A mosquito hummed over me; Euphorion, who was getting along in years, had failed to close exactly the thin curtains of gauze; books and maps left on the ground rattled in the low wind which crept under the tent wall. Sitting up on my bed, I drew on my boots and groped for my tunic and belt with its dagger, then went out to breathe the night air. I walked through the wide, straight streets of the camp, empty at that late hour, but lighted like city streets; sentries saluted formally as I passed; alongside the barracks which served for hospital I caught the stale stench of the dysenterics. I proceeded towards the earthwork which separated us from the precipice, and from the enemy. A sentinel, perilously outlined by the moon, was making his round with long, even tread; his passage and return was one part of the movement of that immense machine in which I was the pivot; for a moment I was stirred by the spectacle of that solitary form, that brief flame burning in the breast of a man midst a world of dangers. An arrow whistled by, hardly more irksome than the mosquito which had troubled me in my tent; I stood looking out, leaning against the rampart of sandbags.
For some years now people have credited me with strange insight, and with knowledge of divine secrets. But they are mistaken; I have no such power. It is true, however, that during those nights of Bethar some disturbing phantoms passed before my eyes. The perspectives afforded the mind from the height of those barren hills were less majestic than these of the Janiculum, and less golden than those of Cape Sunion; they offered the reverse and the nadir. I admitted that it was indeed vain to hope for an eternity for Athens and for Rome which is accorded neither to objects nor men, and which the wisest among us deny even to the gods. These subtle and complex forms of life, these civilizations comfortably installed in their refinements of ease and of art, the very freedom of mind to seek and to judge, all this depended upon countless rare chances, upon conditions almost impossible to bring about, and none of which could be expected to endure. We should manage to destroy Simon; Arrian would be able to protect Armenia from Alani invasions. But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.
Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omnia cernit. Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high: I fingered the stone of a ring on which on a day of bitter depression I had had those few sad words engraved. I went deeper in disillusion, and perhaps into blasphemy: I was beginning to find it natural, if not just, that we should perish. Our literature is nearing exhaustion, our arts are falling asleep; Pancrates is not Homer, nor is Arrian a Xenophon; when I have tried to immortalize Antinous in stone no Praxiteles has come to hand. Our sciences have been at a standstill from the times of Aristotle and Archimedes; our technical development is inadequate to the strain of a long war; even our pleasure-lovers grow weary of delight. More civilized ways of living and more liberal thinking in the course of the last century are the work of a very small minority of good minds; the masses remain wholly ignorant, fierce and cruel when they can be so, and in any case limited and selfish; it is safe to wager that they will never change. Our effort has been compromised in advance by too many greedy procurators and publicans, too many suspicious senators, too many brutal centurions. Nor is time granted oftener to empires than to men to learn from past errors. Although a weaver would wish to mend his web or a clever calculator would correct his mistakes, and the artist would try to retouch his masterpiece if still imperfect or slightly damaged, Nature prefers to start again from the very clay, from chaos itself, and this horrible waste is what we term natural order.
I raised my head and moved slightly in order to limber myself. From the top of Simon’s citadel vague gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed by like a specter; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range in moonlight. I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth, provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep. The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, would concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judaea and bringing back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing the esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebel executed the evening before. I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be awakened two hours later by the trumpets at dawn.
All my life long I had been on the best of terms with my body; I had implicitly counted upon its docility, and its strength. That close alliance was beginning to dissolve; my body was no longer at one with my will and my mind, and with what after all, however ineptly, I must call my soul; the ready comrade of other days was only a slave sulking at his task. In fact, my body was afraid of me; continually now I was aware of the obscure presence of fear, of a feeling of constriction in my chest which was not yet pain, but the first step toward it. I had long been used to insomnia, but from this time on sleep was worse than vigil; hardly would I doze off before there were frightful awakenings. I was subject to headaches which Hermogenes attributed to the heat of the climate and the helmet’s weight; by evening, after prolonged fatigue, I sank into a chair like one falling; rising to receive Rufus or Severus was an effort for which I had to prepare well in advance; when seated I leaned heavily on the arms of my chair, and my thigh muscles trembled like those of an exhausted runner. The slightest motion became actual labor, and of such labors life was now composed.
An accident almost ridiculous, a mere childish indisposition, brought to light the true malady beneath that appalling fatigue. During a meeting of the general staff I had a nosebleed, but took little notice of it at first; it persisted, however, until time for the evening meal; I awoke at night to find myself drenched in blood. I called Celer, who slept in the next tent, and he in his turn roused Hermogenes, but the horid warm flood went on. With careful hands the young officer wiped away the liquid which smirched my face. At dawn I was seized with retching as are the condemned in Rome who open their veins in their bath. They warmed my chilled body the best they could with the aid of blankets and hot packs; to staunch the blood Hermogenes prescribed snow; it was not to be had in camp; coping with innumerable difficulties Celer had it brought from the summit of Mount Hermon. I learned later that they had despaired of my life, and I myself felt attached to it by no more than the merest thread, as imperceptible as the too rapid pulse which now dismayed my physician. But the sudden, inexplicable hemorrhage came to an end; I got up again and strove to live as before, but did not succeed. When, but poorly restored to health, I had imprudently attempted an evening ride, I received a second warning, more serious than the first. For the space of a second I felt my heartbeats quicken, then slow down, falter, and cease; I seemed to fall like a stone into some black well which is doubtless death. If death it was, it is a mistake to call it silent: I was swept down by cataracts, and deafened like a diver by the roaring of waters. I did not reach bottom, but came to the surface again, choking for breath. All my strength in that moment, which I thought my last, had been concentrated into my hand as I clutched at Celer, who was standing beside me; he later showed me the marks of my fingers upon his shoulder. But that brief agony was, like all bodily experiences, indescribable, and remains the secret of him who has lived through it, whether he would tell it or no. Since that time I have passed similar crises, though never identical, and no doubt one does not go twice (and still live) through that terror and that night. Hermogenes finally diagnosed an initial stage of hydropic heart; there was no choice but to accept the orders given me by this illness, which had suddenly become my master, and to consent to a long period of inaction, if not of rest, limiting the perspectives of my life for a time to the frame of a bed. I was almost ashamed of such an ailment, wholly internal and barely visible, without fever, abscess, or intestinal pain, with its only symptom a somewhat hoarser breathing and a livid mark left by the sandal strap across the swollen foot. An extraordinary silence reigned round my tent; the entire camp of Bethar seemed to have become a sick room.
The aromatic oil which burned below my Genius rendered the close air of this canvas cage heavier still; the pounding of my arteries made me think vaguely of the island of the Titans on the edge of night. At other moments the insufferable noise changed to that of galloping horses thudding down on wet earth; the mind so carefully reined in for nearly fifty years was wandering; the tall body was floating adrift; I resigned myself to be that tired man who absently counted the star-and-diamond pattern of his blanket. I gazed at the white blur of a marble bust in the shadow; a chant in honor of Epona, goddess of horses, which used to be sung by my Spanish nurse, a tall, somber
