Homo Sum | Page 2

to the
south of it. It is this that has borne the name, at any rate since the time
of Justinian; the celebrated convent of the Transfiguration lies at its

foot, and it has been commonly accepted as the Sinai of Scripture. In
the description of my journey through Arabia Petraea I have
endeavored to bring fresh proof of the view, first introduced by Lepsius,
that the giant-mountain, now called Serbal, must be regarded as the
mount on which the law was given--and was indeed so regarded before
the time of Justinian--and not the Sinai of the monks.
As regards the stone house of the Senator Petrus, with its windows
opening on the street--contrary to eastern custom--I may remark, in
anticipation of well founded doubts, that to this day wonderfully
well-preserved fire-proof walls stand in the oasis of Pharan, the remains
of a pretty large number of similar buildings.
But these and such external details hold a quite secondary place in this
study of a soul. While in my earlier romances the scholar was
compelled to make concessions to the poet and the poet to the scholar,
in this one I have not attempted to instruct, nor sought to clothe the
outcome of my studies in forms of flesh and blood; I have aimed at
absolutely nothing but to give artistic expression to the vivid realization
of an idea that had deeply stirred my soul. The simple figures whose
inmost being I have endeavored to reveal to the reader fill the canvas of
a picture where, in the dark background, rolls the flowing ocean of the
world's history.
The Latin title was suggested to me by an often used motto which
exactly agrees with the fundamental view to which I have been led by
my meditations on the mind and being of man; even of those men who
deem that they have climbed the very highest steps of that stair which
leads into the Heavens.
In the Heautontimorumenos of Terence, Chremes answers his neighbor
Menedemus (Act I, SC. I, v. 25) "Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum
puto," which Donner translates literally:
"I am human, nothing that is human can I regard as alien to me."
But Cicero and Seneca already used this line as a proverb, and in a
sense which far transcends that which it would seem to convey in

context with the passage whence it is taken; and as I coincide with
them, I have transferred it to the title-page of this book with this
meaning:
"I am a man; and I feel that I am above all else a man."
Leipzig, November 11, 1877.
GEORG EBERS.

HOMO SUM.
CHAPTER I.
Rocks-naked, hard, red-brown rocks all round; not a bush, not a blade,
not a clinging moss such as elsewhere nature has lightly flung on the
rocky surface of the heights, as if a breath of her creative life had softly
touched the barren stone. Nothing but smooth granite, and above it a
sky as bare of cloud as the rocks are of shrubs and herbs.
And yet in every cave of the mountain wall there moves a human life;
two small grey birds too float softly in the pure, light air of the desert
that glows in the noonday sun, and then they vanish behind a range of
cliffs, which shuts in the deep gorge as though it were a wall built by
man.
There it is pleasant enough, for a spring bedews the stony soil and there,
as wherever any moisture touches the desert, aromatic plants thrive,
and umbrageous bushes grow. When Osiris embraced the goddess of
the desert--so runs the Egyptian myth--he left his green wreath on her
couch.
But at the time and in the sphere where our history moves the old
legends are no longer known or are ignored. We must carry the reader
back to the beginning of the thirtieth year of the fourth century after the
birth of the Saviour, and away to the mountains of Sinai on whose
sacred ground solitary anchorites have for some few years been

dwelling--men weary of the world, and vowed to penitence, but as yet
without connection or rule among themselves.
Near the spring in the little ravine of which we have spoken grows a
many-branched feathery palm, but it does not shelter it from the
piercing rays of the sun of those latitudes; it seems only to protect the
roots of the tree itself; still the feathered boughs are strong enough to
support a small thread-bare blue cloth, which projects like a penthouse,
screening the face of a girl who lies dreaming, stretched at full-length
on the glowing stones, while a few yellowish mountain-goats spring
from stone to stone in search of pasture as gaily as though they found
the midday heat pleasant and