Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face. Charles Kingsley

over the heads of the living stream of passengers, the yellow sand-hills of the desert; while at the end of the vista in front of them gleamed the blue harbour, through a network of countless masts.

      At last they reached the quay at the opposite end of the street; and there burst on Philammon’s astonished eyes a vast semicircle of blue sea, ringed with palaces and towers. … He stopped involuntarily; and his little guide stopped also, and looked askance at the young monk, to watch the effect which that grand panorama should produce on him.

      ‘There!—Behold our works! Us Greeks!—us benighted heathens! Look at it and feel yourself what you are, a very small, conceited, ignorant young person, who fancies that your new religion gives you a right to despise every one else. Did Christians make all this? Did Christians build that Pharos there on the left horn—wonder of the world? Did Christians raise that mile-long mole which runs towards the land, with its two drawbridges, connecting the two ports? Did Christians build this esplanade, or this gate of the Sun above our heads? Or that Caesareum on our right here? Look at those obelisks before it!’ And he pointed upwards to those two world-famous ones, one of which still lies on its ancient site, as Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Look up! look up, I say, and feel small—very small indeed! Did Christians raise them, or engrave them from base to point with the wisdom of the ancients? Did Christians build that Museum next to it, or design its statues and its frescoes—now, alas! re-echoing no more to the hummings of the Attic bee? Did they pile up out of the waves that palace beyond it, or that Exchange? or fill that Temple of Neptune with breathing brass and blushing marble? Did they build that Timonium on the point, where Antony, worsted at Actium, forgot his shame in Cleopatra’s arms? Did they quarry out that island of Antirrhodus into a nest of docks, or cover those waters with the sails of every nation under heaven? Speak! Thou son of bats and moles—thou six feet of sand—thou mummy out of the cliff caverns! Can monks do works like these?’

      ‘Other men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours,’ answered Philammon, trying to seem as unconcerned as he could. He was, indeed, too utterly astonished to be angry at anything. The overwhelming vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence of the whole scene; the range of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps, carried on her lap before or since, the extraordinary variety of form-the pure Doric and Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness of the later Roman, and here and there an imitation of the grand elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy colours relieving, while they deepened, the effect of its massive and simple outlines; the eternal repose of that great belt of stone contrasting with the restless ripple of the glittering harbour, and the busy sails which crowded out into the sea beyond, like white doves taking their flight into boundless space?—all dazzled, overpowered, saddened him. … This was the world. … Was it not beautiful? … Must not the men who made all this have been—if not great … yet … he knew not what? Surely they had great souls and noble thoughts in them! Surely there was something godlike in being able to create such things! Not for themselves alone, too; but for a nation—for generations yet unborn. … And there was the sea … and beyond it, nations of men innumerable. … His imagination was dizzy with thinking of them. Were they all doomed—lost? … Had God no love for them?

      At last, recovering himself, he recollected his errand, and again asked his way to the archbishop’s house.

      ‘This way, O youthful nonentity!’ answered the little man, leading the way round the great front of the Caesareum, at the foot of the obelisks.

      Philammon’s eye fell on some new masonry in the pediment, ornamented with Christian symbols.

      ‘How? Is this a church?’

      ‘It is the Caesareum. It has become temporarily a church. The immortal gods have, for the time being, condescended to waive their rights; but it is the Caesareum, nevertheless. This way; down this street to the right. There,’ said he, pointing to a doorway in the side of the Museum, ‘is the last haunt of the Muses—the lecture-room of Hypatia, the school of my unworthiness. And here,’ stopping at the door of a splendid house on the opposite side of the street, ‘is the residence of that blest favourite of Athene—Neith, as the barbarians of Egypt would denominate the goddess—we men of Macedonia retain the time-honoured Grecian nomenclature. … You may put down your basket.’ And he knocked at the door, and delivering the fruit to a black porter, made a polite obeisance to Philammon, and seemed on the point of taking his departure.

      ‘But where is the archbishop’s house?’

      ‘Close to the Serapeium. You cannot miss the place: four hundred columns of marble, now ruined by Christian persecutors, stand on an eminence—’

      ‘But how far off?’

      ‘About three miles; near the gate of the Moon.’

      ‘Why, was not that the gate by which we entered the city on the other side?’

      ‘Exactly so; you will know your way back, having already traversed it.’

      Philammon checked a decidedly carnal inclination to seize the little fellow by the throat, and knock his head against the wall, and contented himself by saying—

      ‘Then do you actually mean to say, you heathen villain, that you have taken me six or seven miles out of my road?’

      ‘Good words young man. If you do me harm, I call for help; we are close to the Jews’ quarter, and there are some thousands there who will swarm out like wasps on the chance of beating a monk to death. Yet that which I have done, I have done with a good purpose. First, politically, or according to practical wisdom—in order that you, not I, might carry the basket. Next, philosophically, or according to the intuitions of the pure reason—in order that you might, by beholding the magnificence of that great civilisation which your fellows wish to destroy, learn that you are an ass, and a tortoise, and a nonentity, and so beholding yourself to be nothing, may be moved to become something.’

      And he moved off.

      Philammon seized him by the collar of his ragged tunic, and held him in a gripe from which the little man, though he twisted like an eel could not escape.

      ‘Peaceably, if you will; if not, by main force. You shall go back with me, and show me every step of the way. It is a just penalty.’

      ‘The philosopher conquers circumstances by submitting to them. I go peaceably. Indeed, the base necessities of the hog-bucket side of existence compel me of themselves back to the Moon-gate, for another early fruit job.’

      So they went back together.

      Now why Philammon’s thoughts should have been running on the next new specimen of womankind to whom he had been introduced, though only in name, let psychologists tell, but certainly, after he had walked some half-mile in silence, he suddenly woke up, as out of many meditations, and asked—

      ‘But who is this Hypatia, of whom you talk so much?’

      ‘Who is Hypatia, rustic? The queen of Alexandria! In wit, Athene; Hera in majesty; in beauty, Aphrodite!’

      ‘And who are they?’ asked Philammon.

      The porter stopped, surveyed him slowly from foot to head with an expression of boundless pity and contempt, and was in the act of walking off in the ecstasy of his disdain, when he was brought to suddenly by Philammon’s strong arm.

      ‘Ah!—I recollect. There is a compact. … Who is Athene? The goddess, giver of wisdom. Hera, spouse of Zeus, queen of the Celestials. Aphrodite, mother of love. … You are not expected to understand.’

      Philammon did understand, however, so much as this, that Hypatia was a very unique and wonderful person in the mind of his little guide; and therefore asked the only further question by which he could as yet test any Alexandrian phenomenon—

      ‘And is she a friend of the patriarch?’

      The porter opened his eyes very wide, put his middle finger in a careful and complicated fashion between his fore and third fingers, and extending it playfully towards Philammon, performed therewith certain mysterious signals,