Read One of Cleopatra's Nights for Free Online

they knew only how to turn pale in your
presence, to fall at your feet and supplicate your mercy; and that your
sole remaining resource would be to awake some ancient, bitumen-perfumed
Pharaoh from his gilded coffin. Now here is an ardent and youthful heart
that loves you. What will you do with it?"
    Cleopatra that night sought slumber in vain. She tossed feverishly upon
her couch, and long and vainly invoked Morpheus, the brother of Death.
She incessantly repeated that she was the most unhappy of queens, that
every one sought to persecute her, and that her life had become
insupportable; woeful lamentations which had little effect upon
Charmion, although she pretended to sympathize with them.
    Let us for a while leave Cleopatra to seek fugitive sleep, and direct
her suspicions successively upon each noble of the court. Let us return
to Meïamoun, and as we are much more sagacious than Phrehipephbour,
chief of the rowers, we shall have no difficulty in finding him.
    Terrified at his own hardihood, Meïamoun had thrown himself into the
Nile, and had succeeded in swimming the current and gaining the little
grove of dhoum-palms before Phrehipephbour had even launched the two
boats in pursuit of him.
    When he had recovered breath, and brushed back his long black locks, all
damp with river foam, behind his ears, he began to feel more at ease,
more inwardly calm. Cleopatra possessed something which had come from
him; some sort of communication was now established between them.
Cleopatra was thinking of him, Meïamoun. Perhaps that thought might be
one of wrath; but then he had at least been able to awake some feeling
within her, whether of fear, anger, or pity. He had forced her to the
consciousness of his existence. It was true that he had forgotten to
inscribe his name upon the papyrus scroll, but what more of him could
the queen have learned from the inscription,
Meïamoun, Son of
Mandouschopsh
? In her eyes the slave and the monarch were equal. A
goddess in choosing a peasant for her lover stoops no lower than in
choosing a patrician or a king. The Immortals from a height so lofty can
behold only love in the man of their choice.
    The thought which had weighed upon his breast like the knee of a
colossus of brass had at last departed. It had traversed the air; it had
even reached the queen herself, the apex of the triangle, the
inaccessible summit. It had aroused curiosity in that impassive heart; a
prodigious advance, truly, toward success.
    Meïamoun, indeed, never suspected that he had so thoroughly succeeded in
this wise, but he felt more tranquil; for he had sworn unto himself by
that mystic Bari who guides the souls of the dead to Amenthi, by the
sacred birds Bermou and Ghenghen, by Typhon and by Osiris, and by all
things awful in Egyptian mythology, that he should be the accepted lover
of Cleopatra, though it were but for a single night, though for only a
single hour, though it should cost him his life and even his very soul.
    If we must explain how he had fallen so deeply in love with a woman whom
he had beheld only from afar off, and to whom he had hardly dared to
raise his eyes—even he who was wont to gaze fearlessly into the yellow
eyes of the lion—or how the tiny seed of love, chance-fallen upon his
heart, had grown there so rapidly and extended its roots so deeply, we
can answer only that it is a mystery which we are unable to explain. We
have already said of Meïamoun,—The Abyss called him.
    Once assured that Phrehipephbour had returned with his rowers, he again
threw himself into the current and once more swam toward the palace of
Cleopatra, whose lamp still shone through the window curtains like a
painted star. Never did Leander swim with more courage and vigor toward
the tower of Sestos; yet for Meïamoun no Hero was waiting, ready to pour
vials of perfume upon his head to dissipate the briny odors of the sea
and banish the sharp kisses of the storm.
    A strong blow from some keen lance or
harpe
was certainly