Cleopatra

Оглавление

Abbott Jacob. Cleopatra

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. THE VALLEY OF THE NILE

CHAPTER II. THE PTOLEMIES

CHAPTER III. ALEXANDRIA

CHAPTER IV. CLEOPATRA'S FATHER

CHAPTER V. ACCESSION TO THE THRONE

CHAPTER VI. CLEOPATRA AND Caesar

CHAPTER VII. THE ALEXANDRINE WAR

CHAPTER VIII. CLEOPATRA A QUEEN

CHAPTER IX. THE BATTLE OF PHILIPPI

CHAPTER X. CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY

CHAPTER XI. THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM

CHAPTER XII. THE END OF CLEOPATRA

Отрывок из книги

The parentage and birth of Cleopatra.—Cleopatra's residence in Egypt.—Physical aspect of Egypt.—The eagle's wings and science.—Physical peculiarities of Egypt connected with the laws of rain.—General laws of rain.—Causes which modify the quantity of rain.—Striking contrasts.—Rainless regions.—Great rainless region of Asia and Africa.—The Andes.—Map of the rainless region.—Valley of the Nile.—The Red Sea.—The oases.—Siweh.—Mountains of the Moon.—The River Nile.—Incessant rains.—Inundation of the Nile.—Course of the river.—Subsidence of the waters.—Luxuriant vegetation.—Absence of forests.—Great antiquity of Egypt.—Her monuments.—The Delta of the Nile.—The Delta as seen from the sea.—Pelusiac mouth of the Nile.—The Canopic mouth.—Ancient Egypt.—The Pyramids.—Conquests of the Persians and Macedonians.—The Ptolemies.—Founding of Alexandria.—The Pharos.

The story of Cleopatra is a story of crime. It is a narrative of the course and the consequences of unlawful love. In her strange and romantic history we see this passion portrayed with the most complete and graphic fidelity in all its influences and effects; its uncontrollable impulses, its intoxicating joys, its reckless and mad career, and the dreadful remorse and ultimate despair and ruin in which it always and inevitably ends.

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Under these circumstances, the immense quantity of water which falls in the rainy district in these inundating tropical showers, expands over the whole valley, and forms for a time an immense lake, extending in length across the whole breadth of the desert. This lake is, of course, from five to ten miles wide, and a thousand miles long. The water in it is shallow and turbid, and it has a gentle current toward the north. The rains, at length, in a great measure cease; but it requires some months for the water to run off and leave the valley dry. As soon as it is gone, there springs up from the whole surface of the ground which has been thus submerged a most rank and luxuriant vegetation.

This vegetation, now wholly regulated and controlled by the hand of man, must have been, in its original and primeval state, of a very peculiar character. It must have consisted of such plants only as could exist under the condition of having the soil in which they grew laid, for a quarter of the year, wholly under water. This circumstance, probably, prevented the valley of the Nile from having been, like other fertile tracts of land, encumbered, in its native state, with forests. For the same reason, wild beasts could never have haunted it. There were no forests to shelter them, and no refuge or retreat for them but the dry and barren desert, during the period of the annual inundations. This most extraordinary valley seems thus to have been formed and preserved by Nature herself for the special possession of man. She herself seems to have held it in reserve for him from the very morning of creation, refusing admission into it to every plant and every animal that might hinder or disturb his occupancy and control. And if he were to abandon it now for a thousand years, and then return to it once more, he would find it just as he left it, ready for his immediate possession. There would be no wild beasts that he must first expel, and no tangled forests would have sprung up, that his ax must first remove. Nature is the husbandman who keeps this garden of the world in order, and the means and machinery by which she operates are the grand evaporating surfaces of the seas, the beams of the tropical sun, the lofty summits of the Abyssinian Mountains, and, as the product and result of all this instrumentality, great periodical inundations of summer rain.

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