[171] These were real affectations of the Cilician pirates.

That night Cornelia and Fabia held each other in their arms for a long time.  They were leaving Rome, leaving Italy, their closest friend at hand was only the quondam slave-boy Agias, yet Cornelia, at least, was happy—­almost as happy as the girl Artemisia; and when she lay down to sleep, it was to enjoy the first sound slumber, unhaunted by dread of trouble, for nigh unto half a year.

Chapter XX

Cleopatra

I

A “clear singing zephyr” out of the west sped the ships on their way.  Down they fared along the coast, past the isle of Capreae, then, leaving the Campanian main behind, cut the blue billows of the Tyrrhenian Sea; all that day and night, and more sail and oar swept them on.  They flew past the beaches of Magna Graecia, then, betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, and Sicilia and its smoke-beclouded cone of AEtna faded out of view, and the long, dark swells of the Ionian Sea caught them.  No feeble merchantman, hugging coasts and headlands, was Demetrius.  He pushed his three barques boldly forward toward the watery sky-line; the rising and setting sun by day and the slowly circling stars by night were all-sufficient pilots; and so the ships flew onward, and, late though the season was, no tempest racked them, no swollen billow tossed them.

Cornelia sat for hours on the poop, beneath a crimson awning, watching the foam scudding out from under the swift-moving keel, and feeling the soft, balmy Notos, the kind wind of the south, now and then puff against her face, when the west wind veered away, and so brought up a whiff of the spices and tropic bloom of the great southern continent, over the parching deserts and the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes and the broad “unharvested sea.”

Cornelia had seen the cone of AEtna sinking away in the west, and then she looked westward no more.  For eastward and ever eastward fared the ships, and on beyond them on pinions of mind flew Cornelia.  To Africa, to the Orient!  And she dreamed of the half-fabulous kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia; of the splendours of Memphis and Nineveh and Susa and Ecbatana; of Eastern kings and Eastern gold, and Eastern pomp and circumstance of war; of Ninus, and Cyrus the Great, and Alexander; of Cheops and Sesostris and Amasis; of the hanging gardens; of the treasures of Sardanapalus; of the labyrinth of Lake Moeris; of a thousand and one things rare and wonderful.  Half was she persuaded that in the East the heart might not ache nor the soul grow cold with pain.  And all life was fair to Cornelia.  She was sure of meeting Drusus soon or late now, if so be the gods—­she could not help using the expression despite her atheism—­spared him in war.  She could wait; she could be very patient.  She was still very young.  And when she counted her remaining years to threescore, they seemed an eternity.  The pall which had rested on her life since her uncle and her lover parted after their stormy interview was lifted; she could smile, could laugh, could breathe in the fresh air, and cry, “How good it all is!”