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"Oh, yes, of course. Why, he rode at the head of his troops; he was symbol in action. Why, in one battle, the Pharaoh himself might crush two hundred skulls with his bludgeon; he might make his way across the battlefield, executing the wounded and dying in the same manner. When he retired to his tent, his arms would be drenched in blood to the elbows. But remember, it was expected, you see. If the Pharaoh fell ... well, the battle would be over."
Silence.
Ramsey: "You don't want to know these things, do you? And yet modern warfare is ghastly. That recent war in Africa; men were blown apart by gunpowder. And the Civil War in the United States, what a horror. Things change, but they do not change...."
"Exactly. Could you yourself do such a thing? Crush skulls one after another?"
Ramsey smiled. "You are a brave man, aren't you, Lord Elliott, Earl of Rutherford. Yes, I could do it. So could you, if you were there, and you were Pharaoh; you could do it."
The ship plowed on through the grey sea. The coast of Africa loomed. The party was almost over.
It had been another perfect night. Alex had retired early, and Julie had been left alone to dance with Ramses for hours. She'd drunk a little too much wine.
And now as they stood in the tiny low-ceilinged passage outside her stateroom, she felt as always the wrenching, the temptation and the desperation that she mustn't give in to it.
It caught her utterly off guard when Ramses spun her around, crushed her to his chest and kissed her more roughly than usual. There was a painful urgency to it. She found herself fighting, then drawing back on the edge of tears, her hand raised to hit him. She didn't.
"Why do you try to force me?" she said.
The look in his eyes frightened her.
"I'm hungry," he said, all semblance of courtesy lost, "hungry for you, for everything. For food and drink and sunshine and life itself. But above all, for you. It is a pain in me! I grow weary of it."
"God!" she whispered. She put her hands up delicately to cover her face. Why was she resisting? For the moment, she didn't know.
"It's what it does to me, the potion in my veins," he said. "I need nothing, yet nothing fills me. Only love, perhaps. And so I wait." His voice grew quieter. "I wait for you to love me. If that is what is required."
She laughed suddenly. How clear it all was.
"Ah, but with all your wisdom, you have it backwards," she said. "What is required is that you love me."
His face went blank. Then slowly he nodded. He seemed utterly at a loss for words. She could not guess what he was really thinking.
Quickly she opened the door and went inside and sat down alone on the sofa. She put her face in her hands. How childish it had sounded. And yet it was true, it was heartbreakingly true. And she began to cry softly, hoping Rita would not hear her.
Twenty-four hours, the navigator had told him, and we shall dock in Alexandria.
He leaned on the railing of the deck. And peered into the thick mist which covered the water completely.
It was four o'clock. Not even the Earl of Rutherford was about. Samir had been fast asleep when last Ramses visited their rooms. And so he had the deck to himself.
He loved it. He loved the deep rumble of the engines through the great steel hull. He loved the ship's pure power. Ah, the paradox of twentieth-century man amid his great machines and inventions, for he was the same two-legged creature he had ever been, and yet his inventions were begetting inventions.
He drew out a cheroot--one of the sweet, mild smokes which the Earl of Rutherford had given him, and cupping his hand around the match carefully lighted it. He could not see the smoke as it disappeared, yet the thing tasted divine. He closed his eyes and savored the wind, and let himself think of Julie Stratford again now that she was safely barricaded in her little bedchamber.
But Julie Stratford faded. It was Cleopatra he saw. Twenty-four hours and we shall be in Alexandria.
He saw the conference room in the palace of long ago, the long marble table, and she the young Queen--young as Julie Stratford was now--conversing with her ambassadors and advisers.
He watched from an antechamber. He had been gone for a long time, wandering far to the north and to the east, into kingdoms that had not been known to him at all in earlier centuries. And returning the night before, had gone directly to her bedchamber.
All night long they'd made love; the windows had been open to the sea; she had been as hungry for him as he had been for her; for though he had had a hundred women in the preceding months, he loved only Cleopatra. So feverish his lovemaking had been that finally he had almost hurt her; yet she had invited him to go on, her arms holding him tight, her body again and again receiving him.
The audience was over. He watched her dismiss her courtiers. He watched her rise from her chair and come towards him--a tall woman with magnificent bones, and a long slender neck beautifully exposed, her rippling black hair swept back from her face into a circle on the back of her head in the Roman manner.
There was a vaguely defiant expression on her face, and a lift to her chin which accentuated it. It gave an immediate impression of strength, badly needed to temper innate seductiveness.
Only when she had drawn the curtain did she turn to him and smile, her dark eyes firing beautifully.
