Hypatia | Page 7

and perfumes, and children sat upon their knees, and husbands by
their side; and dancing girls, in transparent robes and golden girdles,
tossed their tawny limbs wildly among the throng .... What was the
meaning of it all? Why had it all been? Why had it gone on thus, the
great world, century after century, millennium after millennium, eating
and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, and knowing
nothing better .... how could they know anything better? Their
forefathers had lost the light ages and ages before they were born ....
And Christ had not come for ages and ages after they were dead ....
How could they know? .... And yet they were all in hell .... every one of
them. Every one of these ladies who sat there, with her bushy locks,
and garlands, and jewelled collars, and lotus-flowers, and gauzy dress,
displaying all her slender limbs-who, perhaps, when she was alive,
smiled so sweetly, and went so gaily, and had children, and friends, and
never once thought of what was going to happen to her--what must
happen to her .... She was in hell .... Burning for ever, and ever, and
ever, there below his feet. He stared down on the rocky floors. If he
could but see through them .... and the eye of faith could see through
them .... he should behold her writhing and twisting among the
flickering flame, scorched, glowing .... in everlasting agony, such as the
thought of enduring for a moment made him shudder. He had burnt his
hands once, when a palm-leaf but caught fire .... He recollected what
that was like .... She was enduring ten thousand times more than that
for ever. He should hear her shrieking in vain for a drop of water to
cool her tongue .... He had never heard a human being shriek but
once .... a boy bathing on the opposite Nile bank, whom a crocodile had

dragged down .... and that scream, faint and distant as it came across
the mighty tide, had rung intolerable in his ears for days .... and to think
of all which echoed through those vaults of fire-for ever! Was the
thought bearable!--was it possible! Millions upon millions burning
forever for Adam's fall .... Could God be just in that? ....
It was the temptation of a fiend! He had entered the unhallowed
precincts, where devils still lingered about their ancient shrines; he had
let his eyes devour the abominations of the heathen, and given place to
the devil. He would flee home to confess it all to his father. He would
punish him as he deserved, pray for him, forgive him. And yet could he
tell him all? Could he, dare he confess to him the whole truth--the
insatiable craving to know the mysteries of learning--to see the great
roaring world of men, which had been growing up in him slowly,
month after month, till now it had assumed this fearful shape? He could
stay no longer in the desert. This world which sent all souls to hell--was
it as bad as monks declared it was? It must be, else how could such be
the fruit of it? But it was too awful a thought to be taken on trust. No;
he must go and see.
Filled with such fearful questionings, half-inarticulate and vague, like
the thoughts of a child, the untutored youth went wandering on, till he
reached the edge of the cliff below which lay his home. It lay
pleasantly enough, that lonely Laura, or lane of rude Cyclopean cells,
under the perpetual shadow of the southern wall of crags, amid its
grove of ancient date-trees. A branching cavern in the cliff supplied the
purposes of a chapel, a storehouse, and a hospital; while on the sunny
slope across the glen lay the common gardens of the brotherhood, green
with millet, maize, and beans, among which a tiny streamlet,
husbanded and guided with the most thrifty care, wandered down from
the cliff foot, and spread perpetual verdure over the little plot which
voluntary and fraternal labour had painfully redeemed from the inroads
of the all-devouring sand. For that garden, like everything else in the
Laura, except each brother's seven feet of stone sleeping-hut, was the
common property, and therefore the common care and joy of all. For
the common good, as well as for his own, each man had toiled up the
glen with his palm-leaf basket of black mud from the river Nile, over

whose broad sheet of silver the glen's mouth yawned abrupt. For the
common good, each man had swept the ledges clear of sand, and sown
in the scanty artificial soil, the harvest of which all were to share alike.
To buy clothes, books, and chapel furniture for the common necessities,