Читать книгу Sarchedon - A Legend of the Great Queen - George J. Whyte-Melville - Страница 4

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YING in the desert—stretched, limp and helpless, in the darkening waste—poured out like water on the tawny sand—two specks poised high above him in the deeper orange of the upper sky—a wide-winged vulture hovering and wheeling between the stricken lion and the setting sun.

Dying in the desert—grim, dignified, unyielding, like a monarch slain in battle. So formidable in the morning—the herdsman's terror, the archer's dread, the savage wrestler in whose grasp horse and rider went down crushed, mangled, over-matched, like sucking fawn and unweaned child—fierce, tameless, unconquered—a noble adversary for the noblest champions of the plain—but ere the last red streak of evening faded on the dusky level of their wilderness, a thing for the foul night-bird to tear and buffet—for the wild ass, wincing and snorting, half in terror, half in scorn, to spurn and trample with her hoof.

Pitiful in its hopelessness, the wistful pleading of eyes gradually waning to the apathy of death; pitiful the long flickering tongue, licking with something of a dog's homely patience that fatal gash of which the pain grew every moment more endurable, only because it was a death-wound; and pitiful too the utter prostration of those massive limbs, with knotted muscles and corded sinews—of that long, lean, tapering body—the very emblem of agile strength—which, striving in agony to rear but half its height, sank down again in dust, writhing, powerless, like an earthworm beneath the spade.

No yell, no moan—only a short quick breathing, a convulsive shiver, and the occasional effort to rise, that time by time soaked and stained his lair with darker jets of blood.

So those specks on the upper sky widened into two huge soaring vultures, while the wing of a third brushed lightly against the fallen lion's mane, as the foul bird ventured nearer its coming banquet, croaking hideous invitations to others and yet others, that emerged, as if by magic, from the solemn cloudless heaven.

Far back into the desert, varied here and there by clammy clotted spots, lay a single track of footprints, closer together, less sharp, round, and clearly-defined, as they dragged towards the end. Many a weary furlong had he travelled, the king of beasts, on his journey here to die; and yet he never was to reach the patch of arid reeds that instinct bade him seek for a last shelter—the scanty covert where-with nature prompted him to shield his death agony from the remorseless bird of prey.

It is a royal sport to-day. It was a royal sport, no doubt, thousands of years ago, to rouse the kingly lion from his haunt of reeds, or rock, or cool dank quivering morass, in those wide plains that stretch between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Mesopotamia of the ancients, the Naharaina of its present migratory tribes. A royal sport, when followed by a queen and all her glittering train, defiling from the lofty porches of Babylon the Great, the tramp of horse and ring of bridle, with steady footfall of Assyrian warriors—curled, bearded, erect, and formidable—with ponderous tread of stately elephants, gorgeous in trappings of scarlet, pearls, and gold, with stealthy gait of meek-eyed camels, plodding patient under their burdens in the rear. Scouring into the waste before that jewelled troop, herds of wild asses bruised and broke the shoots of wormwood beneath their flying hoofs, till the hot air was laden with an aromatic smell; the ostrich spread her scant and tufted wings to scud before the wind, tall, swift, ungainly, in a cloud of yellow dust; the fleet gazelle, with beating heart, and head tucked back, sprang forward like an arrow from the bow, never to pause nor stint in her terror-stricken flight, till man and horse, game and hunter, pursuer and pursued, were left hopelessly behind, far down beyond the unbroken level of the horizon. Was not her speed of foot the strength and safety and glory of her being? Nor could the desert falcon strike her save unawares, nor the cruel Eastern greyhound overtake her save when she had lately drunk her fill from the spring.

But the monarch of the desert, the grim and lordly lion, sought no refuge in flight, accepted no compromise of retreat. Driven from his covert, he might move slowly and sullenly away; but it was to turn in savage wrath on the eager horseman who approached too near, on the daring archer who ventured to bend his bow within point-blank distance of so formidable an enemy. Nevertheless, even the fiercest of their kind must yield before man, the conqueror of beasts; before woman, the conqueror of man: and on the shaft which drank his life-blood, and transfixed the lion from side to side, was graven the royal tiara of a monarch's mate, were cut those wedge-shaped letters that indicated the name of Semiramis the Great Queen.

Fainter and fainter drooped the mighty frame of the dying beast; one by one large red drops plashed heavily on the sand beneath him, as the first bright stars of a Chaldean sky blazed from the clear depths of heaven. The perishable was fast fading below. Was that indeed eternal which shone so pure and pitiless above?

Great Babylon lay spread out, massive, mysterious, and indistinct, in the shades of coming night. Here and there, huge piles of building loomed vast and shadowy against the sky, far below these, amidst the tents, houses, palaces, and gardens within the town, glittered and flashed a world of lamps and torches, scattered bright and countless as the stars in that other world above; while rearing its head, like some ghostly giant, high over shaft and column, fortress, palace, and obelisk, rose a lofty tower that seemed to demand of heaven its secrets, and bade defiance to the sky.

Here, on the summit of this tower stood a human figure, gazing fixedly on the planets already visible, scanning the heavens with rapt attention; calm, serious, abstracted, wrestling, as it were, with all its mental forces, for the triumph of intellect, the mastery of thought.

It was Assarac, priest of Baal, reading the stars, as a student reads a book writ in some symbolical language of which he holds the key.

Assarac the priest, the man for whom in that voluptuous climate, amidst that gorgeous people, delighted in splendour, in pleasure, in luxury, in warfare, glory, arts, arms, and magnificence, the world could furnish but one attraction—the insatiable craving of ambition—to lull which he must rule supreme; therefore he trained himself, night and day, with the weapons of victory, seeking diligently that knowledge which constitutes power.

The act of worship is amongst all creation indigenous and peculiar to man. As he alone stands erect and raises his front without effort towards heaven, so he bends the knee in reasoning adoration, neither cowering down with his head in the dust, nor grovelling on his belly, like other creatures, in abject fear; but wanton, unstable, and extravagant even in his noblest aspirations, this viceroy of earth has been ever prone to waver in his allegiance, eager to amplify his worship of the one true God into a thousand false religions, more or less beautiful, poetical, and absurd. Amongst these, none could be less unworthy than that earliest form of superstition which attributed to the celestial bodies certain properties of power and knowledge, such as could affect the present no less than they predicted the future. Man's intellect felt elevated and purified by scientific communion with the book of Fate as written on the luminous pages of the sky, while his soul seemed scarce debased by an adoration that lifted it at least to the visible and material heaven. On the wide-stretching plains of Western Asia, in the warm cloudless Assyrian night, with the lamps of heaven flashing out their radiance in uninterrupted splendour from the centre to the boundless horizon, it was no wonder that students and sages should have accepted for deities those distant worlds of fire on which eyes, brain, hopes, thoughts, and aspirations were nightly fixed—the guides of their science, the exponents of their history, the arbiters of their fate.

While the rude camel-driver, as he plodded by night through the trackless desert, relied, no less than the early mariner, for progress and safety on the stars, priests in their temples, kings in their palaces, consulted the same changeless, passionless, inscrutable witnesses, for the web of policy, the conduct of warfare, the furtherance of love, desire, ambition, or revenge. Ere long, by an inevitable process in the human mind, the instructor of their course came to be looked on as the originator of events; and that which began only with an assumption that it could foretell, was soon credited with the power to bias, to prevent, or to destroy.

Then arose an idolatry which seemed irresistible to the noblest and boldest nations of the ancient world, which, notwithstanding their own sublime creed, possessed a strong fascination for the Chosen People themselves. Yav, Nebo, Bel, and Ashtaroth[1] came to be worshipped as living deities, reigning and revealing themselves through the planets that bore these names. The Seven Stars[2] were believed to time the inevitable march of the universe to their seven tones of mysterious music, unheard by mortal ears only because it never ceased nor faltered in its eternal diapason. The twelve months of the year were sacred, each to its especial luminary. Thirty stars were worshipped as the Consulting Gods. Twelve to the north, twelve to the south, were believed respectively to compel the destinies of living men and dead, the whole twenty-four bearing the title of Judges of the World. And finally, lest superstition should overlook one single object of its adoration, or idolatry fail in the smallest detail to sin against its Creator, priests, temples, sacrifices, and votive offerings were assigned to those countless worlds that gem a Southern night, under the collective title of the Host of Heaven.

[Footnote 1: Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus.]

[Footnote 2: Rather the seven spheres, or the five planets with the sun and moon.]

Assarac looked abroad, above, around, below—with the confident glance of a monarch who reviews his powers, with the critical attention of a calculator who sums up his total, with the visionary gaze of a prophet who forecasts his destiny, yet not entirely without something of that astute and wary expression which on the magician's face seems to scan and dominate, while it half mistrusts, the implements of his art.

He was yet a young man, to count by years, and his dark almond-shaped eyes had lost none of the fire and softness which are only combined before middle life; but above his black eyebrows there were lines traced deep in the tawny forehead, and at his temples a few white hairs already mingled with the black bushy ringlets that, confined by a fillet of gold, were drawn back in clustering profusion to his neck and shoulders. His arms, but for the heavy gold bracelets that clasped their wrists, were bare, as were his strong muscular legs from knee to ankle; he wore sandals, fastened by straps; of embroidered leather crossing and recrossing so as to form no slight protection for foot and instep. His long gown of white linen, open to the breast and looped so as to give the legs freedom of action at the knee, was bordered with cunning needlework wrought in tissue of gold and scarlet silk, its arrow-headed characters displaying many a dark sentence and time-honoured record. A tasselled cord fastened it at the waist, and a deep fringe also of scarlet tissue, hung below its edges, while an ample cloak, white and embroidered like the gown, fell from one shoulder and trailed behind the priest as he stood erect and motionless, looking out into the night.

On his solid earrings, on his golden bracelets, on the fillet that bound his forehead, on the very clasps that secured his sandals, was graven the mystic circle that, with or without its winged figure, constituted a memorial and a symbol of fate, omnipotence, and eternity. If he worshipped the stars, he could yet conceive of a power so supreme as to control and dominate their influence: nor could his religion in its aspirations for this ineffable essence find a better emblem of its ideal than that geometrical figure which has neither beginning nor end.

He bore in his hand a lotus-flower lately gathered, and was careful, with something of superstitious reverence, to preserve its freshness; though once, when it caught his eye by chance, a smile of mingled scorn and curiosity wreathed his full red lips; but he looked aloft again the next instant with a keener and more rapt attention in his gaze. If he speculated on the symbolical interpretation of the plant, it was not there he sought the power and lore that should enable him to control his kind.

Though he carried two knives in his girdle, though his limbs were massive and muscular, his chest deep and his head erect, the man's habits seemed those of peace and study, not of action and warfare. His face, for all its indications of intellectual virility, was somewhat too rounded in outline, too full and flaccid, rather perhaps unmanly than effeminate, and bearing an expression of sustained effort, as of one who continually strives to hide and overcome a consciousness of unmerited degradation. There was no sign of beard about the well-cut lips, nor on the firmly-moulded chin; and for Assarac the priest it was too obvious that the domestic affections must ever remain a sealed book—his hearth must be the sacred fire of his worship, and the starry canopy of heaven his home.

"And what have you given me?" said he, rising his hand towards the glittering world above, with a gesture that denoted quite as much of defiance as devotion. "What have you given me, O my gods, in exchange for the glow of youth, the dignity of manhood, the rapture and the folly and the sweet sorrow that are common, like cool breezes and running streams, to all but such as me? No wife, no child! None of the treasures others guard so jealously; but, in compensation, none of the fears that bid the brave man cower and the strong man quake. What have you given me, O my gods? The thirst for power, the desire to rule, the knowledge that causes brave and strong to bend and quiver like reeds in the Euphrates before the breeze that hurries down its stream. You have given me wisdom to forecast men's lives and destinies; it is strange if he who has a knowledge of the future cannot control and warp the present to his will. I have torn open your scrolls by force of hand; I have compelled you to reveal your secrets by sheer strength of intellect—ye are my gods indeed, and I your priest and servant; yet is there something working here in this forehead, in this breast, that seems to dominate you as the goad rules the elephant, as the bridle turns and guides the foaming war-horse on the plain! Your strength, your knowledge, and your fire are mine—mine until these reasoning powers are dulled—these senses enervated by luxury and indulgence. Prophesy—prophesy! Trace for me in your shafts of light the story of that which is to come: show me the future of Assarac the priest—his growing knowledge, his indomitable struggles, his successful encounters, the culminating glory of his career. Show me the destiny of that fairest, bravest, fiercest of women—the diamond of the East! whose white arm conquers nations, whose flashing eyes set towns and palaces and kingdoms all ablaze—beautiful, proud, and pitiless—Semiramis the Great Queen; of her lord, the king of nations, the grim old champion who scoffs, forsooth, at your power, O my gods! and trusts only in the strength of his right arm and in his sword. Shall ye not avenge yourselves for his scorn and unbelief? Shall not Assarac your priest rise on the war-worn monarch's ruin to a splendour before which the glory of Ninus and all his line shall pale, even as ye pale yourselves, eternal host, before the Lord of Light who comes with day?"

Even while he spoke, the dying lion, far off in the desert, turned on his side with one quick gasping moan, one convulsive shudder of his mighty limbs, ere they grew rigid and motionless for ever, breaking short off in his death-pang the shaft on which was graven a royal tiara and the symbol of the Great Queen.