of roasting sun between me and
home!.... I must hire a gig, or a litter, or some-thing, off the next
stand .... with a driver who has been eating onions.... and of course
there is not a stand for the next half-mile. Oh, divine aether! as
Prometheus has it, and ye swift-winged breezes (I wish there were any
here), when will it all be over? Three-and-thirty years have I endured
already of this Babel of knaves and fools; and with this abominable good
health of mine, which won't even help me with gout or indigestion, I am
likely to have three-and-thirty years more of it....I know nothing, and
I care for nothing, and I expect nothing; and I actually can't take the
trouble to prick a hole in myself, and let the very small amount of
wits out, to see something really worth seeing, and try its strength at
something really worth doing--if, after all, the other side the grave
does not turn out to be just as stupid as this one.... When will it be
all over, and I in Abraham's bosom--or any one else's, provided it be
not a woman's?'

CHAPTER V: A DAY IN ALEXANDRIA

In the meanwhile, Philammon, with his hosts, the Goths, had been
slipping down the stream. Passing, one after another, world-old cities
now dwindled to decaying towns, and numberless canal-mouths, now fast
falling into ruin with the fields to which they ensured fertility,
under the pressure of Roman extortion and misrule, they had entered
one evening the mouth of the great canal of Alexandria, slid easily all
night across the star-bespangled shadows of Lake Mareotis, and found
themselves, when the next morning dawned, among the countless masts and
noisy quays of the greatest seaport in the world. The motley crowd of
foreigners, the hubbub of all dialects from the Crimea to Cadiz, the
vast piles of merchandise, and heaps of wheat, lying unsheltered in that
rainless air, the huge bulk of the corn-ships lading for Rome, whose
tall sides rose story over story, like floating palaces, above the
buildings of some inner dock--these sights, and a hundred more, made the
young monk think that the world did not look at first sight a thing to
be despised. In front of heaps of fruit, fresh from the market-boats,
black groups of glossy negro slaves were basking and laughing on the
quay, looking anxiously and coquettishly round in hopes of a purchaser;
they evidently did not think the change from desert toil to city
luxuries a change for the worse. Philammon turned away his eyes f