Hypatia by Charles Kingsley (good books to read for young adults txt) 📕

‘Never mind, my good follows! we’re only Goths; and on a visit to the prefect, too.’

‘Only Goths, my donkey-riding friends!’ echoed Smid, and at that ominous name the whole posse comitatus tried to look unconcerned, and found suddenly that their presence was absolutely required in an opposite direction.

‘Let him go,’ said Wulf, as he stalked up the steps. ‘Let the boy go. I never set my heart on any man yet,’ he growled to himself in an under voice, ‘but what he disappointed me—and I must not expect more from this fellow. Come, men, ashore, and get drunk!’

Philammon, of course, now that he had leave to go, longed to stay— at all events, he must go back and thank his hosts. He turned unwillingly to do so, as hastily as he could, and found Pelagia and her gigantic lover just entering a palanquin. With downcast eyes he approached the beautiful basilisk, and stammered out some commonplace; and she, full of smiles, turned to him at once.

‘Tell us more about yourself before we part. You speak such beautiful Greek—true Athenian. It is quite delightful to hear one’s own accent again. Were you ever at Athens?’

‘When I was a child; I recollect—that is, I think—’

‘What?’ asked Pelagia eagerly.

‘A great house in Athens—and a great battle there—and coming to Egypt in a ship.’

‘Heavens!’ said Pelagia, and paused …. ‘How strange! Girls, who said he was like me?’

‘I’m sure we meant no harm, if we did say it in a joke,’ pouted one of the attendants.

‘Like me!—you must come and see us. I have something to say to you …. You must!’

Philammon misinterpreted the intense interest of her tone, and if he did not shrink back, gave some involuntary gesture of reluctance. Pelagia laughed aloud.

‘Don’t be vain enough to suspect, foolish boy, but come! Do you think that I have nothing to talk about but nonsense? Come and see me. It may be better for you. I live in—’ and she named a fashionable street, which Philammon, though he inwardly vowed not to accept the invitation, somehow could not help remembering.

‘Do leave the wild man, and come,’ growled the Amal from within the palanquin. ‘You are not going to turn nun, I hope?’

‘Not while the first man I ever met in the world stays in it,’ answered Pelagia, as she skipped into the palanquin, taking care to show the most lovely white heel and ankle, and, like the Parthian, send a random arrow as she retreated. But the dart was lost on Philammon, who had been already hustled away by the bevy of laughing attendants, amid baskets, dressing-cases, and bird-cages, and was fain to make his escape into the Babel round, and inquire his way to the patriarch’s house.

‘Patriarch’s house?’ answered the man whom he first addressed, a little lean, swarthy fellow, with merry black eyes, who, with a basket of fruit at his feet, was sunning himself on a baulk of timber, meditatively chewing the papyrus-cane, and examining the strangers with a look of absurd sagacity. ‘I know it; without a doubt I know it; all Alexandria has good reason to know it. Are you a monk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then ask your way of the monks; you won’t go far without finding one.’

‘But I do not even know the right direction; what is your grudge against monks, my good man?’

‘Look here, my youth; you seem too ingenuous for a monk. Don’t flatter yourself that it will last. If you can wear the sheepskin, and haunt the churches here for a month, without learning to lie, and slander, and clap, and hoot, and perhaps play your part in a sedition—and—murder satyric drama—why, you are a better man than I take you for. I, sir, am a Greek and a philosopher; though the whirlpool of matter may have, and indeed has, involved my ethereal spark in the body of a porter. Therefore, youth,’ continued the little man, starting up upon his baulk like an excited monkey, and stretching out one oratorio paw, ‘I bear a treble hatred to the monkish tribe. First, as a man and a husband; .... for as for the smiles of beauty, or otherwise,—such as I have, I have; and the monks, if they had their wicked will, would leave neither men nor women in the world. Sir, they would exterminate the human race in a single generation, by a voluntary suicide! Secondly, as a porter; for if all men turned monks, nobody would be idle, and the profession of portering would be annihilated. Thirdly, sir, as a philosopher; for as the false coin is odious to the true, so is the irrational and animal asceticism of the monk, to the logical and methodic self-restraint of one who, like your humblest of philosophers, aspires to a life according to the pure reason.’

‘And pray,’ asked Philammon, half laughing, ‘who has been your tutor in philosophy?’

‘The fountain of classic wisdom, Hypatia herself. As the ancient sage—the name is unimportant to a monk—pumped water nightly that he might study by day, so I, the guardian of cloaks and parasols, at the sacred doors of her lecture-room, imbibe celestial knowledge. From my youth I felt in me a soul above the matter-entangled herd. She revealed to me the glorious fact, that I am a spark of Divinity itself. A fallen star, I am, sir!’ continued he, pensively, stroking his lean stomach—‘a fallen star!—fallen, if the dignity of philosophy will allow of the simile, among the hogs of the lower world—indeed, even into the hog-bucket itself. Well, after all, I will show you the way to the Archbishop’s. There is a philosophic pleasure in opening one’s treasures to the modest young. Perhaps you will assist me by carrying this basket of fruit?’ And the little man jumped up, put his basket on Philammon’s head, and trotted off up a neighbouring street.

Philammon followed, half contemptuous, half wondering at what this philosophy might be, which could feed the self-conceit of anything so abject as his ragged little apish guide; but the novel roar and whirl of the street, the perpetual stream of busy faces, the line of curricles, palanquins, laden asses, camels, elephants, which met and passed him, and squeezed him up steps and into doorways, as they threaded their way through the great Moon-gate into the ample street beyond, drove everything from his mind but wondering curiosity, and a vague, helpless dread of that great living wilderness, more terrible than any dead wilderness of sand which he had left behind. Already he longed for the repose, the silence of the Laura—for faces which knew him and smiled upon him; but it was too late to turn back ow. His guide held on for more than a mile up the great main street, crossed in the centre of the city, at right angles, by one equally magnificent, at each end of which, miles away, appeared, dim and distant over the heads of the living stream of passengers, the yellow sand-hills of the desert; while at the end of the vista in front of them gleamed the blue harbour, through a network of countless masts.

At last they reached the quay at the opposite end of the street; and there burst on Philammon’s astonished eyes a vast semicircle of blue sea, ringed with palaces and towers….He stopped involuntarily; and his little guide stopped also, and looked askance at the young monk, to watch the effect which that grand panorama should produce on him.

‘There!—Behold our works! Us Greeks!—us benighted heathens! Look at it and feel yourself what you are, a very small, conceited, ignorant young person, who fancies that your new religion gives you a right to despise every one else. Did Christians make all this? Did Christians build that Pharos there on the left horn—wonder of the world? Did Christians raise that mile-long mole which runs towards the land, with its two drawbridges, connecting the two ports? Did Christians build this esplanade, or this gate of the Sun above our heads? Or that Caesareum on our right here? Look at those obelisks before it!’ And he pointed upwards to those two world-famous ones, one of which still lies on its ancient site, as Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Look up! look up, I say, and feel small—very small indeed! Did Christians raise them, or engrave them from base to point with the wisdom of the ancients? Did Christians build that Museum next to it, or design its statues and its frescoes—now, alas! re-echoing no more to the hummings of the Attic bee? Did they pile up out of the waves that palace beyond it, or that Exchange? or fill that Temple of Neptune with breathing brass and blushing marble? Did they build that Timonium on the point, where Antony, worsted at Actium, forgot his shame in Cleopatra’s arms? Did they quarry out that island of Antirrhodus into a nest of docks, or cover those waters with the sails of every nation under heaven? Speak! Thou son of bats and moles—thou six feet of sand—thou mummy out of the cliff caverns! Can monks do works like these?’

‘Other men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours,’ answered Philammon, trying to seem as unconcerned as he could. He was, indeed, too utterly astonished to be angry at anything. The overwhelming vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence of the whole scene; the range of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps, carried on her lap before or since, the extraordinary variety of form-the pure Doric and Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness of the later Roman, and here and there an imitation of the grand elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy colours relieving, while they deepened, the effect of its massive and simple outlines; the eternal repose of that great belt of stone contrasting with the restless ripple of the glittering harbour, and the busy sails which crowded out into the sea beyond, like white doves taking their flight into boundless space?—all dazzled, overpowered, saddened him …. This was the world …. Was it not beautiful? .... Must not the men who made all this have been—if not great …. yet …. he knew not what? Surely they had great souls and noble thoughts in them! Surely there was something godlike in being able to create such things! Not for themselves alone, too; but for a nation—for generations yet unborn …. And there was the sea …. and beyond it, nations of men innumerable …. His imagination was dizzy with thinking of them. Were they all doomed—lost? .... Had God no love for them?

At last, recovering himself, he recollected his errand, and again asked his way to the archbishop’s house.

‘This way, O youthful nonentity!’ answered the little man, leading the way round the great front of the Caesareum, at the foot of the obelisks.

Philammon’s eye fell on some new masonry in the pediment, ornamented with Christian symbols.

‘How? Is this a church?’

‘It is the Caesareum. It has become temporarily a church. The immortal gods have, for the time being, condescended to waive their rights; but it is the Caesareum, nevertheless. This way; down this street to the right. There,’ said he, pointing to a doorway in the side of the Museum, ‘is the last haunt of the Muses—the lecture- room of Hypatia, the school of my unworthiness. And here,’ stopping at the door of a splendid house on the opposite side of the street,