by Joan Grant
My bath, not set in the floor like ours, reminded me of a stone sarcophagus. Cold water spouted into it through the mouth of a stone fish, and it was drained through a little channel cut in the floor. Pottery vases of elaborate shapes, to hold dried herbs and flowers to scent the bath, were set on shelves against the walls, which were painted with seabirds and shells and branching coral.
At one end of the terrace, walled with the distant view of sea and sky, there was a swimming pool; and at the other, an arbour invited us to rest, shaded by vines and climbing roses with sharp-pointed buds.
When I returned to my rooms to prepare for the banquet, which was being given in our honour, my women had taken my clothes from their travelling boxes and laid them away in long chests of painted cedarwood. Maata told me that she had found twelve wig stands in the room where my clothes were kept, and that she supposed the people of Minoas thought our people were bald, just because they had heard that sometimes we wore wigs for ceremonies. Dear Maata! She took much more pride in my hair than she had ever done in her own, and she felt its lustre was due to her fierce combing of its tangles when I was a child.
Her thoughts crowded each other for her tongue; and as she polished my hair she told me that the girls who brought the hot water for my bath had bare breasts and their nipples painted scarlet, “and their hair was dyed orange and yellow, and curled and be-ribboned, instead of wearing decent wigs and linen tunics like our attendants. I doubt if there is any girl in this whole country whom a husband could surprise on her marriage day.”
I laughed and told her to be more tolerant of other people’s customs or they would think us dull as a room full of statues.
Maata sniffed fiercely. “Sly, giggling women! Not one of them would I let work in our palace for half a day, not even to clean out the lion stalls. If the ones I’ve seen are not big with child it’s no virtue of theirs, but because the men here are too busy painting their faces and curling their hair to have time even to remember that they are men.”
“Hush, Maata. They are different from us; perhaps they are younger than us. But they are our friends. We may be able to teach them a little wisdom—from what I know of their priests they have need of it. But frowns and disapproval lock hearts against words that might guide them. To see your face we might be surrounded by a forest of spears, and our wine poisoned, and our beds full of scorpions.”
“If it is your pleasure, I will hide my thoughts. As to my speech, it matters not what I say; they can no more understand my words than I can make out their heathen chatter.”
“Please me then, and smile, Maata. I also find it difficult to express myself in their language, but I am glad I learned something of it before their visit last year. It was gracious of them to welcome us in our own tongue.”
Maata had left me when Neyah came to my room to see if I was ready, and I told him what she thought of the Minoans. He was in a very good humour and kept laughing to himself; as we walked down to the banqueting hall he said, “It is well that Maata has not been to my room, for when I went to bathe I found six young girls to wait on me. And when I told them to go they pretended not to understand me, and they pointed to each other and to the bed to ask which I should like to wait on me to-night.”
One side of the banqueting hall was pillared, and curtained with the sunset. There were two long marble tables down each side of the room, and a shorter one on a dais at one end, where Neyah and I sat between Kiodas and his queen. Her flounced dress, of flax-blue edged with violet, was draped tightly round her waist and thighs; the bodice was cut low and showed her breasts with their gilded nipples. Her hair, piled high on her head in little curls, was kept in place by silver pins headed with amethysts.
At the King’s table, also, were Ptah-kefer and Zertar; the high-priests of Minoas, Kioda’s chief vizier, and the captain of his fleet. The nobles and captains sat with the women of both our households on cushioned benches at the long tables. Here each must spend the banquet with those on either side of them and cannot select those they wish to talk to, as we can in Kam.
The pale gold wine, soft on the tongue and very cool, was poured from long-necked jars with two handles of graceful shape by boys in short tunics, whose curled hair was bound with ribbons.
Many kinds of fish that I had never tasted before were served, and many sweet dishes, one being of honey, crushed almonds, and sugared rose-leaves. The table was strewn with violets and white roses. And while our tongues were beguiled with pleasant foods, musicians charmed our ears, and dancers our eyes.
To the sound of reed pipes, a dancer came running into the centre of the floor, his loins girdled with vine-leaves. He held the ends of long ropes of flowers, by which he dragged six girls, dressed as he, who were as slaves that he was bringing to his king. Then suddenly the girls whirled into a dance. He stood in the middle of them, while they danced round him, their steps weaving about each other, until he was plaited in the garlands of their ropes and bound, their captive. Then, as they rang their mockery of him, he burst his flowery chains, and they fled in pretended terror as he chased them out into the night.
Then followed two men and a girl, who though they were very graceful, were more acrobats than dancers. The men flung her to each other across the room; and as her arms back-stretched like wings, she flew through the air like a bird breasting the wind.
After each dance the company acclaimed the dancers and threw flowers to them. The first time this happened, I was startled. In Kam to praise a dancer when she has danced would be as if one stood looking at a sculptor, admiring him, and took no notice of the statue he had made. To us the rhythm of a dance is as separate from the one that creates it as is a statue from its carver; but here it is the dancer herself who is praised, and not only that thought which, through her body, she has brought alive.
I took a white rose that was lying beside my plate and threw it to a girl who had just danced, and I saw that in so doing I had pleased Kiodas. When he stayed with us in Kam, he must have thought us grudging in our praise, unknowing that for us to praise the makers of a shadow dance would be as if we sang to the moon for patterning a fig tree on a wall.
That night before I slept Neyah came to my room. He had been swimming in the pool; his hair still ran with water, and I told him to dry it before he went to bed.
He said, “I have no bed, for in it there is a sleeping girl who waits for me. I do not like this over-hospitality. I wish to sleep. If I send her from my room Kiodas may think I hold his women unworthy of me.…I like to choose for myself who shares my bed.”
“Poor Neyah! Tell her that on this day there is a sacred festival in Kam when all men swear celibacy for a night and leave the world of women to the god Min. She will believe anything of us. They think us magicians, who might turn them into frogs, or ride across the sky on crocodiles!”
“I am glad you threw that rose, Sekeeta; it pleased Kiodas. I found conversation difficult with his wife; it would have been easier had she been to Kam, but they were only married in the spring.
“They are such a happy people, gayer than we were, Neyah, even when we were little. They may not know who they are or where they come from or where their journey leads, but they live with laughter in that flash of time which is the present.”
“Yes, but their gaiety is like foam that soon will fade.”
“That may be, Neyah, but foam holds magic colour while it lasts, more beautiful than the deeps of all the seas. Though we may have the contentment of the long in years, they strain the present to their pointed breasts, closing their fingers round each grain of time as if it were a rose, fiercely distilling each drop of scent before its petals fall to free its heart.”
“But they know nothing of wisdom; if I could make Kiodas fill these temples with my priests…”
“They are young, and glad; and this is good for them. To change their lives would be as cruel as if I were to take Tchekeea’s favourite toy and rip it up and let the feathers out and show her that it was a linen clo
th, and not a cat to whom she told her stories. Leave them. They are not evil, they are young. And when they are older they will be re-born into a land like ours.
“But it is late; the day has been long and we must sleep. Good-night, my Neyah; go to your room and in the morning tell me how you slept!”
CHAPTER THREE
Artemiodes
Artemiodes used to come to my room and try any of my unguents that were new to her. They had no malachite in Minoas, and she liked to colour her eyelids green with mine. I showed her how it must be made into a smooth paste with a drop of oil on the finger, and I promised her that as long as we had it in Kam she should not lack of it, and that I would send her a carved palette, such as I used, on which to grind it into a powder.
Her toilet took her a long time. Each of her many curls had to be twisted round a little stick, tied with thread, and then wetted with rose-water, before her hair was fanned dry. Her skin was very fair, almost the colour of her pearls, and every day she bathed in fresh goats’ milk and rubbed her hands with sheep’s cream to keep them smooth.
She had a long narrow room where she kept her dresses, each on its own wide shelf, arranged according to their colours. One that I liked specially was of yellow silk, ribboned in turquoise; and another, striped in pink and white like a tulip, was bound at the neck and hem with vivid green; and the five flounces of a third, which was the soft mauve of rosemary, were fringed with little pearls. Her sandals were as many-coloured as her dresses. When we were alone together, she often wore a simple tunic girdled below her breasts with coloured ribbons.
She would talk of clothes as eagerly as a captain would tell his fellow of a strategy for battle, and she would describe a coupling of colours like a poet who words an imagery of thought to a fellow song-maker, finding the same pleasure in the placing of an ornament that Thoth-terra-das finds in a smoothly worded phrase.
She was surprised when she saw that each of my dresses had four others that were exactly like it. I told her that in Kam most of the clothes we wore had been fashioned on the same lines for more than a hundred years.
Though she was queen to Kiodas, she did not share his rulership; and I think she was sorry for me because instead of having only the pleasures of a queen I shared the responsibilities of a king.
I had brought Artemiodes a lion cub; for knowing how much joy Natee gave me, I thought this would give her more pleasure than any other gift. She had seemed delighted, and she had said that he should sleep on a violet cushion beside her bed. But the paws of the gentlest cub are rough, and their little teeth sharp. He ate his violet cushion and tore the ribbons off her dresses. And she found that it is as difficult for the love of clothes and a lion cub to share one’s heart as for a pigeon and a wild-cat to house together. So she asked me whether I was not lonely without Natee, and whether I should not be happier with the little lion to sleep in my room while I was in Minoas. As soon as he was with me he was very good; and when people whom he didn’t know came near me, he used to try to roar at them in his little hoarse voice. I grew so fond of him that I decided to take him home and give him to Tchekeea; so I told Artemiodes that I thought the winters of Minoas would be too cold for him, and that I would send her embroidered linens and carved bracelets as a better token of our friendship.
Each day was a blossom on the tree of time. The cares of rulership became remote, and we had but to think of our own pleasure to delight our hosts.
We spent five halcyon days in a little summer palace by the sea, alone with Kiodas and Artemiodes. We wore such simple tunics as the fisher people wear, and cooked our food over the glowing ashes of a driftwood fire.
On rocky beaches, where the sea whispered to the moon, were little pools with living flowers that folded their feathery petals at a touch, and scarlet sea-weed like a sea-nymph’s hair, and yellow crabs that scuttled sideways to a sheltering rock.
Neyah used to coil our fishing lines round his waist, and he and I would swim out to a rock that rose sheer from the deep water. Here we flung out our weighted hooks until we felt a strong fish fighting on the line. Once I caught a little octopus; its tentacles were like a nest of snakes, and evil looked at me out of its eyes until Neyah killed it with his hunting-knife. Stringing the fish we had caught through the gills, Neyah carried them slung over his shoulder as we swam back to the shore. Then I would lie basking in the warmth, while the sun burnished my skin, which glittered with the salt crystals of the sea. Not till the dusk had fallen did we wear clothes, for here even the sun at noonday was not too impetuous.
I grew to be very fond of Artemiodes, but I never knew her heart or understood her way of thought. She loved to hear of the housings of my life, but she did not ask me of my thoughts or wish to talk of things away from Earth; she liked to hear about what our people ate, how long they worked, and how they amused themselves. But when I would have told her what they were taught, I saw that she listened but from courtesy. And when I tried to find out what she believed, she would tell me of some new dish that her cooks had made, or some new whim she had thought of to please Kiodas.
Sometimes she talked of him as if she were his favourite dancing-girl, telling me how, even if his fleet were overdue, she could drive thoughts of kingship from his mind and keep him within the closed circle of an embrace. Sometimes she talked of him as if he were a beautiful youth who had still to assail her virginity; and sometimes as if she were an indulgent mother talking proudly of a wilful child. Her love for her husband seemed to change with her every mood. Perhaps it was because in Minoas they are not taught to ‘know thyself’, and have not yet learned that the enduring strength of love is to know the measure that the other has of good and evil, wisdom and foolishness, and, knowing it in stark simplicity, still to want to make the long journey by his side.
One night, sleeping in curtained litters, we were carried up one of the great mountains that crown their island. For the first time I held snow between my hands and saw my fingers mould it with their warmth. The gleaming white of pearl I knew, the warm white of new-cut ivory, the foaming whiteness of a breaking wave, and daisy petals brilliant in the sun; but now in my hands I cupped the heart of whiteness, the essence of all colour transmuted into purity.
The eastern sky hung out its banners of the day, and the morning breeze quenched the stars’ flickering lamps. The land below us was still sleeping beneath the mist; but we, on a white island above the clouds, saw the cold brilliance about our feet turn to a throne of coral for the Gods. The horizon, mighty as the Wheel of Time, encircled us; and sleeping Earth stirred to the sound of Ra’s Chariot, as to the coloured music of the dawn he returned to greet his subjects on a new day.
CHAPTER FOUR
Minoan Art
Just as the gods of the Minoans are different from ours, so are their paintings, their sculpture, their gardens, and their buildings. And it was not until I had been in their country for many days that I realized wherein the difference lay.
In Kam we see the ordered pattern of the universe, wherein there is no chaos and no chance; the stars plough their allotted furrows across the sky; the corn springs from the seed, ripens, falls from the ear, and is re-born, in a smooth cycle. Just as there is no stone that falls into water and makes no ripple, so there is no action, whether it is good or evil, that is not exactly balanced by the future that its present creates. Not only the universe, not only our lives, but every grain of sand that is blown upon the wind is meticulously balanced with that unflawed justice which to us is symbolized by the Great Scales of Tahuti. Our innate knowledge of this unbroken rhythm is reflected in all things that we create to symbolize the form in which we see beauty walking upon Earth.
The two opposite sides of our rooms are reflections each of the other. If there is a window upon one side and there cannot be a window upon the other, we paint its semblance upon the wall: not because we wish it to be thought that the painting is a real window, but because it shows that we realize that beauty is the twin sister of the poised sc
ales. A plucked lotus has lost half its beauty: for when it floats upon a clear pool, the flower and its reflection unite in a balanced harmony. It is this harmony that we strive to achieve in our gardens: if there is one pomegranate tree upon the left hand of a pool, then shall its brother be upon the right hand: if the red lilies of Ptah grow by the left-hand wall, then shall their reflection grow by the wall opposite.
We see the present as the reflection of the past, or as that which creates a reflection in the future. Only thus can the present be seen in its entirety: for if one sees only one side of a balance, it is without meaning and cannot fulfil its purpose.
We know that beauty is permanent, and that, being permanent, it is beyond the confines of the five senses of the body and can be apprehended only by the spirit. We do not paint a frieze in a fashion that is expected to convince the eye that what it sees is not a painting of a man, but the man himself. But our drawing-scribes record those things that they hope will stir the spirit of the beholder, so that he can re-create with his inward vision that which the scribe saw with his spirit.
Just as writing-signs convey words, which convey thought, which conveys an image seen in the writer’s mind, so do our pictures pass on what the painter has seen not only through his eyes, but in his heart. If our painting-scribes wish to record the beauty of a garden, they do not depict it as their eyes see it: for to create an illusion of reality is to create only an illusion. No one can sit in the shade of a painted tree, though every leaf were faithfully portrayed; and a flower, however beautifully drawn, can give forth no scent except of the plaster on which it has been limned. But just as corn springs from dry seed, so does the drawing-scribe plant the seeds of thought: his pool is a square space marked with water lines, and if it harbours lotuses or fish, they too are shown; his trees are formalized and show where they are placed and what kind of fruit or flowers they bear; and in the mind of the beholder these seeds of thought shall grow, until he can hear the wind stirring the leaves, see the fish flickering in the lotus shade, taste the pomegranate juice cool upon his tongue, and find contentment in this garden living in his mind.
