Electronic Resource
E-book Caesar and cleopatra
An October night on the Syrian border of Egypt towards the end of
the XXXIII Dynasty, in the year 706 by Roman computation,
afterwards reckoned by Christian computation as 48 B.C. A great
radiance of silver fire, the dawn of a moonlit night, is rising
in the east. The stars and the cloudless sky are our own
contemporaries, nineteen and a half centuries younger than we
know them; but you would not guess that from their appearance.
Below them are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace,
and soldiers. The palace, an old, low, Syrian building of
whitened mud, is not so ugly as Buckingham Palace; and the officers in the courtyard are more highly civilized than modern
English officers: for example, they do not dig up the corpses of
their dead enemies and mutilate them, as we dug up Cromwell and
the Mahdi. They are in two groups: one intent on the gambling of
their captain Belzanor, a warrior of fifty, who, with his spear
on the ground beside his knee, is stooping to throw dice with a
sly-looking young Persian recruit; the other gathered about a
guardsman who has just finished telling a naughty story (still
current in English barracks) at which they are laughing
uproariously. They are about a dozen in number, all highly
aristocratic young Egyptian guardsmen, handsomely equipped with
weapons and armor, very unEnglish in point of not being ashamed
of and uncomfortable in their professional dress; on the
contrary, rather ostentatiously and arrogantly warlike, as
valuing themselves on their military caste.
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