University of Virginia Library

3. III.

The Ionic capitals of the two fair columns of the fallen
temple were still tinged with rosy light on the side
towards the sunset, when the full moon, rising in the
east, burnished the other like a shaft of silver. The
two lights mingled in the sky in a twilight of opal.

“Job,” said I, stooping to reach a handful of sand
as we strolled up the western bank of the river, “can
you resolve me why the poets have chosen to call this
pretty stream the `golden-sanded Pactolus?' Did you
ever see sand of a duller grey?”

“As easy as give you a reason,” answered Job “why
we found the turbidus Hermus, yesterday, the clearest
stream we have forded—why I am no more beautiful
than before, though I have bathed like Venus in the
Scamander—why the pumice of Naxos no longer reduces
the female bust to its virgin proportions—and why
Smyrna and Malta are not the best places for figs and
oranges!”

“And why the old King of Lydia, who possessed
the invisible ring, and kept a devil in his dog's collar,

lies quietly under the earth in the plain below us, and
his ring and his devil were not bequeathed to his successors.
What a pleasant auxiliary to sin must have
been that invisible ring! Spirit of Gyges, thrust thy
finger out of the earth, and commit it once more to a
mortal! Sit down, my dear monster, and let us speculate
in this bright moonshine on the enormities we
would commit.”

As Job was proceeding, in a cautious periphrasis, to
rebuke my irreverent familiarity with the Prince of
Darkness and his works, the twilight had deepened, and
my eye was caught by a steady light twinkling far
above us in the ascending bed of the river. The green
valley wound down from the rear of the Acropolis, and
the single frowning tower stood in broken and strong
relief against the sky, and from the mass of shadow below
peered out, like a star from a cloud-rack, the steady
blaze of a lamp.

“Allons! Job!” said I, making sure of an adventure,
“let us see for whose pleasure a lamp is lit in the
solitude of this ruined city.”

“I could not answer to your honored mother,” said
my scrupulous friend, “if I did not remind you that
this is a spot much frequented by robbers, and that
probably no honest man harbors at that inconvenient
altitude.”

I made a leap over a half-buried frieze that had served
me as a pillow, and commenced the ascent.

“I could as ill answer to your anxious parent,” said
Job, following with uncommon alacrity, “if I did not
partake your dangers when they are inevitable.”

We scrambled up with some difficulty in the darkness,
now rolling into an unseen hollow, now stumbling
over a block of marble, held fast one moment by the
lacerating hooked thorn of Syria, and the next brought
to a stand-still by impenetrable thickets of brushwood.

With a half-hour's toil, however, we stood on a clear
platform of grass, panting and hot, and as I was suggesting
to Job that we had possibly got too high, he
laid his hand on my arm, and, with a sign of silence,
drew me down on the grass beside him.

In a small fairy amphitheatre, half-encircled by a
bend of the Pactolus, and lying a few feet below the
small platform from which we looked, lay six low tents,
disposed in a crescent opposite to that of the stream,
and enclosing a circular area of bright and dewy grass,
of scarce ten feet in diameter. The tents were round,
and laced neatly with wicker work, with their curtain
doors opening inward upon the circle. In the largest
one, which faced nearly down the valley, hung a small
iron lamp of an antique shape, with a wick alight in
one of its two projecting extremities, and beneath it
swung a basket cradle suspended between two stakes,
and kept in motion by a woman apparently of about
forty, whose beauty, but for another more attractive object,
would have rewarded us alone for our toil. The
other tents were closed, and seemed unoccupied, but the
curtain of the one into which our eyes were now straining
with intense eagerness, was looped entirely back to
give admission to the cool night-air, and, in and out,
between the light of the lamp and the full moon, stole
on naked feet a girl of fifteen, whose exqisite symmetry
and unconscious but divine grace of movement filled
my sense of beauty as it had never been filled by the
divinest chisel of the Tribune. She was of the height
and mould of the younger water-nymph in Gibson's
Hylas,[3] with limbs and lips that, had I created and
warmed her to life like Pygmalion, I should have just

hesitated whether or not they wanted another half-shade
of fulness. The large shawl of the East, which
was attached to her girdle, and in more guarded hours
concealed all but her eyes, hung in loose folds from her
waist to her heels, leaving her bust and smoothly-rounded
shoulders entirely bare; and, in strong relief
even upon her clear brown skin, the flakes of her glossy
and raven hair floated over her back, and swept around
her with a grace of a cloud in her indolent motions. A
short petticoat of striped Brusa silk stretched to her
knees, and below appeared the full trowser of the East,
of the same material, narrowed at the ankle, and bound
with what looked in the moonlight an anklet of silver.
A profusion of rings on her fingers, and a gold sequin
on her forehead, suspended from a colored fillet, completed
her dress, and left nothing to be added by the
prude or the painter. She was at that ravishing and
divinest moment of female life, when almost the next
hour would complete her womanhood—like the lotus
ere it lays back to the prying moonlight the snowy leaf
nearest its heart.

She was employed in filling a large jar which stood
at the back of the tent, with water from the Pactolus,
and as she turned with her emptied pitcher, and came
under the full blaze of the lamp in her way outward,
treading lightly lest she should disturb the slumber of
the child in the cradle, and pressing her two round
hands closely to the sides of the vessel, the gradual compression
of my arm by the bony hand which still held
it for sympathy, satisfied me that my own leaping pulse
of admiration found an answering beat in the bosom of
my friend. A silent nod from the woman, whose Greek
profile was turned to us under the lamplight, informed
the lovely water-bearer that her labors were at an end;
and with a gesture expressive of heat, she drew out the
shawl from her girdle, untied the short petticoat, and

threw them aside, and then tripping out into the moonlight,
with only the full silken trowsers from her waist
to her ankles, she sat down on the brink of the small
stream, and with her feet in the water, dropped her
head on her knees, and sat as motionless as marble.

“Gibson should see her now,” I whispered to Job,
“with the glance of the moonlight on that dimpled and
polished back, and her almost glittering hair veiling
about her in such masses, like folds of gossamer!”

“And those slender fingers clasped over her knees,
and the air of melancholy repose which is breathed into
her attitude, and which seems inseparable from those
indolent Asiatics. She is probably a gipsy.”

The noise of the water dashing over a small cascade
a little farther up the stream had covered our approach
and rendered our whispers inaudible. Job's conjecture
was probably right, and we had stumbled on a small
encampment of gipsies,—the men possibly asleep in
those closed tents, or possibly absent at Smyrna. After
a little consultation, I agreed with Job that it would be
impolitic to alarm the camp at night, and resolving on
a visit in the morning, we quietly and unobserved withdrew
from our position, and descended to our own tents
in the ruins of the palace.