Dominic by Kathleen Robinson

Author:Kathleen Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-05-31T23:19:34+00:00

XXV

I stared straight up at the camel’s swaying head. The homely visage stared back down at me from a ridiculously long neck, like a cobra hovering over a mesmerized mouse. And, the beast had not even stood up yet! The long knobby legs were still folded beneath the hulking body.

“Surely, you don’t expect me to ride that!” I said to the dragoman standing beside the camel’s head.

He grinned. “There’ll be nothing to fear once you are on her back. Or, would you rather walk behind her?”

I shook my head and glanced doubtfully over to see Alexandros and Endymodes being helped to mount their beasts. Before I could reconsider my own ascent, the dragoman seized me and flung me onto the carpeted camel’s humped back, where I clung for my life while the creature immediately heaved its rear-end into the air and struggled to its feet. I felt like I rode a mountain in an earthquake.

After I grew accustomed to the jerky motion of the beast and the long drop to the dirt, I looked back toward the Nile, its meandering blue waters emitting a living green aura of vegetation from its banks. Coming thus far upriver by barge, our little party now rode astride a caravan of hairy hills lumbering along a dusty, palm-shaded road, heading west into the never ending desert.

In the distance, three perfectly geometric mountains floated above a hazy horizon, seeming no more substantial nor connected to the Earth than the bank of clouds that stretched away behind them. The Pyramids! The closer we traveled, the more solid, grander, more indescribably gigantic they became. That men should undertake to build mountains!

I gazed upward in awe toward the peaks of limestone. What were they? Tombs? Monuments? The Pharaohs they were built for are long gone to dust-only silent stone remains. Still, they command a bemused admiration. I guessed each one of those pyramids must have used up the lives of a million slaves who toiled and died under the whip of Egypt-so that now thousands of years later we might come and stare-and wonder why. Did one of those laborers ever step back and run an eye along the vast edge of a pyramid and call it his handiwork? Who could say?

We looked upon the face of the Sphinx also that day. It did not look back at us-it scarcely noticed us. Etched in gargantuan blocks of stone, head raised loftily to capture the sun, eyes far-watching to the blue horizon, the Sphinx appeared as ageless as the Earth. Our lives are as brief as the flash of a firefly in its impassive face. It appears to ponder the deepest secrets of the universe, but I recall that mortals fashioned the Sphinx, too. Without human hands, this mysterious creature would be so many chunks of rock. The wisdom written in its calm features belongs not to the gods, but to humankind.

I imagined time as the Sphinx might view it-circles of change as sure and true as the revolutions

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