extremities to anyone, and for that reason wore a garment reaching to the ground. Even in the hours of love caresses did she keep her legs closely covered with raiment. Many strange and droll legends had sprung up on this account.

Some averred, that the queen had legs like a goat, grown over with wool; others swore, that instead of human feet she had webbed feet, like a goose. And they even related how the mother of Balkis had once, after bathing, sat down upon sand where just before a certain god, temporarily metamorphosed into a gander, had left his seed, and that through this she had borne the beauteous Queen of Sheba.

And so Solomon one day commanded to be built, in one of his chambers, a transparent floor of crystal, with an empty space beneath it, which was filled with water and stocked with live fish. All this was done with such extraordinary art that one not forewarned could never possibly notice the glass, and would take an oath that a pool of clear, fresh water lay before him.

And when all was in readiness, Solomon invited his regal guest to an interview. Surrounded by all the pomp of her retinue, she paced through the chambers of the House at Lebanon, and came up to the treacherous pool. At the other end of it sat the king, resplendent with gold and precious stones, and with a welcoming look in his dark eyes. The door opened before the queen, and she took a step forward,--but cried out and....

Sulamith claps her palms and laughs, and her laughter is joyous and child-like.

“She stoops and lifts up her raiment?” asks Sulamith.

“Yea, my beloved, she acted as any among women would have acted. She raised up the hem of her garment, and although this lasted for but a moment, not only I but all my court saw that the beauteous Savvian Queen, Balkis-Mâkkedah, had ordinary human legs, but crooked and grown over with coarse hair. On the very next day she set off, without bidding me farewell, and departed with her magnificent caravan. I had not meant to offend her. I sent after her a trustworthy runner, whom I ordered to give to the queen a bundle of a rare mountain herb,--the best means for the extirpation of hair upon the body. But she returned to me the head of my emissary in a bag of costly purple.”

Solomon also told his beloved many things out of his life, which none other among men and women knew, and which Sulamith carried with her into the grave. He told her of the long and weary years of his wanderings, when, fleeing from the wrath of his brethren, he was forced to hide under an assumed name in foreign lands, enduring fearful poverty and privations. He told her how, in a far-off, unknown country, while he was standing in the market place, in expectation of being hired to work somewhere, the king’s cook had approached him and said:

“Stranger, help me carry this hamper of fish into the palace.”

Through his wit, adroitness, and skilled demeanor, Solomon so pleased the officers of the court, that in a short while he had made himself at home in the palace, and when the head cook died he had taken his place. Further, Solomon told of how the king’s only daughter,--a beautiful, ardent maiden,--had fallen in love with the new cook and had confessed her love to him; how they fled from the palace one night, and had been re-taken and brought back; how Solomon had been condemned to die; and how, by a miracle, he succeeded in escaping from the dungeon.

Avidly did Sulamith listen to him, and, when he grew silent, amidst the stillness of the night their lips joined, their arms entwined each other, and breast touched breast. And when morning drew near, and Sulamith’s body seemed a foamy pink, and the fatigue of love encircled her splendid eyes with blue shadows, she would say with a tender smile:

“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick with love.”

X.

In the temple of Isis, upon Mount Beth-El-Khav, the first part of the great mystery, to which the faithful of the lesser initiation were admitted, was just over. The priest on duty,--an ancient elder in white vestment, with shaven head, and neither moustache nor beard,--had turned from the elevation of the altar toward the people, and pronounced in a quiet, tired voice:

“Dwell in peace, my sons and daughters. Wax perfect through deeds. Extoll the name of the goddess. And may her blessings be over ye for ever and aye.”

He raised his hands on high over the people, in benediction. And immediately all the initiates into the lesser rank of the mysteries prostrated themselves on the floor, and then, arising, softly and in silence made their way to the exit.

To-day was the seventh day of the month Phamenoth, sacred to the mysteries of Osiris and Isis. Since evening the solemn procession had thrice made the circuit of the temple with lamps, palm-leaves, and amphoræ; with the occult symbols of the gods and the sacred images of the Phallus. In the midst of the procession, upon the shoulders of the priests and the minor prophets, was reared the closed _naos_ of costly wood, ornamented with pearl, ivory, and gold. Therein dwelt the goddess herself,--She, The Invisible, The Bestower of Fecundity, The Mysterious; Mother, Sister, and Wife of gods.

The evil Seth had enticed his brother, the divine Osiris, to a feast; through craftiness he made him to lie down in a magnificent sarcophagus, and, having clapped down the lid over him, cast the sarcophagus with the body of the great god into the Nile. Isis, who had just given birth to Horus, with yearning and tears searches all the world over for the body of her spouse, and for long can not find it. Finally, slaves inform her that the body had been borne out to sea by the waves, and that it had been cast up at Byblos, where an enormous tree had sprung up about it, enclosing within its trunk the body of the god and his floating dwelling. The king of that domain had commanded a mighty column to be made out of the enormous tree, not knowing that within it reposed the god Osiris himself, the great bestower of life. Isis goes to Byblos; she arrives there fatigued with sultriness, thirst, and the toilsome, stony road. She liberates the sarcophagus out of the midst of the tree, carries it with her, and buries it in the earth near the city wall. But Seth again secretly steals away the body of Osiris, cuts it up into fourteen parts, and strews them over all the towns and settlements of Upper and Lower Ægpyt.

And again with great grief and lamentations Isis set out in search of the sacred members of her spouse and brother. Her sister, the goddess Nephthys, and the mighty Thoth, and the son of the goddess, the radiant Horus,--Horus of the Horizon,--all join their plaints to her weeping.

Such was the hidden meaning of the present procession in the first half of the sacred service. Now, upon the departure of the common believers, and after a short rest, the second part of the great mystery was about to be consummated. In the temple were left only those initiated into the higher degrees,--mystagogues, epopts, prophets and sacrificators.

Boys in white vestments bore about, upon salvers of silver, flesh, bread, dried fruits, and sweet wine of Pelusium. Others poured hippocras out of narrow-necked Tyrian vessels,--a drink given in those days to condemned criminals before execution, to arouse their manhood, but which also possessed the great virtue of generating and sustaining in men the fire of a sacred madness.

At a sign from the priest on duty the boys withdrew. A priest who was also the keeper of the gates locked all doors. Then he attentively made the rounds of all those who remained, scrutinizing their faces and testing them with secret words that constituted the pass-orders for this night. Two other priests drew a silvern thurible upon wheels down the length of the temple and around each of its columns. The temple filled with the blue, thick, heady, aromatic fumes of incense, and through the layers of smoke grew barely visible the vari-coloured flames of the lamp,--lamps made of translucent stones, lamps set in carved gold and suspended from the ceiling upon long chains of silver. In the times of eld this temple of Osiris and Isis was known for its small extent and its poverty, and was hollowed out like a cavern in the heart of the mountain. A narrow subterranean corridor led to it from without. But in the days of the reign of Solomon, who had taken under his protection all religions save those which permitted the offering of children in sacrifice, and thanks to the zeal of Queen Astis, an Ægyptian born, the temple had expanded in depth and height, and had become adorned with rich offerings.

The former altar still remained inviolate in its primordial, austere simplicity, together with a great number of small chambers surrounding it and serving for the keeping of treasures, sacrificial objects, and priestly appurtenances, as well as for special secret purposes during the most occult mystic orgies.

But then, the outer court was truly magnificent, with its pylons in honour of the goddess Hathor, and with a four-sided colonnade of four and twenty columns. The inner, subterranean, hypostylic hall for worshippers was built still more magnificently. Its mosaic floor was all adorned with cunningly wrought images of fishes, beasts, amphibians and reptiles; while the ceiling was overlaid with blue lazure, and upon it shone a sun of gold, glowed a moon of silver, innumerable stars twinkled, and birds soared upon outspread wings. The floor was the earth, the ceiling the sky, and they were joined by round and many-sided columns, like mighty tree trunks; and since all the columns were surmounted by capitals in the form of the tender flowers of lotus or the slender cylinders of the papyrus, the ceiling they supported did in reality seem as light and æthereal as the sky.

The walls to the height of a man were faced with plates of red granite, brought at the desire of Queen Astis out of Thebes, where the local master workers could impart to the granite a smoothness like that of a mirror, together with an amazing polish. Higher, to the very ceiling, the walls, as well as the columns, were gay with graven and limned images with the symbols of the gods of both Ægypts. Here was Sebekh, honoured in Fayum in the form of a crocodile; and Thoth, the god of the moon, depicted as an ibis in the city of Khmunu; and the sun-god Horus, to whom a small idol-temple was consecrated in Edfu; and Bast of Bubastis, in the form of a cat; Shu, the god of the air, as a lion; Ptah,--an Apis; Hathor, the goddess of mirth,--a heifer; Anubis, the god of embalming, with the head of a jackal; and Menthu out of Hermon; and the Coptic Minu; and Neith of Sais, the goddess of the sky; and, finally, in the form of a ram,--the dread god whose name was never uttered, and who was called Khenti-Amentiu, which signifieth: The Dweller in the West.

The half-dark altar reared above the entire temple, and the gold upon the walls of the sanctuary that hid the images of Isis gleamed within its depths. Three gates,--a large one in the middle, and two small ones flanking it,--opened into the sanctuary. Before the middle one stood a small sacrificial altar with a sacred stone knife of Æthiopian obsidian. Steps led up to the altar, and upon them were disposed young priests and priestesses with tympani and sistrums, with flutes and tabours.

Queen Astis was reclining within a little, secret chamber. A small quadrangular opening, artfully concealed by a large curtain, led directly to the altar, and permitted one to follow all the details of the sacred service without betraying one’s presence. A light, closely-fitting dress of linen gauze, interwoven with silver, tightly enveloped the body of the queen, leaving the arms bare up to the shoulders, and the legs half-way to the calf. Her skin gleamed pinkly through the diaphanous material, and one could see the pure lines and elevations of her graceful body, which, despite the queen’s age of thirty, still had lost none of its litheness, beauty and freshness. Her hair, stained a blue colour, was spread loosely over her shoulders and back, and was adorned with innumerable little aromatic pomanders. Her face was much rouged and whitened; while her eyes, finely outlined by kohl, seemed enormous and glowed in the darkness, like those of some powerful beasts of the feline species. A sacred uræus of gold hung down from her neck, separating the half-bared breasts.

Ever since Solomon had cooled toward Queen Astis, tired of her unbridled sensuality, she, with all the ardour of southern love-passion, and with all the jealousy of a woman scorned, had given herself up to those secret orgies of perverted lust that constituted the highest cult of the castrates’ service of Isis. She always showed herself surrounded by priests-castrates, and, even now, as one of them fanned her head with measured strokes of a fan made of peacock feathers, others were seated upon the floor drinking in the beauty of the queen with eyes of insane bliss. Their nostrils were dilating and quivering from the scent of her body wafted to them, and they sought with trembling fingers to touch unperceived the hem of her light raiment, barely stirring in the breeze. Their excessive, never satiated sensuousness spurred on their imagination to its utmost limits. Their inventiveness in the pleasures of Kybele and Ashera surpassed all human possibilities. And being jealous of the queen toward one another, toward all men, women, and children--being jealous of her own self--they adored her even more than Isis, and, loving her, hated her as an inexhaustible, fiery fountain-head of delectable and cruel sufferings.