“I don’t know,” said Cora. “No one will ask me to pose as the Cnidian Venus. I have nothing but my voice. …”
“And I nothing but a terrible sleepy feeling!” yawned Catullus. “I shall stay and sleep here, under the stars. …”
He stretched himself and heaved his body over; two slaves approached and covered him carefully with silken sheets and woollen blankets and pushed pillows under his head, his loins and his feet. He accepted their attentions like a child. And, when he had turned over, he at once fell asleep like a child, with not a wrinkle of care in his bald forehead, which shone like ivory in the soft light of the stars.
Cora had risen to her feet:
“Good night, Thrasyllus,” she said.
“Good night, Cora,” said the tutor, paternally.
The Greek slave, her harp tucked into her arm, moved away slowly. She lifted the hanging of a cabin which she shared above-deck with some other slaves. These were sleeping in six or seven narrow beds close together. A rose-coloured lantern shed a vague glimmer, here over a hip rounded in sleep, there over a face with shut eyes, framed in black tresses and white, raised arms.
The slave undressed in silence. Her muslin peplos woven with gold flowers fell from her. She stood naked. She looked at her wrists, which were slim, like a patrician’s. She stooped and looked at her ankles. She arched the instep of her narrow, shapely foot. And she passed her slender fingers over her hips, which were like a virgin’s, and over her waist, round which she could almost make her two hands meet. Then she took up a metal hand-mirror and looked at herself in the light of the rose-coloured lantern. She half-closed her big eyes, which were like gigantic sapphires in mother-o’-pearl shells, very soft, very bright, very big, with the streak of antimony stretching to the temples. Then she smiled.
But next she gave a very deep sigh. She lay down on her little narrow bed between two other beds. A slave had moved slightly in her sleep, muttering. Cora drew a sheet over herself; and her great eyes stared, without seeing, into the rose-coloured lantern.
In the windless night the ship glided over the sea, which was calm as a lake; and there was nothing but the beating of the oars and the lulling melodious phrase of the rowers. …
Sometimes … a singsong order from the steersman, up in his lookout turret. …
And then a creaking of heavy ropes over great pulleys. …
III
Next morning, the soft, even light of a tea-rose dawn spread over a magic spectacle, beautiful as a marvellous dream, flimsy as a vision, compelling as an enchantment. The ship had glided past the monumental, marble, nine-storeyed Pharos into the Great Harbour; and Alexandria lay before the eyes of the delighted travellers, Lucius, Thrasyllus, Catullus, shining pink through diaphanous, mother-o’-pearl gleams and a slowly-lifting silvery mist, like a city of magic and fairytale. A long, long row of white palaces, with irregular gables, loomed through the mist and the gleam.
On the left, on the rocks of Lochias, the pillars of the former royal palace shone magical and fairylike in the silvery mist. Thrasyllus knew that, since Egypt had become a Roman province, the legate resided there, surrounded with royal honours. Under the palace the little square basin of the palace-harbour showed, gay with the purple sails of the legate’s triremes; with the little island of Antirrhodos, behind which pillars and yet more pillars outlined more and more clearly the white theatre; with the bight of the Posidium, where stood the Temple of Poseidon and the great Emporium, the great market of the merchant shippers, while a pier ran into the harbour on which, dainty as a marble ornament, stood the villa of the Timoneum, built by Mark Antony. A riot of luxuriant green gardens, with the stately crowns of palm-trees and the dreamy-delicate crests of tamarisks, flung cool, dark nosegays between all those gleaming white buildings, which began to blink in the ever fiercer sunshine. …
Thrasyllus pointed with his finger, along the harbour, the long row of palaces of the Caesareum, the huge docks and yards teeming all motley with people and industry, to the Heptastadium, the promenade-jetty which stretched out to unite the city with the island of Pharos, whence the lighthouse took its name. On the one side of this pier, with rostra and statues on the marble balustrade and gates, lay the harbour of Eunostus and the naval docks of Cibotus.
The water on every side was crowded and swarming with vessels: biremes and triremes, battleships and merchant-ships; the masts rose like a forest of poplars and the sails glowed like the many-coloured wings of one bird against another; and, as soon as the quadrireme glided in, she was surrounded by a host of sloops, filled with traders, with yelling Arabs and Nubians. The Aphrodite heaved to; a pilot came on board; then she glided on again through the press of the sloops, the yelling of the traders and with swanlike elegance turned and lay to beside the great quay, at the place where she was expected, the place kept open for her.
The quay, between the obelisks, was alive with a maddening concourse of people: sailors and merchants, vendors of fruit and
