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

shepherds’ music lured him on and on, and girlish voices, chanting the mystic idyll of his mighty ancestor, rang soft and fitful through his weary brain.

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Before sunrise the next morning, Raphael was faring forth gallantly, well armed and mounted, by Synesius’s side, followed by four or five brace of tall brush-tailed greyhounds, and by the faithful Bran, whose lop-ears and heavy jaws, unique in that land of prick-ears and fox-noses, formed the absorbing subject of conversation among some twenty smart retainers, who, armed to the teeth for chase and war, rode behind the bishop on half-starved, raw-boned horses, inured by desert training and bad times to do the maximum of work upon the minimum of food.

For the first few miles they rode in silence, through ruined villages and desolated farms, from which here and there a single inhabitant peeped forth fearfully, to pour his tale of woe into the ears of the hapless bishop, and then, instead of asking alms from him, to entreat his acceptance of some paltry remnant of grain or poultry, which had escaped the hands of the marauders; and as they clung to his hands, and blessed him as their only hope and stay, poor Synesius heard patiently again and again the same purposeless tale of woe, and mingled his tears with theirs, and then spurred his horse on impatiently, as if to escape from the sight of misery which he could not relieve; while a voice in Raphael’s heart seemed to ask him—‘Why was thy wealth given to thee, but that thou mightest dry, if but for a day, such tears as these?’

And he fell into a meditation which was not without its fruit in due season, but which lasted till they had left the enclosed country, and were climbing the slopes of the low rolling hills, over which lay the road from the distant sea. But as they left the signs of war behind them, the volatile temper of the good bishop began to rise. He petted his hounds, chatted to his men, discoursed on the most probable quarter for finding game, and exhorted them cheerfully enough to play the man, as their chance of having anything to eat at night depended entirely on their prowess during the day.

‘Ah!’ said Raphael at last, glad of a pretext for breaking his own chain of painful thought, ‘there is a vein of your land-salt. I suspect that you were all at the bottom of the sea once, and that the old Earth-shaker Neptune, tired of your bad ways, gave you a lift one morning, and set you up as dry land, in order to be rid of you.’

‘It may really be so. They say that the Argonauts returned back through this country from the Southern Ocean, which must have been therefore far nearer us than it is now, and that they carried their mystic vessel over these very hills to the Syrtis. However, we have forgotten all about the sea thoroughly enough since that time. I well remember my first astonishment at the side of a galley in Alexandria, and the roar of laughter with which my fellow-students greeted my not unreasonable remark, that it looked very like a centipede.’

‘And do you recollect, too, the argument which I had once with your steward about the pickled fish which I brought you from Egypt; and the way in which, when the jar was opened, the servants shrieked and ran right and left, declaring that the fish-bones were the spines of poisonous serpents?’

‘The old fellow is as obstinate as ever, I assure you, in his disbelief in salt water. He torments me continually by asking me to tell him the story of my shipwreck, and does not believe me after all, though he has heard it a dozen times. “Sir,” he said to me solemnly, after you were gone, “will that strange gentleman pretend to persuade me that anything eatable can come out of his great pond there at Alexandria, when every one can see that the best fountain in the country never breeds anything but frogs and leeches?”’

As he spoke they left the last field behind them, and entered upon a vast sheet of breezy down, speckled with shrubs and copse, and split here and there by rocky glens ending in fertile valleys once thick with farms and homesteads.

‘Here,’ cried Synesius, ‘are our hunting-grounds. And now for one hour’s forgetfulness, and the joys of the noble art. What could old Homer have been thinking of when he forgot to number it among the pursuits which are glorious to heroes, and make man illustrious, and yet could laud in those very words the forum?’

‘The forum?’ said Raphael. ‘I never saw it yet make men anything but rascals.’

‘Brazen-faced rascals, my friend. I detest the whole breed of lawyers, and never meet one without turning him into ridicule; effeminate pettifoggers, who shudder at the very sight of roast venison, when they think of the dangers by which it has been procured. But it is a cowardly age, my friend—a cowardly age. Let us forget it, and ourselves.’

‘And even philosophy and Hypatia?’ said Raphael archly.

‘I have done with philosophy. To fight like a Heracleid, and to die like a bishop, is all I have left—except Hypatia, the perfect, the wise! I tell you, friend, it is a comfort to me, even in my deepest misery, to recollect that the corrupt world yet holds one being so divine—’

And he was running on in one of his high-flown laudations of his idol, when Raphael checked him.

‘I fear our common sympathy on that subject is rather weakened. I have begun to doubt her lately nearly as much as I doubt philosophy.’

‘Not her virtue?

‘No, friend; nor her beauty, nor her wisdom; simply her power of making me a better man. A selfish criterion, you will say. Be it so …. What a noble horse that is of yours!’

‘He has been—he has been; but worn out now, like his master and his master’s fortunes….’

‘Not so, certainly, the colt on which you have done me the honour to mount me.’

‘Ah, my poor boy’s pet! .... You are the first person who has crossed him since—’

‘Is he of your own breeding?’ asked Raphael, trying to turn the conversation.

‘A cross between that white Nisaean which you sent me, and one of my own mares.’

‘Not a bad cross; though he keeps a little of the bull head and greyhound flank of your Africans.’

‘So much the better, friend. Give me bone—bone and endurance for this rough down country. Your delicate Nisaeans are all very well for a few minutes over those flat sands of Egypt: but here you need a horse who will go forty miles a day over rough and smooth, and dine thankfully off thistles at night. Aha, poor little man!’—as a jerboa sprang up from a tuft of bushes at his feet—‘I fear you must help to fill our soup-kettle in these hard times.’

And with a dexterous sweep of his long whip, the worthy bishop entangled the jerboas long legs, whisked him up to his saddle-bow, and delivered him to the groom and the game-bag.

‘Kill him at once. Don’t let him squeak, boy!—he cries too like a child….’

‘Poor little wretch!’ said Raphael. ‘What more right, now, have we to eat him than he to eat us?’

‘Eh? If he can eat us, let him try. How long have you joined the Manichees?’

‘Have no fears on that score. But, as I told you, since my wonderful conversion by Bran, the dog, I have begun to hold dumb animals in respect, as probably quite as good as myself.’

‘Then you need a further conversion, friend Raphael, and to learn what is the dignity of man; and when that arrives, you will learn to believe, with me, that the life of every beast upon the face of the earth would be a cheap price to pay in exchange for the life of the meanest human being.’

‘Yes, if they be required for food: but really, to kill them for our amusement!’

‘Friend, when I was still a heathen, I recollect well how I used to haggle at that story of the cursing of the fig-tree; but when I learnt to know what man was, and that I had been all my life mistaking for a part of nature that race which was originally, and can be again, made in the likeness of God, then I began to see that it were well if every fig-tree upon earth were cursed, if the spirit of one man could be taught thereby a single lesson. And so I speak of these, my darling field-sports, on which I have not been ashamed, as you know, to write a book.’

‘And a very charming one: yet you were still a pagan, recollect, when you wrote it.’

‘I was; and then I followed the chase by mere nature and inclination. But now I know I have a right to follow it, because it gives me endurance, promptness, courage, self-control, as well as health and cheerfulness: and therefore—Ah! a fresh ostrich-track!’

And stopping short, Synesius began pricking slowly up the hillside.

‘Back!’ whispered he, at last. ‘Quietly and silently. Lie down on your horse’s neck, as I do, or the long-necked rogues may see you. They must be close to us over the brow. I know that favourite grassy slope of old. Round under yon hill, or they will get wind of us, and then farewell to them!’

And Synesius and his groom cantered on, hanging each to their horses’ necks by an arm and a leg, in a way which Raphael endeavoured in vain to imitate.

Two or three minutes more of breathless silence brought them to the edge of the hill, where Synesius halted, peered down a moment, and then turned to Raphael, his face and limbs quivering with delight, as he held up two fingers, to denote the number of the birds.

‘Out of arrow-range! Slip the dogs, Syphax!’

And in another minute Raphael found himself galloping headlong down the hill, while two magnificent ostriches, their outspread plumes waving in the bright breeze, their necks stooped almost to the ground, and their long legs flashing out behind them, were sweeping away before the greyhounds at a pace which no mortal horse could have held for ten minutes.

‘Baby that I am still!’ cried Synesius, tears of excitement glittering in his eyes; .... while Raphael gave himself up to the joy, and forgot even Victoria, in the breathless rush over rock and bush, sandhill and watercourse.

‘Take care of that dry torrent-bed! Hold up, old horse! This will not last two minutes more. They cannot hold their pace against this breeze …. Well tried, good dog, though you did miss him! Ah, that my boy were here! There—they double. Spread right and left, my children, and ride at them as they pass!’

And the ostriches, unable, as Synesius said, to keep their pace against the breeze, turned sharp on their pursuers, and beating the air with outspread wings, came down the wind again, at a rate even more wonderful than before.

‘Ride at him, Raphael—ride at him, and turn him into those bushes!’ cried Synesius, fitting an arrow to his bow.

Raphael obeyed, and the bird swerved into the low scrub; the well- trained horse leapt at him like a cat; and Raphael, who dare not trust his skill in archery, struck with his whip at the long neck as it struggled past him, and felled the noble quarry to the ground. He was in the act of