Swept from the sight and nothing visible,
... Save here and there
An empty tomb, a fragment like a limb
Of some dismembered giant.”
“Og, the King of Bashan, came out against us to battle at Edrei, and the Lord said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him, and all his people, and his land, into thy hand. And we took ... three-score cities of the Kingdom of Og, in Bashan.”—Deut. iii.
“Bashan is the land of sacred romance.” “His mission [Paul’s, Gal., 1: 15] to Bashan seems to have been eminently successful. Heathen temples were converted into churches, and new churches built in every town.” “In the fourth century nearly the whole of the inhabitants were Christian.” “The Christians are now nearly all gone.” “Nowhere else is patriarchal life so fully exemplified.” “Bashan is literally crowded with towns, the majority of them deserted, but not ruined.” “Many are as perfect as if finished only yesterday.”—Porter’s “Giant Cities.”
For a brief period the delightful seasons, the famed rivers, the stately surrounding mountains, the paradisiacal plains, the antiquities, the pleasure gardens and palaces of the city of Damascus, whose name by interpretation is “change,” offered sought-for gratification to the knight[196] and his bride. Harrimai died suddenly after the elopement of his child, the only person on earth whom he truly loved, the only one that had ever successfully defied his mandates. He had purposed disinheriting her for her act, but before he could execute that purpose, death disinherited him. Some said that he died of a broken heart; the physicians said he was taken off by a fit; Sir Charleroy said he died because his proud will was crossed. Rizpah inherited a fortune that helped both her and her husband to forget the old priest’s maledictions by enabling them to enjoy all there was to be enjoyed in Damascus, “the eye of the East.” They gave up unreservedly to pleasure, and centered the world more and more in themselves. Sir Charleroy did this easily, reasoning that, having had so many pains, he was entitled to compensating pleasures. He heard from England; and the news was to the effect that there had been changes and changes in his native land. Many of those he once knew, including his mother, were dead; and he himself was forgotten as dead. Sententiously, bitterly he summed up his feelings: “They thought me dead, and, my mother and her fortune being gone, did not care to find out whether I was dead or not; therefore let them think as they thought.” Rizpah feared the lashings of conscience, and, having given up every thing once dear to enter the life she had, courted forgetfulness of the past, pleasure for the present. The two had within themselves exuberant youth, a wealth of possibilities of happiness; the elements that, like the abundance of the volcano, paints the sky gorgeously when rising heavenward; like it, in the downward course, followed by darkness and disaster. The two, differing in almost[197] every thing but fervor of temperament, were in accord in pursuit of change; they persuaded themselves that they were growing to be like each other, when they were only exalting the one thing, love of excitement, in which they were alike.
Damascus, naturally, in time, became uninteresting and vapid to them both. They wore it out; they wanted new scenes. They heard that a caravan of Mohammedan pilgrims was to pass through their city on the way to Mecca to procure besim balm and holy chaplets, and promptly determined to journey with it; but not to Mecca. The caravan was to pass through Bashan, and the two excitement-seekers desired to visit the latter land of wonders. They readily garbed themselves as Mohammedans, though once they would have loathed such garbing as a defilement. They desired company toward Bashan, and since the time they defied their consciences in order to be wedded to each other, their consciences had been wont to be very submissive in the face of their desires. They explained to themselves the absence of qualms of conscience in the face of a pretense of being Moslems, as the result of a growth toward liberality on their part. The explanation made them comfortably complacent, although the fact was that they had passed far beyond liberalism toward nothingism.
Passing Musmeth and Khubat of the Argob, they tarried after a time at Edrei, just inside the shore line of that mysterious black, lava sea, the Lejah. They were in a country where nature, art and desolation had done their greatest. Following a passing impulse seemed to them to have brought them thither, but one believing in God’s constant providence will readily[198] believe that they were led thither as to a school. There were omen and prophecy confronting them. These fervent souls had gone from hymen’s altar filled with romancings, under a glow of prismatic auroras, never pausing to perceive that from each wedding time there winds a troop of serious years burdened with many a commonplace duty. Their love had been volcanic, their impulses ecstatic, their aims toward things filled with commotion. The wine in their cup was to leave dregs; after the fire there was to be ashes, and it was fitting that they contemplated a specimen of great desolation and dreariness, the result of great fires and great storms. So they were within that wonder of the world, three hundred and fifty square miles of awful plain, filled with ruined towns and cities. Heaved up here and there by jutting basalt rocks, the plain seemed filled with black ice-bergs; ridged at intervals the plain suggested an ocean wave-tossed. Therein is many a cave and cranny place, fit abode for the wild beast or robber; fit abode for ghosts, if one seeks to believe there are such. But therein were only a few green spots, oases, to bid the traveler welcome. Ere long the knight and his consort wore out the Lejah, and, in so doing, in part, wore out themselves. They had a fullness of the pleasure of the kind which lacks recreation. As it was, they stayed there longer than it was well for them to stay.
Rizpah, the passion flower of Gerash, experiencing the supreme exaction of womanhood now, began to droop. Months spent in pursuit of excitement, the great change in her manner of life, as well as the oppressive desolations of her surroundings, had drawn heavily upon her resources physically. Reaction after[199] exaltation, and nervous discord after nervous tension are natural results, always.
The knight discerned the change of temper, and as an anxious novice went about correcting the matter. He knew little concerning woman, except that love of her intoxicates; delighting in the intoxication he sought to stimulate Rizpah’s flagging energies by pushing her onward into the feverish brilliancy that was so delightful to himself. It was an attempt to cure physical impoverishment by the renewal of its causes. She was at times complacent, because incompetent to resist; passive, because enervated. He was most selfish, though not realizing the fact, when trying to be most tender. In fact, the twain were on the rim of a test period in their married life and being unskilled in its common places, unfitted to stand the test. Sir Charleroy had recourse to the only physician he deemed adequate; one whom on account of his dress he called “Old Sheepskin.” This was a guide, with a motly group of Druses assistants, and an unpronouncible name.
“Come, Rizpah, ‘Old Sheepskin Jacket’ has put on his red tunic and leathern girdle to carry us a camel voyage in-sea; if we do not give the man a job he’ll fall to stealing again.”
Rizpah languidly shook her head.
“But we must patronize the man to keep up what little honesty he has, and he has some. He told me but yesterday he’d rather work than rob—though the pay be less, so is the danger less.”
The knight was telling the truth as well as trying to be facetious.
Again Rizpah replied with a weary shake of the[200] head, her hands rising deprecatingly, then falling into her lap as if almost nerveless.
“But, Rizpah, while we are here we ought to fully explore the changeless cities of this dead, black, lava sea. There are none other like this on earth! ’Tis nature’s desperate effort to outrun phantasmagoria.”
Rizpah shook her head and waved her hands; this time vehemently, as if to repel a horror.
“What? A fixed no?”
“No more excursions into this counterpart of hades for me.”
“Well, so be it to-day, at least,” with surrendering tones, the knight replied.
“To-day? All days! Oh, God, remove me from this nightmare!”
So exclaiming, the woman covered her eyes, shuddered and wept hysterically.
Sir Charleroy was almost overcome with sudden amazement. The tears, the terror, the complete change before him, were beyond his comprehension. After a time he again spoke: “Why, this is a sudden freak or frenzy. I thought Rizpah fascinated here!”
“I’ve had my notice from the dread spirits that infest the place to go! Didst thou note what dark and threatening clouds dipped down like vultures upon me when we were last there?” vehemently Rizpah replied.
“I only saw a threatening of rain that came not. It seldom rains in the Lejah.”
“There was rain enough in my poor, shivering, weeping heart!”
“But, I wonder, Rizpah, thou didst not tell me of these feelings before!”
“I could not confide then; I was too jealous!”
[201]
“Jealous? What a word! But of whom, me?”
“I can never forget that thy union with me has made thee alien to thy people and in part neglectful of the faith for which thou didst once fight bravely. I can not forget that the Teutonic knight was the devotee of a bepraised Lady Mary. I thought of this that black day, and I felt as if those dry, grim clouds were her frowns. It was thou, my Christian husband, who named the Lejah, ‘Tartarus,’ and it has been such for some time to me. Its sight has constantly burned me with remorse! That day it seemed to me thy Mary pitied thee and blamed me! I writhed under the thought! I, for a moment, hated her. I felt like climbing some height, and, club in hand with defiant curses, challenging her right to have a finer care of thee than I have. I’d have done it, if thou hadst not been here to laugh at the folly of my frenzy. Ah, husband, if she is or was all that thou dost depict her, she can not love me, and thou must contrast us to my disparagement. I can not forget that thou wert a Christian soldier; sworn to war for her and her son; now thou art wedded to me, a daughter of her and His persecutors!”
“Why, Rizpah, thy changing moods are appalling; thou dost beat the magicians who conjure up the dead, since thou dost create out of nothing the most hideous ghosts to haunt thyself—Maya! Maya!”
“Oh, yes, I know ‘Maya,’ wife of Brahm, by interpretation ‘illusion.’ A myth, as a gibe, has a sharp point, effective because so difficult to parry. But, alas, ridicule, though it easily tear to pieces delusion, is powerless to disperse the gloom that sits in a soul as mine.”
“I’ll not ridicule my Rizpah, but I would bring her light.”
[202]
“Ah? That is, resurrect the peace thou didst murder?”
“Show me one wound my hand has made and I’ll abjectly beg all pardons, attempt any atonement!”
“Dost thou, knight, remember the ruins of the Christian church of Saint George, at Edrei?”
“Certainly.”
“And thy conversation there?”
“Yes, that Saint George was England’s patron saint famed for having slain the dragon which imperiled a king’s daughter.”
“More thou didst say; thou didst expatiate on the princess, saying her name was Alexandra, meaning, ‘friend of mankind’; further, thou saidst there was a queenly woman by name, Mary, daughter of the King of Kings, friend beyond all women of humanity, for whom every true knight was willing to be a Saint George.”
“True enough; but to what purport now is this reminiscence?”
“Thou saidst Saint George was loyal to the death to his faith, and died a martyr!”
“True again. What of it?”
“Was the Teutonic knight thinking of himself as a martyr because wed to a Jewess? I followed thy thoughts, though they were not all spoken. How naturally that day thou didst tell me of thy visions which thou hadst between Gerash and Bozrah when wounded nigh to death. The English saint, knight, very loyal to creed, rebuked in his dreams, by the beating of mighty wings, the departing of his heart’s rose! Oh, why didst thou not tell me this before it was too late! I would have helped thee escape the ingenuous Jewess[203] Thou didst awaken then with dread bleeding, to find thyself pillowed upon the bosom of a simple-hearted loving girl; I now awaken, wounded indeed, but with none to staunch the wounding! Why, de Griffin, didst thou keep this secret so long? Why unfold it now?”
“I’d be the Saint George of Rizpah and slay her dragon, gloom.”
“Poor comfort to offer since the gloom is beyond thy powers! Flout my mood as thou mayst; what use? I vainly denounce it. Thou hast had thy dream; now I’m having mine. I’ll not mock thy insights; thou canst not by bantering jeer change mine. My Lejah omens assure me that I’m to have a rain of tears and more; some way thy Mary will be their cause.”
Join or Log In!
You need to log in to continue reading
(Left Keyword <-) Previous:
CHAPTER XIII. FROM RAMOTH GILEAD TO DAMASCUS
Back
Next:
CHAPTER XV. THE REVELS OF MEN AND RITES OF THEIR GODDESSES.
(Right Keyword:->)