feathers of a peacock’s quill; sleep did not tarry in flinging its golden powder over the lovely eyes of the sister of Ptolemy.

While Cleopatra is sleeping, let us mount again to the bridge of the cange, and enjoy the wonderful spectacle of the setting sun. A wide band of violet, strongly warmed by reddish tones towards the west, fills all the lower part of the sky; as it meets the azure zones, the violet tint melts into clear lilac, and is drowned in the blue in a half shade of rose; on the side where the sun, red like a buckler fallen from Vulcan’s furnace, throws burning reflected light, the shades turn to pale lemon, and produce tints like those of turquoises. The water, rippled by an oblique beam, had the flat radiance of a mirror seen from the foil, or a damascened blade; the windings of the river, the reeds, and all the undulations of the bank stand out in firm black lines, which the whitish reflections throw into strong relief. Thanks to this twilight clarity you will see down there, like a grain of dust fallen on quicksilver, a little brown point which trembles in a network of shining threads. Is it a teal that is diving, a tortoise letting itself drift on the stream, a crocodile raising the end of his scaly snout to breathe the less burning evening air, the stomach of a hippopotamus stretching himself on the water’s surface? or else indeed a rock left uncovered by the lowering of the river? for the old Hopi-Mou, Father of the Waters, has indeed need to fill his exhausted urn at the rains of the solstice in the Mountains of the Moon.

It is none of these. By the fragments of Osiris so happily sewn together! it is a man who seems to be walking and skating on the water; now the skiff that bears him can be seen, a real nutshell, a hollowed out fish, three bands of cork fitted together, one for the bottom and two for the sides, the whole solidly tied at the two ends by a cord daubed with bitumen. A man is standing upright, one foot on each side of this frail contrivance, which he guides by a single oar that serves at the same time as rudder, and although the royal cange flies rapidly along under the power of fifty oars, the little black skiff gains visibly upon it.

Cleopatra was wanting some strange incident, something unexpected; this little slim skiff, with its mysterious behaviour, has in our eyes all the appearance of bringing, if not an adventure, at least an adventurer. Perhaps it contains the hero of our story; the thing is not impossible.

It was, in any case, a handsome young man of twenty, with hair so black that it seemed blue, a skin fair as gold, and proportions so perfect that one would have said a bronze of Lysippus; although he had been rowing a long time, he betrayed no sign of fatigue, and on his brow was not a single bead of sweat.

The sun plunged beneath the horizon, and on its jagged disk was drawn the brown silhouette of a distant city that the eye could barely have discovered without this trick of lighting; soon it went down altogether, and the stars, those evening flowering blossoms of the night, opened their golden calices to the azure firmament. The royal cange, followed closely by the little skiff, stopped near a stairway of black marble, each step of which was supported by one of the sphinxes hated by Cleopatra. It was the landing stage of the summer palace.

Cleopatra, leaning on Charmion, passed rapidly like a glittering vision, between a double row of slaves carrying signal torches.

The young man took from the bottom of the boat a large lion skin, threw it on his shoulders, leaped lightly to the ground, drew the skiff up the steep bank, and made his way towards the palace.

III

Who is this young man who, standing on a bit of cork, dares to follow the royal cange, and who can race against fifty rowers of the country of Kush, naked to the waist, and rubbed with palm-tree oil? What motive urges him on and rouses his activity? That is what we are obliged to know in our quality of a poet gifted with the gift of intuition, for whom all men, and even all women, and that is more difficult, should have in their sides the window which Momus craved.