sparkle to the last. Yet, if I escape this peril--ay, if I
escape--bright and clear as the moonlight track along the waters glows
the rest of my existence. I see honors, happiness, success, shining
upon every billow of the dark gulf beneath which I must sink at last.
What, then, with such destinies beyond the peril, shall I succumb to the
peril? My soul whispers hope, it sweeps exultingly beyond the boding
hour, it revels in the future--its own courage is its fittest omen. If
I were to perish so suddenly and so soon, the shadow of death would
darken over me, and I should feel the icy presentiment of my doom. My
soul would express, in sadness and in gloom, its forecast of the dreary
Orcus. But it smiles--it assures me of deliverance.'
As he thus concluded his soliloquy, the Egyptian involuntarily rose. He
paced rapidly the narrow space of that star-roofed floor, and, pausing
at the parapet, looked again upon the grey and melancholy heavens. The
chills of the faint dawn came refreshingly upon his brow, and gradually
his mind resumed its natural and collected calm. He withdrew his gaze
from the stars, as, one after one, they receded into the depths of
heaven; and his eyes fell over the broad expanse below. Dim in the
silenced port of the city rose the masts of the galleys; along that mart
of luxury and of labor was stilled the mighty hum. No lights, save here
and there from before the columns of a temple, or in the porticoes of
the voiceless forum, broke the wan and fluctuating light of the
struggling morn. From the heart of the torpid city, so soon to vibrate
with a thousand passions, there came no sound: the streams of life
circulated not; they lay locked under the ice of sleep. From the huge
space of the amphitheatre, with its stony seats rising one above the
other--coiled and round as some slumbering monster--rose a thin and
ghastly mist, which gathered darker, and more dark, over the scattered
foliage that gloomed in its vicinity. The city seemed as, after the
awful change of seventeen ages, it seems now to the traveler,--a City of
the Dead.'
The ocean itself--that serene and tideless sea--lay scarce less hushed,
save that from its deep bosom came, softened by the distance, a faint
and regular murmur, like the breathing of its sleep; and curving far, as
with outstretched arms, into the green and beautiful land, it seemed
unconsciously to clasp to its breast the cities sloping to its
margin--Stabiae, and Herculaneum, and Pompeii--those children and
darlings of the deep. 'Ye slumber,' said the Egyptian, as he scowled
over the cities, the boast and flower of Campania; 'ye slumber!--would
it were the eternal repose of death! As ye now--jewels in the crown of
empire--so once were the cities of the Nile! Their greatness hath
perished from them, they sleep amidst ruins, their palaces and their
shrines are tombs, the serpent coils in the grass of their streets, the
lizard basks in their solitary halls. By that mysterious law of Nature,
which humbles one to exalt the other, ye have thriven upon their ruins;
thou, haughty Rome, hast usurped the glories of Sesostris and
Semiramis--thou art a robber, clothing thyself with their spoils! And
these--slaves in thy triumph--that I (the last son of forgotten
monarchs) survey below, reservoirs of thine all-pervading power and
luxury, I curse as I behold! The time shall come when Egypt shall be
avenged! when the barbarian's steed shall make his manger in the Golden
House of Nero! and thou that hast sown the wind with conquest shalt reap
the harvest in the whirlwind of desolation!'
As the Egyptian uttered a prediction which fate so fearfully fulfilled,
a more solemn and boding image of ill omen never occurred to the dreams
of painter or of poet. The morning light, which can pale so wanly even
the young cheek of beauty, gave his majestic and stately features almost
the colors of the grave, with the dark hair falling massively around
them, and the dark robes flowing long and loose, and the arm
outstretched from that lofty eminence, and the glittering eyes, fierce
with a savage gladness--half prophet and half fiend!
He turned his gaze from the city and the ocean; before him lay the
vineyards and meadows of the rich Campania. The gate and walls--ancient,
half Pelasgic--of the city, seemed not to bound its extent. Villas and
villages stretched on every side up the ascent of Vesuvius, not nearly
then so steep or so lofty as at present. For, as Rome itself is built
on an exhausted volcano, so in similar security the inhabitants of the
South tenanted the green and vine-clad places around a volcano whose
fires they believed at rest for ever. From the gate stretched the long
street of tombs, various in size and architecture, by which, on that
side, the city is as yet approached. Above all, rode the cloud-capped
summit of the Dread Mountain, with the shadows, now dark, now light,
betraying the mossy caverns and ashy rocks, which testified the past
conflagrations, and might have prophesied--but man is blind--that which
was to come!
Difficult was it then and there to guess the causes why the tradition of
the place wore so gloomy and stern a hue; why, in those smiling plains,
for miles around--to Baiae and Misenum--the poets had imagined the
entrance and thresholds of their hell--their Acheron, and their fabled
Styx: why, in those Phlegrae, now laughing with the vine, they placed
the battles of the gods, and supposed the daring Titans to have sought
the victory of heaven--save, indeed, that yet, in yon seared and blasted
summit, fancy might think to read the characters of the Olympian
thunderbolt.
But it was neither the rugged height of the still volcano, nor the
fertility of the sloping fields, nor the melancholy avenue of tombs, nor
the glittering villas of a polished and luxurious people, that now
arrested the eye of the Egyptian. On one part of the landscape, the
mountain of Vesuvius descended to the plain in a narrow and uncultivated
ridge, broken here and there by jagged crags and copses of wild foliage.
At the base of this lay a marshy and unwholesome pool; and the intent
gaze of Arbaces caught the outline of some living form moving by the
marshes, and stooping ever and anon as if to pluck its rank produce.
'Ho!' said he, aloud, 'I have then, another companion in these unworldly
night--watches. The witch of Vesuvius is abroad. What! doth she, too,
as the credulous imagine--doth she, too, learn the lore of the great
stars? Hath she been uttering foul magic to the moon, or culling (as her
pauses betoken) foul herbs from the venomous marsh? Well, I must see
this fellow-laborer. Whoever strives to know learns that no human lore
is despicable. Despicable only you--ye fat and bloated things--slaves
of luxury--sluggards in thought--who, cultivating nothing but the barren
sense, dream that its poor soil can produce alike the myrtle and the
laurel. No, the wise only can enjoy--to us only true luxury is given,
when mind, brain, invention, experience, thought, learning, imagination,
all contribute like rivers to swell the seas of SENSE!--Ione!'
As Arbaces uttered that last and charmed word, his thoughts sunk at once
into a more deep and profound channel. His steps paused; he took not
his eyes from the ground; once or twice he smiled joyously, and then, as
he turned from his place of vigil, and sought his couch, he muttered,
'If death frowns so near, I will say at least that I have lived--Ione
shall be mine!'
The character of Arbaces was one of those intricate and varied webs, in
which even the mind that sat within it was sometimes confused and
perplexed. In him, the son of a fallen dynasty, the outcast of a sunken
people, was that spirit of discontented pride, which ever rankles in one
of a sterner mould, who feels himself inexorably shut from the sphere in
which his fathers shone, and to which Nature as well as birth no less
entitles himself. This sentiment hath no benevolence; it wars with
society, it sees enemies in mankind. But with this sentiment did not go
its common companion, poverty. Arbaces possessed wealth which equalled
that of most of the Roman nobles; and this enabled him to gratify to the
utmost the passions which had no outlet in business or ambition.
Travelling from clime to clime, and beholding still Rome everywhere, he
increased both his hatred of society and his passion for pleasure. He
was in a vast prison, which, however, he could fill with the ministers
of luxury. He could not escape from the prison, and his only object,
therefore, was to give it the character of the palace. The Egyptians,
from the earliest time, were devoted to the joys of sense; Arbaces
inherited both their appetite for sensuality and the glow of imagination
which struck light from its rottenness. But still, unsocial in his
pleasures as in his graver pursuits, and brooking neither superior nor
equal, he admitted few to his companionship, save the willing slaves of
his profligacy. He was the solitary lord of a crowded harem; but, with
all, he felt condemned to that satiety which is the constant curse of
men whose intellect is above their pursuits, and that which once had
been the impulse of passion froze down to the ordinance of custom.
From the disappointments of sense he sought to raise himself by the
cultivation of knowledge; but as it was not his object to serve mankind,
so he despised that knowledge which is practical and useful. His dark
imagination loved to exercise itself in those more visionary and obscure
researches which are ever the most delightful to a wayward and solitary
mind, and to which he himself was invited by the daring pride of his
disposition and the mysterious traditions of his clime. Dismissing faith
in the confused creeds of the heathen world, he reposed the greatest
faith in the power of human wisdom. He did not know (perhaps no one in
that age distinctly did) the limits which Nature imposes upon our
discoveries. Seeing that the higher we mount in knowledge the more
wonders we behold, he imagined that Nature not only worked miracles in
her ordinary course, but that she might, by the cabala of some master
soul, be diverted from that course itself. Thus he pursued science,
across her appointed boundaries, into the land of perplexity and shadow.
From the truths of astronomy he wandered into astrological fallacy; from
the secrets of chemistry he passed into the spectral labyrinth of magic;
and he who could be sceptical as to the power of the gods, was
credulously superstitious as to the power of man.
The cultivation of magic, carried at that day to a singular height among
the would-be wise, was especially Eastern in its origin; it was alien to
the early philosophy of the Greeks; nor had it been received by them
with favor until Ostanes, who accompanied the army of Xerxes,
introduced, amongst the simple credulities of Hellas, the solemn
superstitions of Zoroaster. Under the Roman emperors it had become,
however, naturalized at Rome (a meet subject for Juvenal's fiery wit).
Intimately connected with magic was the worship of Isis, and the
Egyptian religion was the means by which was extended the devotion to
Egyptian sorcery. The theurgic, or benevolent magic--the goetic, or
dark and evil necromancy--were alike in pre-eminent repute during the
first century of the Christian era; and the marvels of Faustus are not
comparable to those of Apollonius. Kings, courtiers, and sages, all
trembled before the professors of the dread science. And not the least
remarkable of his tribe was the most formidable and profound Arbaces.
His fame and his discoveries were known to all the cultivators of magic;
they even survived himself. But it was not by his real name that he was
honored by the sorcerer and the sage: his real name, indeed, was unknown
in Italy, for 'Arbaces' was not a genuinely Egyptian but a Median
appellation, which, in the admixture and unsettlement of the ancient
races, had become common in the country of the Nile; and there were
various reasons, not only of pride, but of policy (for in youth he had
conspired against the majesty of Rome), which induced him to conceal his
true name and rank. But neither by the name he had borrowed from the
Mede, nor by that which in the colleges of Egypt would have attested his
origin from kings, did the cultivators of magic acknowledge the potent
master. He received from their homage a more mystic appellation, and
was long remembered in Magna Graecia and the Eastern plain by the name
of 'Hermes, the Lord of the Flaming Belt'. His subtle speculations and
boasted attributes of wisdom, recorded in various volumes, were among
those tokens 'of the curious arts' which the Christian converts most
joyfully, yet most fearfully, burnt at Ephesus, depriving posterity of
the proofs of the cunning of the fiend.
The conscience of Arbaces was solely of the intellect--it was awed by no
moral laws. If man imposed these checks upon the herd, so he believed
that man, by superior wisdom, could raise himself above them. 'If (he
reasoned) I have the genius to impose laws, have I not the right to
command my own creations? Still more, have I not the right to
control--to evade--to scorn--the fabrications of yet meaner intellects
than my own?' Thus, if he were a villain, he justified his villainy by
what ought to have made him virtuous--namely, the elevation of his
capacities.
Most men have more or less the passion for power; in Arbaces that
passion corresponded exactly to his character. It was not the passion
for an external and brute authority. He desired not the purple and the
fasces, the insignia of vulgar command. His youthful ambition once
foiled and defeated, scorn had supplied its place--his pride, his
contempt for Rome--Rome, which had become the synonym of the world
(Rome, whose haughty name he regarded with the same disdain as that
which Rome herself lavished upon the barbarian), did not permit him to
aspire to sway over others, for that would render him at once the tool
