Is rather to be pitied just now in view of the fact that Julius Caesar is invading his country. Would, if influentially connected, be employed in the two last capacities by a modern European State on the strength of his success in the first.
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.īelzanor is a typical veteran, tough and wilful prompt, capable and crafty where brute force will serve helpless and boyish when it will not: an effective sergeant, an incompetent general, a deplorable dictator. 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. 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. Below them are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace, and soldiers. 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. A great radiance of silver fire, the dawn of a moonlit night, is rising in the east. 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.
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