Last Days With Cleopatra

by Jack Lindsay

  Perhaps things would he different in the Arsinoite Nome; but its very name, Limne, the Marsh, was hardly encouraging, though the sailors said it was a vast district of marshland reclaimed. The lovers lay tighter in one another’s arms, feeling that there at least was security; and discovered at least one good point about the flat world of waters into which they were hurrying. Surely no one would pursue them into such a waste. Nothing could be less like populous Alexandria with its innumerable crafts and distractions. Indeed a new start was being made, and life had offered an immensity of brooding waters to express the nakedness of the choice of love. The old was discarded, and perhaps in very truth the waters would recede in due time and leave an earth ready for fresh harvest. Victor had told Daphne of the death of Nicias; and she had wept and then begged him never to mention the past again, and he had been glad.

  The sailors knew the course intimately, and stood in turn with a pole to keep the boat from running aground when the banks were submerged, though they steered so well that there was seldom any risk. Daphne and Victor grew used to this endless passage through a world which was neither land nor sea. The scraps of the desert lost their effect of harsh sterility and appeared the friendly and stable foundations of the waste of waters, promising the day when all would he land again, firm and fertile. The lovers began to ask for no other life. They liked the sailors, and felt at home, whereas the Limne they did not know.

  The sailors found a patch of land on which to moor the boat: on the right-hand side where the ground was higher and drier. The running line of the desert hills had come close; and there were no cultivated fields, water-covered, between the rugged slopes and the river-bank. There was only dry sand, with a few palm-trees and a solitary sycamore. But one of the sailors reported that there was a nook about a hundred yards up the river, which would suit the young lady finely; and when Daphne said that she didn’t want to walk so far, he picked her up in his arms and carried her to it. But he did it so gently, so respectfully and inoffensively, that even Victor could not object. Victor followed the sailor’s stalwart figure, merely wishing that he was as strong, and determining that he would work so hard on the farm he would soon be able to carry Daphne, lightly as the sailor carried her, even when she was weighted with an unborn child.

  He stopped, his heart quavering. His child. The knowledge came with an urgency it had never come before, a terrifying sweetness that drew something out of him—like an arrow twanged from a bow—and yet left a need of greater giving. Indeed he must grow strong now. He had something to protect, something utterly his own to protect; a world that rested on his shoulders, without crushing. His life was knitting with strength to carry the desired burden. Even as Daphne’s blood had accepted the child. So did he accept the child. It was in his blood as well as come out of his blood.

  He caught up with the sailor, who laid Daphne in a little bushy lair, softly grassed. Then, after muttering incoherently, he raced back to the boat for rugs. He returned and tucked Daphne in, trying to find words to tell what he had felt, this fatherhood in his blood, and afraid that he would lose the awareness. It was no longer so clear, and yet it was there; it would never go. He wanted her to know that he too was bearing the child. Why hadn’t he known it before?

  But he couldn’t say anything. He merely stroked her face and breasts, and kissed her, and lay quiet; and then they ate some bread together.

  *

  In starry darkness they slept. Then noise awakened them. Shouts and blows, banging. Victor crawled and saw a fight was going on round the boat, a whirl of forms outlined by the noise rather than the starlight. Desperately he cleared his brain. Robbers. The country had been filled with them ever since the Romans took Pelusion; the sailors had been discussing it. Robber-bands half-starved and violent. With horror he realised that they would be least of all merciful towards Greeks. What might they not do to Daphne?

  He crawled back to her and whispered, “Don’t be frightened, but we must get away.” They would be seen in the daylight, even if one of the robbers didn’t blunder on them before then.

  “But I can’t walk...very far.”

  “We must do our best. I’ll carry you part of the way.”

  Sooner than he thought he would have to learn the weight of Daphne and their child. He led her out on the further sight of the little ragged thicket, trying to keep calm. Certainly there would be several hours before dawn; better to go slowly than to hurry and collapse. The robbers would be thinking only of the boat, taken up with sharing out the plunder.

  “Let’s not go too fast.”

  He put his arm round Daphne’s waist. They walked on towards the hillocks that cut away the stars westward. Once they thought they saw some men prowling near, and crouched down. There was nobody. Victor was sure that he remembered a clear way on to the foothills on the other side of the sycamore. With relief he made out the top-branches of the sycamore against the sky, for it stood on a slight rise, and he guided the way thither. Daphne was breathing hard. “I’m sorry.”

  He took her in his arms and moved towards the sycamore. She grew heavier, but he gritted his teeth and struggled on. He would get as far as the sycamore. Having that goal, he had something on which to base his resistance. The muscles tore at his back, at his arms, plucked red-hot at his calves, as if someone was flogging at him. He plodded on. It would not kill him. He would be stronger yet.

  The sycamore was reached and he laid Daphne down—slowly, despite his tortured arms. Ah, the agonising release of comfort.

  “We’ll rest here awhile.”

  The noise was fainter. They lay against one another, taking deep breaths, watching stars through the sparse boughs.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “Yes.”

  They walked on side by side, westward to the hills but with a curve southward. Victor was sure that he had the lay of the ground. Daphne made no complaint, but he could tell from her breathing when she was hard pressed. He took her up then and carried her as far as he could, then they rested. She made no protest when he carried her, no complaint while she walked. They lay motionless for a while, till hearts subsided and breath grew even and wrenched muscles grew easy. Then he spoke again.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “Yes.”

  So it went on. Once they found themselves panting up a sandy incline. Once their feet splashed in marshy ground. But after a while Victor found the direction again. They rested and went on. He carried her, and they rested. They were past the stage of tiredness. They moved in a delirium of exhaustion, yet keeping one faint awareness clear and decided. And aware of their love; upheld by the nearness of bodies anguished beyond desire but infinitely adored; lost in terror, but trusting.

  On and on they went, and the night would never end, Pray God it did not end till they were miles away.

  *

  Suddenly the sun came up over flat eastern hills, waked them out of a dazed sleep. They looked round, painfully raising their racked bodies. They did not know the scene they saw. There were no robbers, no boat, no scyamore tree. How far they had gone they didn’t know, but it was far enough. Unless the robbers also came that way.

  Victor staggered to his feet. Below them ran the Nile; and that sight was pleasant, for it gave him a feeling of contact with the known world. Nearer were some mud-flats and a stretch of arid sand with a few bushes and some greenery round the edge of the mud. Behind were the dead slopes of limestone cracked and herbless. There seemed no shelter anywhere. He thought with ravenous desire of the bread which had been left by the river-bank. Not a habitation was to be seen.

  He heard Daphne gasping.

  “What is it?”

  “I fear...it’s coming on me.” She spoke with difficulty and smiled wanly. “I’m sorry....”

  “Darling,” he cried, and kneeled beside her. But what use was a kiss at such a moment? He must do something, and what could he do? The burden crushed him, and he wanted to lie on the ground and weep for hunger and inability
to help. Then the weakness passed, and he knew that he must do something or die. He stroked Daphne’s hair and rose, to give another glance round. There was a bush a little further on, which seemed to have berries. He ran towards it, forgetting his fatigue and hopeful that he might find something to sustain Daphne. There were no berries on the bush, only shrivelled leaves; but as he looked about him, he saw an opening in the limestone, a pillared door. The sand-pitted pillars were cut from the stone-itself. He ran up and looked in. It was a rock-tomb, long ago pillaged, empty. But it was a shelter. Soon the sun would be cruelly beating down on the rocks, and here Daphne would be safe.

  He ran back and breathlessly told her what he had found; picked her up and carried her towards the rock-tomb, strengthened by the chance which had provided this refuge. Inside the tomb it was cool but dry; the hot winds had seen to that. In one corner was a heap of driven sand. Opposite gaped the desecrated opening of the mummy-pit, filled with sand and broken pottery. Other pieces of earthenware lay on the ground, bits of figurines and mummy-wrappings. A hole had been made into a tomb on the other side, since the wall was only a few inches thick and thus easier to break through than the blocked-up front. Victor peered into the hole, dimly fearing snakes or wild-beasts, but could see nothing. Daphne lay back patiently on the sloping sand-heap.

  “I must go and find something to eat—somewhere,” he said.

  But she waved her hand feebly, to stop him. “Stay,” she whispered, and then gave a moaning scream and doubled up, dragging her legs heavily. The cry startled Victor, freezing his blood and making him want to flee. It was too intense in its confession of pain. But he ran to Daphne, knelt beside her and held her gently, helplessly.

  “Hold me tight,” she whispered hoarsely, her eyes screwed-up to shut out the light of life which had become pain. “Tighter...tighter...” And she screamed again.

  Never had he known such panic as burned behind his eyes. The shock of pain so transformed her. It made of her nothing but an automaton of awful convulsion. It wasn’t Daphne crying. It was a beast of anguish, a ravished daimon, terrible and pure in its terror. But the next moment it was his poor Daphne who gasped, who whispered to him, who wanted to be held tighter than any arms could hold her, least of all his tired arms. It was Daphne who was suffering, and that daimon-cry of pain made her suffering his, shocking his blood to a terrified participation.

  “Pull me away...away...” she begged.

  But that was impossible. She was in the vice of the pain and could not be drawn out of it. She heaved and twisted, and he held her tight. It was all he could do. To hold her tight and to make her suffering his by bearing the cries that were torn out of her, that tore at him in turn. A wild beast of pain was in this place; not Daphne but the daimon inhabiting her, tearing her for a purpose about which she and Victor cared nothing. What was the child to him at this moment of death-life, this terrible moment of choice, this agony of change in the blood?

  They wanted to be safe, to be alone, to be themselves only; and the daimon came between them, thrust a sword into the loins and the heart, binding them with unrealised agony of the scream, the bestial scream. It reached back, back into aeons of night and hunger and powerless cruelty. It came from the very heart of the living earth.

  “Hold me tight...I’m dying...O God, let me die.” And again the scream, the scream.

  *

  The sun was setting as Victor came back from the pool with water scooped in one of the least-broken pieces of pottery. Unnerved, loathing, he washed the strange and filthied creature with whose emergence the daimon of the scream had ceased to devour the lives of the lovers. Then he laid it in the arms of Daphne who lay back in her corner on the slanting couch of sand. Her eyelids flickered but did not open, and he feared that she was dying, until he saw the faintest shadow of a smile about her lips. She held the child in her arms, laxly but proudly, and made a weak gesture that he should guide its mouth to her breast. It was a male child, Victor had noticed—without interest; for all his thoughts were centred on the enormous gladness that Daphne was no longer suffering, no longer screaming. He could forgive the child now, because Daphne smiled. But he felt nothing else about it.

  He bathed her body, as well as he could without moving her, and lifted the water to her lips. She drank greedily. It was too late for him to go in search of a village or a herds-man’s hut. He sat beside Daphne, tearing up his shift to make swaddling bands, and watched the paintings on the wall of the rock-tomb gradually fade in the dusk. He was too tired to think, to feel anything but that dumb enormous gratitude for silence. Even his hunger did not disturb him much.

  Idly he noted the details of the tomb, with a sense that he had seen it all before, that he had seen everything in the world, having touched the tip of the sky of noon and the bottom of the underworld of midnight, in this room of rock. The roof was higher one end than the other, because of the fault in the limestone that one could see outside running along the ridge; the hewers had cut up to the fault and then feared to go higher. The roof had been plastered, but part of the plaster had fallen. For some reason or other all the paintings hadn’t been finished. The marks of the chisel could be seen. Some of the figures were merely scratched on the wall round the outline in red, or the stone had been cut away to leave the figure in relief, but no modelling work had been expended on the figure itself. But other figures were brightly painted: reddish men and yellow women, a bird with each feather picked out, a scaly fish, ears of corn red-outlined in a field of yellow-gold, some ears standing straight up, others bending over, others caught into a clump by the hand of the reaper, the toothed sickle ready to sever them.

  The shapes wavered and blurred, like the shapes of the abandoned world. The world had become these flat antique shapes, and the lovers were alone, with the new life that they had created. The unfinished haphazard world was gone, and only the lovers and the child were left. The holy Three in a rock-cavern, purified by hunger and a draught of water.

  The shapes on the walls were gods, men made into a pattern of life, changing unchanging. But they were fading. The god with the cross in his hand and the straight thin beard, the god with a cobra-crown. All the hieroglyphs with their locked meaning were fading. The Cross was loins meeting. Out of the cross came the new life, the loins become energy, become pattern changing unchanging, and then suddenly a new life, the baby on the cross, on the mated loins, on the cross of life which was the cross of death in mystery of the screaming pain, the loss, the unavailing regret.

  The shapes on the wall wavered across the brain of Victor, repeating their meaning, though no priest had ever unlocked the hieroglyphs for him, though he had no words to speak the meaning, no strength to utter it. The shapes were in his blood; and he slept.

  *

  At dawn he fetched more water, and gave Daphne to drink, and she opened her eyes and smiled; and he set out to find a village. He had his belt with the gold coins sewed into it, for Daphne had kept to her resolution of making him wear it all the while. As he started off on his search, he felt astonished at his good condition; but before he had gone more than a few paces, all his strength left him. The light hung on his eyelids like a swarm of stinging flies; the ground lifted and swayed beneath him; the sand clogged his steps. Twice he fell, breaking the fall with his hands, and went for a few yards on hands and knees. Then he dragged himself up, feeling that someone might see him...might take him for a hyena and hunt him. Fantasies whirled through his head. He wanted to bellow, to be a bull looking for pasture, to gore his enemies. Where were his enemies now? Hiding behind the rock, over the hilltops...He saw a hole, and wanted to sit by it, waiting till a hare put out its head so that he could seize it by the ears, kill it, and take it home to eat. But it might be a snake-hole.

  The sun grew hotter, and suddenly he was afraid that he would lose his way and never find Daphne again. He turned and looked back, carefully noting how the rocks looked; for things always seemed different when approached from an opposite direction. He
found a lump of hard stone and scratched a cross on a flat space of limestone, repeating the sign wherever he could find a suitable rock.

  He walked down the water’s edge and took another drink, and felt better. Then he went on, round a spur of limestone, which forced him closer to the river; round another spur; and then he saw some huts. He stood for a while, to collect his wits; and removing his belt, undid one of the gold pieces, then put the belt on again. The natives might be hostile; none of them might understand Greek; but he would get food somehow.

  As he neared the huts, a dog barked and children ran out, naked with fat bellies, sucking their fingers in wonderment and uncertain whether to throw stones. An old woman and a young girl were squatting on the brink of a hole, kneading something. Victor saw and smelt that it was dung. The children were fetching it, and the crone and the girl had their bare arms immersed in the dung-pit up to their elbows, getting the dung to an even state of liquidity; then it would be left to dry until it could be patted into thin cakes and stored for fuel in this timberless land.

  The girl jumped up, swinging her arms to get the moisture from them, and ran away. The old woman went on kneading. Victor spoke to her. She gave one look at him, shook her head, and returned to the dung. Victor, followed by the children, walked on into the village. Several natives, men and women, appeared at the door-holes, and Victor called, “Anyone here speak Greek?”

  There was no answer, and despair began to bring out anew all his exhaustion. He stumbled and leant against a wall, surrounded by suspicious eyes implacable in their stupidity. The sense of their antagonism grew stronger; it pinned him to the wall as if one of the men had driven a lance through his stomach.