Part 6
"And if, even as that Saul who slew the Prophets, the Lord hath chosen such a man to be His servant, shall not the Judge of all the world do righteously? And if this man, blinded by pride and wrath, reject the offered grace--turn from the Light, and quit the threshold ere the Gate be opened--shall He Who planted in the human breast the soul--that is a spark of His Divinity--and dowered Man with Free Will that Man might choose Him!--shall He be blamed because His creature hurls back the gift into the Giver's Face?"
"I have erred!" said the Abbot, striking his breast--"O Lord, do Thou forgive thy silly servant!"
And all through the rest of that burning day, Pachomius knelt upon the wall of the Monastery of Tabenna, purging himself of sin by penance, and praying for Hazaël the Jew.
IX
At the spring of the oasis at the summit of the pass leading to the Outer Mountain, bronze-coloured doves, several oryx, and a herd of wild asses were drinking, greyish-red creatures these, white bellied, and marked by a broad black stripe down the back. The birds took wing, the beasts scattered over the plain at the approach of the camel and its two riders, who halted to water the animal and fill the goatskins, and take food and rest.
Bands of painted, naked Blemmyes, the fierce Ethiopian nomads of the south and eastern desert had shown themselves occasionally, but made no attempt to attack the travellers, whom they perhaps judged to be too poor to plunder, or too strong, fierce and well-armed to be despoiled without exacting tribute of life in return.
Before sunrise Hazaël and the Saracen camel-driver, who had agreed to guide him,--struck northwards through a rocky and difficult defile. This was the opening of the road that led to the inner fastnesses of Attaka, that stupendous mountain of pale red granite, streaked with limestone, and sometimes veined with porphyry, from whose summit, it was said, one could view the distant Mediterranean upon one hand; and upon the other look over to the Sinai ranges, across the Gulf of Heroöpolis, that widens into the Red Sea.
The region in which Hazaël now found himself was savage, bare and solitary. At the top of the defile the camel halted and knelt. The Jew dismounted and looked back. A crimson glow spread over the shining waters of the Gulf of Heroöpolis, and every object possessed two shadows; one cast by the sunrise and the other by the moon. The yellow plain of the desert, looking west, exhibited an illusory vista of cool blue waters, out of which rose little islands plumed with palm groves, reflected in the depths.
"Return," the Jew said to the guide, "and wait for me with the camel at the spring of the oasis. Yet first describe to me again, in number and device as I shall find them, the various signs by which pilgrims to the hermitage that is on Derhor, may find their way."
He listened as the guide spoke, storing these things in his strong memory. Here a column of porphyry set up; there a pile of oddly-shaped granite boulders; at the mouth of the defile an arrow scratched on a limestone rock with a lump of crystal; at the parting of ways a rude Cross fashioned of the pieces of a broken staff, and jammed between two great stones.
"Swear to me by your gods," said the Jew when the idolater had ended his recital, "that you have named these marks in the order in which they come!"
"By the Face of Truth!" swore the camel-driver, who was a wild and savage-looking object, with tangled hair smeared with rancid butter; grotesquely painted of face and body; hung about with charms and wearing a waist-cloth of gaudy colours under his mantle of camel-hair. "I have not lied! Follow these directions and you will return to find me waiting for you with the _heggin_. Yet pay me now the sum agreed, in case you lose your purse upon your way!"
Hazaël reluctantly paid down half, and set out upon his solitary journey.
The steep defile being ascended, the first sign was recognised in the shape of a rude pillar of porphyritic rock. This passed, the surface of the ground began to be more gently inclined. Heat radiated from the huge pinkish-granite boulders that almost scorched the flesh. The ground was covered with blocks of this stone, between which showed the arid yellow soil of the desert. A scrubby bush with black stems set with long white thorns, also tufts of seeding wild garlic and a spiny red-fleshed wild cucumber, bitter exceedingly, with wild fig-trees, grew between the granite rocks. Wild goats with great horns walked upon the verge of towering precipices and bounded from ledge to ledge. White eagles and huge ravens screamed or croaked from inaccessible eyries. The defile being passed, the rocks sank down. Barely a dry weed relieved the barren aridity. The yellow gravelly ground began to billow upwards, and into the troughs of these billows the sun poured down like molten brass.
Climbing over one of these extraordinary ridges, the Jew made an astonishing discovery. It was a dish or charger, circular as a Gaulish buckler, wrought with the victories of forgotten kings, and of the purest gold. The love of the Semite for this precious metal,--of which were carved the lions that adorned the throne of Solomon,--plates of which covered the Temple built by Herod,--and of which the Vine above its chief entrance was gloriously made,--caused Hazaël's sight to dim and his powerful frame to tremble. Such a mass of gold, all his by the right of discovery! ... He threw himself upon the treasure with such eagerness that his foot slipped upon a rolling pebble. He fell--and the gourd water-bottle he carried at his girdle was smashed into bits.
Moments passed before he grasped the full extent of his misfortune. With all his strength he could barely lift the massy charger, which might have contained a wild-deer or a calf roasted whole. Sweat streamed from him, and a raging thirst was aggravated by his efforts. He moistened his throat with a few drops of water left in a fragment of the bottle, covered the golden dish with sand, and marked the place with three stones. Then he rose up and strode onwards. Another defile presented itself before him,--not leading upwards but bending to the north.
To the south another opened, floored with huge granite slabs, frowned on by precipices. At its mouth on the left side was a conical mound of rounded black stones. Night rushed down before Hazaël had decided which of these forbidding roads it would be best to follow. That indicated by the mound looked the worst.... He was beginning to doubt the honesty of the camel-driver. If the hermitage beneath the summit of Derhor was to be reached, he must trust to his own good wits.
He chose the northern defile, and presently--with the rising moon--came into a wide valley walled in by sheer cliff-faces of limestone. At its eastern side rose a precipice of coal-black stone, down which appeared to flow a foaming waterfall. This appearance was caused by snow-white quartz, issuing like a solid torrent from a point high above, and flowing down into the rocky valley. There was no way out of this trap but the way by which Hazaël had come in. With his agony of thirst increased tenfold by the unreal show of water, he lifted his arms above his head and savagely cursed the deceptive flow. And as the echoes of his deep voice resounded from the precipitous walls of the valley, he turned about sharply--for a high whinnying laugh had answered from behind him--and the clatter of hoofs, light and small as an ass's or goat's, followed--galloping over the pavement of broken stone....
"Who laughed there?" the Jew cried, but no human voice answered, and the moon was veiled behind a light cloud that afforded no hope of rain. When the planet looked forth, no sign appeared of the supposed ass and his laughing rider; and Hazaël, suppressing the desire to bestow another curse upon the cheating torrent, made the two benedictions, and repeated the Shema for the first night-watch,--fortifying himself against the attacks of evil spirits within an iron wall of prayer. Then he painfully retraced his steps through the defile previously traversed,--munching the dates he carried in his wallet,--as the dried bread without saliva to moisten it could not be swallowed without pain. And as he went, he slept by snatches,--often wakened from one of these dozes by tripping amongst boulders, or jagged sharp-edged stones.
Walking still with indomitable determination, he had just repeated the prayer for the third night-watch, when he stepped into daylight across the edge of dawn. A dazzling play of colour was smitten by the sunrise from the wilderness of stone beneath and about him. Broad veins of purple and greenish-white porphyry, with red granite, and yellow and black limestone, with outcroppings of snowy quartz, streaked the towering sides of the defile: the stones and gravel beneath his great travelling boots of hippo-hide,--whose heels of elephant-nail kept him from slipping,--was composed of fragments of these. Looking about he came to the conclusion that in sleep, or during an interval of darkness, he had turned aside into another path. This led steeply up, and up,--the vari-coloured rocks closing in until a mere streak of fierce blue sky between the walls at the tops of the defile showed where egress might be obtained. To delay here was to die. Therefore Hazaël determined to go on.
Now, as he toiled upwards under the increasing torture of the sunrays, delusions born of thirst and weariness began to haunt his path. The faces of his wife Miriam, of Levi his first-born son and of his little daughter Leah,--rose up before him in the vivid hues of life. His dead master; the child Florens, or Mark as he must now be called; the monk Paule and the Abbot of Tabenna, moved with him among the scorching stones, on which the lizard rarely basked; and between which a few dry bushes lived without visible nourishment. Through a strange roaring in his ears he distinguished the voices of these phantoms. Sometimes he answered them without ceasing to walk.
He retained by this time barely the semblance of humanity. His eyes beneath the beetling brows were red as those of the captive eagle of Tabenna: and his long hair, and curling beard, uncombed; tangled with burrs; soaked with sweat, and clotted with the dust with which his ragged garments were covered, had the appearance of a wig carved in stone. Blood flowed from cuts upon his gaunt sun-blackened limbs--sustained when he had fallen. He realised that without water he could not now live long. Should there be dew that night, he might find sufficient relief by licking the stones, to endure forty-eight hours longer. Did no dew fall, he might possibly survive yet another day. What grieved him most was, that as the news of his death could not reach Alexandria for a long time after the return of Ephraim by way of the Libyan Desert with Mafa Oabu and the Saracens; his son Levi--who had already begun to study the Mishnah--would not say Kaddish for his father for many moons to come. And the thought of the anguish of his widowed Miriam would have moistened his parched eyelids, had in their dry and gritty channels one single tear remained....
Stumbling amidst boulders, striding from stone to stone, falling, dragging himself to his feet, and staggering on again, the recurrent image of Miriam tormented him more sorely. The fancy that at the top of the pass--where the rocks approached each other so nearly--her well-loved figure would appear with that square of blue sky behind it, became conviction. He bounded on, obsessed by the idea....
"Miriam! My loved one! ..."
He breathed like a beast roaring. His parched gullet and dried-up lungs would barely admit the air. He was bruised from head to foot and wounded in many places; but beyond that square of burning blue he would find--he knew it--home.... Home,--where he was welcomed as a King on each return from a journey,--the rooms festively adorned even as on the Sabbath! the table spread with fair linen, rich porcelain and costly plate,--the dishes such as he loved best; the thin sweet Mareotic wine cooled exquisitely in snow....
"Miriam.... My wife! I come!"
He heard a sweet voice singing.... He was nearing the square of burning blue framed in the porphyritic rock when a waft of perfume came to him, and a figure filled the frame.
X
A woman, but not Miriam. He stared at her blankly. He strove to speak, but his stiff tongue only clicked against his dry palate. His mouth gaped. He drank her in with long pants, veritably as though her beauty had been the luscious wine of Ephesus, chilled with Mount Hermon's snow.
She was draped in a robe of fine Egyptian byssus with crimson and purple borders, fastened about her rounded hips, and drawn over her beautiful bronze-tinted shoulders and bosom in many transparent folds. From beneath an Egyptian headdress of enamelled guinea-fowl's feathers her rich hair, plaited with gold wire strung with orient pearls and other jewels, fell down in broad bands on either side of her small face of purest oval, from which piercing glances were launched as arrows under eyebrows like ebony bows. Her wide silken trousers were red as the heart of a cut pomegranate; yet shot with green and purple in the folds. Her tiny sandals were of white leather, ornamented with golden studs.
"O Isis! Mother of the Dog Star!" ...
She veiled herself at the sight of the stranger. The rich amber and crimson tints of her cheeks and lips, glowing through the diaphanous covering, suggested ripe nectarines in a dish of frosted crystal. Her long eyes, under their jetty brows, were luminous and beryl-green. The voice that issued from her scarlet lips was as the cooing of doves in the sycamores; as the gurgling of waters from the heart of a mossy hill, as she continued: shading her face with an amber-handled fan of red flamingo-feathers, and rocking with her quickened breaths the heavy necklace of huge pearls suspending an emerald talisman between her swelling breasts....
"Pardon, my lord! but you appeared so suddenly! And O, the gods!--being a woman unprotected--and this so wild and terrible a place--"
Hazaël knew that his aspect must be terrifying. But the perfume of roses that exhaled from the fair woman mounted to his brain in waves of dizziness. Hush! Again the doves were cooing:
"I am the wife of an Egyptian noble. We live across the Bay, at Arsinoë, but pass the vintage-months in our summer palace at Aënus. And--my lord is stricken in years and yet desires posterity!--" There was a dancing gleam of mockery in the sleepy beryl eyes. "We have visited the shrine of the god at Pannias, but alas!--without remedy. So my lord commanded me, poor me!--to seek out the dwelling of this Christian hermit, offer him rich gifts, and ask him to pray for us to The Crucified.... Indeed, to be rich and without heirs is sad for the poor old man, is it not? Yet am I to blame for this?" She reared her little head upon the rounded throat, and the beryl eyes blazed angrily. "No, by Hathor! My lord Makrisi has been young and handsome; even, dear stranger--" the feathers of her fan softly touched the cheek of Hazaël,--"as thou thyself! ... Now is he a withered branch. And"--she shrugged--"would even the fields of Egypt bring forth their abundance, without the fertilising waters of the Nile? ..."
Insensibly he had approached, his long, heavy footsteps setting the loose stones of the steep pathway sliding downwards. His bloodshot eyes were at the level of her scarlet lips, between which rows of milk-white teeth were gleaming; his bearded mouth was dangerously near the wooing fragrance of her bosom. She sighed, and warm sweet fragrance assailed his expanding nostrils, and caressed his parched temples and cheeks. And the heat of the morning sun was like the downward draught of a white-hot smelting furnace. And the dazzling blue above and behind her seemed to burn in azure flame....
"O speak again! ... Do not cease!" he heard himself croaking, as though the cool, sweet, gurgling voice had power to quench the thirst with which he burned. She laughed beautifully; and said, pointing with her fan to a great reed pannier with a carrying-strap, set within the shadow of a deep cleft or cave in the face of the porphyry rock:
"See how this surly Saint has treated me, a Princess of the house of Schabak! Look upon this basket of purple figs, and black grapes bursting with honeyed ripeness! and green melons with scarlet flesh dripping with cloying golden juice.... By Phthah! the weight is as much as my black slave Zet can bear, and this man would not even open the door of the ruined temple under the shadow of the dome of Derhor, where he dwells with the Lili and the Lilith--the bat and the screech-owl--and the great white eagles, and the falcons of the rock--or answer me a word. So I wept, I was so angered, and Zet wept also,--for to carry the pannier down the mountain was abominable to him. And when we heard you coming he set it down and ran away. And for this he shall be beaten with rods until the blood runs, when we return home. Why do you look at me so strangely, O Satrap? for I see by your mien that you are governor of a province, in Assyria or Persia possibly? Am I less fair than the women of your country? Have I no beauty in your sight?"
Hazaël answered in his thirst-cracked voice, with reddened eyes devouring her:
"O Princess! Even in dreams I have never beheld a woman to compare with thee! But--but--I am wedded. A fountain springs in the courtyard of my house, and a fruitful vine shadows my threshold; and as apples of gold in a network of silver, precious unto me is the love of my wife!"
He reeled as he spoke and clouds passed before his eyes as though the steam of the blood boiling in his veins had rushed into his brain-pan. Blindly he sought to push them away. And a soft small hand closed on his huge wrist, and his arm became powerless and fell across her shoulder. He swayed like a giant palm-tree whose trunk is sawn through. And with astonishing strength the Princess supported him, saying in that voice like the gurgle of cool waters:
"Thou art famished. Men unfed ever talk of virtue. There are other things in the pannier besides figs and melons and grapes. Rolls of Egyptian flour, white as snow and light as foam-flakes; and roasted quails in peppered jelly, wrapped in fresh green leaves. And meat-balls with spices, cheese-cakes and saffron-curds, and bottles of cool Nile water and also a flask or two of yellow Theban wine. Let us go into yonder cave and eat and drink together. When thou art refreshed, we will talk, or if thou wouldst--sleep!"
And the movement of her lips in framing such words as "eat," "drink" and "together," had infinite allurement, but less than "refreshed" and "sleep." Her utterance of these bewitched and bewildered. Hazaël felt as one smothering in roses, or sinking in the embrace of perfumed arms upon a bosom smooth and cool as silk. And realising in a flash his desperate predicament:
"O Lord my GOD!" he cried aloud, "look upon my shame and see my sorrow! From the evil impulse, from the evil companion: from Satan the Destroyer and from judgment, do Thou in Thy Mercy deliver me!"
Whereupon the Princess Schabak with a burst of high, whinnying laughter, skipped backwards,--and nimbly as a mountain goat--leaped upon a ledge of rock jutting from the cliff-face high above the level of the astonished Israelite's head. At the same time the pannier in the cave fell over and burst open, disgorging a cataract of repulsive creatures; vipers with horns, chameleons with popping eyes, lizards, tarantulas, scorpions and huge brown bats,--which flying round and round in the dazzling sunshine beat about Hazaël's ears with their leathery, hooked wings and entangled themselves in his hair. Deafened, appalled, exhausted and choked with thirst, heat and stench, he fell down swooning,--fortunately for his reason!--within the shadow of the cave....
When he revived, the rocky gorge was filled with the crimson of the sunset. The blazing heat had abated somewhat, the fresh smell of water came to his nostrils, and he groaned and opened his eyes. Then he cried out in thankfulness to God, Who had sent him water in his extremity,--for at the very back of the cave a thread of wet showed on the wall above a natural basin in the rock bordered with delicate black-stemmed green ferns, that contained a draught or two. As the cool liquid flowed down his dried throat; life revived in him newly. He ate of his bread, soaking it, and also took some dates.
Then he found his staff, went up the pass, and squeezed through the narrow aperture. The path now became little more than a goat-walk upon the barren mountain's flank.
A vast prospect spread about and beneath him, upon the right hand of the desert and the Nile beyond it:--with the islands, cities, gardens, palm-groves, temples; the distant cataracts, and the ranges of sandstone and syenite beyond the towns on the Libyan bank. Looking to the east his eye embraced Mount Serbal and the terrible splendour of Sinai, the Tih Mountains and Desert of Sin. Nearer, he looked down upon the Gulf of Heroöpolis,--the town at its mouth, and the city of Clysma upon the plain of the promontory, with the Wilderness of Etnam, and the Arabian Desert beyond.... North to Syria, bordered with the blue fillet of the Mediterranean, his glance ranged; and then with a cool breath fanning his brow, and stirring in the folds of his garments, he lifted up his eyes--and beheld the immense round summit of Mount Derhor, gleaming--white as though hoary with innumerable ages, touched with the fading rose of the sunset and crowned with the evening star. A vast tract of snow-white limestone, not level, but tilted at a steep angle, traversed with innumerable waved ridges, crevices and fissures and resembling a petrified cataract, spread between the traveller and the base of the stupendous dome. An irregular building, like a Pagan tomb or temple, partly in ruins, could be seen upon the dome's eastern side.
Desolation. Not a grass-blade, not a bush, nor tuft of wormwood found nourishment enough to sustain life in all that arid region. Yet here the Athlete of Christ had lived since he quitted Tabenna; eating every third day of dried bread--of which a store was left for him at the oasis every six months--moistening the flint-hard cakes with water fetched from the spring in a heavy stone jar. When the water in the jar came to an end too soon, according to the monks of Tabenna and the Coptish boatmen, the Blessed One would eat the snow if it were winter; or gather the dew,--soaking it up with linen rags, or that porous fungus that much resembles sponge. And these he would suck, to quench the thirst that tormented him, nor would he, were this relief withheld, descend the mountain to fetch more water, until the arrival of the appointed day.
Night fell. So close together and so deep were the fissures in the limestone, that Hazaël determined not to attempt to reach the hermitage until the rising of the moon. So he waited, seated upon a boulder; a strange, wild figure, dishevelled, scarred and bleeding; with battered weapons, and robes dusty and ragged; burning with impatience to do his errand and return to the oasis whilst strength remained to him....
Suddenly the Mount from its base to its summit was girt with sheaves of towering flame of strange and marvellous colours. At the same moment a tumult broke forth of indescribable and hellish violence. Awful voices thundered opprobrium, or wakened the echoes of the precipices and chasms with shouts of hideous laughter, answered by other invisible beings from the fissures in the plain.