Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (21 page)

If I survive what I now do, it will not be by my own choosing.
 
Not that I choose to die.
 
Nor do I choose to live.
 
I do no choosing at all.

On the first night, responding to
Irisi’s
billowed white sail, my mind still questioned: was there a time when the world was not?
 
If it was not and then it was, something can appear from nothing.
 
If so, how?
 
If not, then all is actually
nothing
, and what we experience as “world” is in truth a magical dream.
 
But do I
know
this?
 
I know what many great minds have been taught, for they have taught me.
 
But who has taught them?
 
How far back does it go, this teaching?

On the second night, I thought only of home.
 
Did Father gnaw at his pillow?
 
Has he yet to notice my absence?
 
Minkah must be half mad with the death of Lais—has he found time in his madness for me?
 
And Jone, Lais’ well loved “mouse.”
 
Who does she seek solace with?

I have determined to remain still in both body and mind and to accept what swims towards me.
 
For something comes, of that I am certain.

It is day again.
 
I have fallen asleep as I do more and more, and as I sleep, tormented by dreams of snakes with scales of fire and trees uprooting from soil to walk the earth and of winged insects writing nonsense on walls, the rat I share my boat with has curled itself around my feet.
 
We are both the warmer for it.

From one instant to the next, I come awake, slapped in the face by a cold hand of water.
 
The sky, pale blue when last I saw it, is a curved metal mirror, and a gelid wind has come up that snaps first here and then there.
 
I know what I see, what I hear, what I smell.
 
A storm comes, a great storm.
 
Stupor flees as a cur flees a stone.
 
I am fully alert to my danger.
 
Weakened by lack of food and water, I have strength enough to grasp the sheet line, causing the
Irisi
to wear on the wind.

The cold deepens by the moment, the wind strengthens, the waves grow farther apart, and each rises higher than the one before.
 
We ship water, the
Irisi
and I, our rigging strained to the utmost.

And now rises a wave to starboard that seems come out of nowhere, and not such a wave as follows one after the other like floods in the Nile or tremors in the earth, but a wave like the tremendous raising up of a great watery head out of the sea, a cobra’s flared head…and in the blue-water cobra are caught fish whose scales gleam with blue light, and strange dark shapes that toss and circle and swirl, torn and twisted up from the deep sea floor.
 
Higher and higher rises the cobra with its cowl of living water until it hangs over the
Irisi
before it falls with the heaving of the sea…and this wave will swamp us.
 
Immediately, I slack my line to spill wind.
 
There is nothing to do but head into this wave, hoping the
Irisi
and I might ride up and over it—and we do.
 
But then, behind, comes another wave larger still, and another behind that, and the
Irisi
takes water over her bow as, head-on, she plunges into the next wave and the next.
 
Salt sea water washes over the gunwale and into the
Irisi’s
sole, and I, holding fast to the oar, plant my bare feet hard into the wet sole so that I might quickly switch headings and quarter the sea, all in the hope I will ride up the waves.
 
But still I ship water, so much so that I am turned side into wave and at that the
Irisi
lays over, her blooded white sail so close to the shipping sea how shall she right herself?

I call out in the crash of wave on wave and the seeming sound of the
Irisi
breaking asunder, “Spirit!
 
Is this what is mine?”

If there is answer, I cannot hear it for then comes the greatest wave of all, not a cobra but a sphinx of a wave, and it breaks over the mast and over me…and I am on the instant washed overboard.
 
For one long moment I grip the gunwale as a shriveled thing, a blackened thing.
 
I am no thing.
 
Through salted lips that bleed, through a salted throat that sears with pain, I cry out, “Take me.
 
Do not take me.
 
Choose!”

My strength deserts me.
 
I cannot hold on.
 
Falling away from the
Irisi
, I endure what I hope will be my last thought.

Let me be with Lais
.

~

I awake, if I awake, to the dark.
 
If hand I still have, I cannot see it.
 
If body I still have, I do not feel it.
 
If sound there is, I cannot hear it.
 
If there is still something of me that might reach out to touch, I cannot move it.
 
If there is still an I and if that I is called a name I dimly perceive as mine—
Hypatia, Hypatia
—I could not prove it.

I have passed beyond the gate, but as what?

Time passes…or it does not.
 
Without sound or sight or touch or taste or smell, how does one tell?

Even dead, I am full of questions.
 
But if dead, I have brought with me my heart.
 
If I would be comforted in death by lack of feeling, to my horror I am not.
 
If I would be met in death by the bliss of those gone before, to my sorrow I am not.
 
But if I would be obscure, lost, abandoned to a meaningless nothing, this I have gained.

I drift farther and farther into deeper and deeper green.
 
I hear, though what I hear is strange beyond strange.
 
Long low musical sounds, as mournful as a widow at a tomb.
 
High short sounds, as curious as a dog at a door.
 
Clicks like insects in the heavy heat of the day.
 
Enveloped by waving fronds of slick yellow green, I too sway as the fronds sway and my hair is like the sea grass.
 
I do not breathe.
 
I have no sense of breathing.
 
I have no sense of a need to breathe.

I grow quiet within.
 
Fans of sea bubbles rise from somewhere far below.
 
I am without mind and all is Mind.
 
Like a sea snake, delight curls up my spine and all the while, lights like tiny stars, dance in the deep waters.
 
I become full of import.
 
I become transported by meaning.
 
I weep at the bottom of the sea.

~

I am not sunk in the sea, but lie on the sand that lies by the edge of the waters.
 
What remains of my tunic is yet wet, but not so wet I am recently washed ashore.
 
I have been here for a space of time.
 
The skin of my legs and my arms and my face are as much sand as the beach is sand.

Flat on my back, I turn my head to see only sea and sand that curves away until I can see no farther.
 
I turn my head again and there is the
Irisi
and beyond the
Irisi
the lighthouse, made small by distance.
 
She is keeled over on her side, her mast snapped in two, her sail torn and lying, as I do, curled in the sand.
 
From a hole in her side creeps my rat.
 
It too lives.

The
Irisi
is not lost, but damaged.
 
I can see she will become again what she was.
 
I too am damaged but I will never become again what I was.
 
A thing that has drowned in the sea is a thing claimed by the sea.

By what means I am returned to life I do not recall.
 
But someone or something has chosen.
 
And I can do nothing but accept what has been decided by my taking the
Irisi
out into the sea, alone, in the season of storms.

I turn my head away from our little boat and begin to count the grains of numinous sand.

~

I return to a house in deepest mourning.
 
With the loss of Lais, the house itself seems lost.
 
The servants go about in silence.
 
Even the horses make no sound.
 
All lives, yet nothing is truly alive.

I return to a city in mourning for Lais was beloved of all.
 
I return to my teaching because I must continue to teach or those of my household who so silently mourn will do so in rags.

But in truth “I” do not return at all.
 
Hypatia as she was is gone.
 
The Hypatia who rose from the sea is as yet undiscovered, and until she is found, I play the part of the Hypatia all know.
 
I do this for myself as well as for others.
 
If I did not, who should I be?

If any suspect the struggle and the change, it is Minkah.

During this time of sorrow I do only one thing that flows out from the Hypatia who recently lived.
 
In the farthest reaches of a night soft with the light of a silvered moon curved as Diana’s Bow, and timed by the flight of Venus, I light the flame that will heat the rare
aqua animus
in which silver, to my mind more noble than gold, will metamorphose into that which is no longer silver, no longer
aqua animus
, but the transcendent
aqua spiritus
.
 
To fast for three days and then to drink of Spiritual Water under the face of the moon, to call upon Isis, Demeter, Inanna, I hope to shine with a light as lustrous as silver for I too will transmute…and in this state I will cry out to Lais.
 
I would have her hear me.
 
Of more worth, I would hear her.

I awaken to find myself lying in a slant of moonlight.
 
Above me stands Paniwi who, for the second time, leaps from a window.
 
As fast as she, I am up and searching for her in the street below our house.
 
She stops to look back just once before becoming no more than shadow…and then a shadow lost in shadows.

“Lais,” I call out, “my life is yours.
 
Live through me.”

~

Later, not knowing why, I cut off my hair.

BOOK
THREE

“I am the First and the Last…I am the knowledge of my inquiry, And the finding of those who seek after me, And the command of those who ask of me, and the power of the powers in my knowledge of the angels who have been sent at my word, And of gods in their seasons by my counsel, And the spirits of every man who exists with me, And of women who dwell with me.”
—The Thunder, Perfect Mind

The Return of the Sun, 399

Hypatia of Alexandria

Six years have passed and with them my life.
 
I am now Hypatia of Alexandria, revered throughout the Empire.
 
The books I write, the students I send out, those who travel great distances merely to hear me speak, the praise of Augustine and of Synesius—all this should swell my heart if not my head.

On this day, Jone believes her Christ was born.
 
Minkah calls it “The Return of the Distant One,” for on this day Het-Heret, without beginning or end, is coaxed back by the sorrowing land, desolate without her.
 
As a Greek, Father prefers to think the sun returns with Persephone, Light bringer, Life giver.
 
By whatever name, cold turns to warm, dark to light, despair to hope.
 
Yet I remain still at heart.
 
Lais died on this day; it is a perfect day for what Minkah and I will do.

If I have grieved, so too has Minkah.
 
I have lost not only my beloved sister and faithful friend, I have lost inspiration…the one true thing that proved Spirit exists.
 
Minkah has lost love.
 
For more than a year, we did not mention her name.
 
But slowly we spoke, a remembrance, a feeling, and as the years passed and each year we sat at her tomb, it is as if she were with us again.
 
Lais has not died.
 
Not so long as I live and Minkah lives.
 
And each year, I grow closer to our Egyptian, seeing him as the brother Father would have him.
 
There are times when I see him as more, but I shudder away this dishonorable thought.
 
He is my brother.
 
His heart lives with Lais.

~

We walk, Ia’eh and Minkah, Desher and I, towards the dark ridge of stone where the books lie hidden, awaiting the day they should be found again.
 
I would urge Desher to speed, but cannot, for Lais’ poems reside in earthen jars and these reside in leather bindings—if they should be broken in my need to see sooner done what was promised!

When Cleopatra ruled, the books numbered four hundred thousand …and this, I think, is true.
 
By the time of Theon of Alexandria, an age in which the books were no longer in the Great Library of the Palace of the Ptolemies, which was also no longer, but housed instead in the “daughter” library of the Serapeum, they numbered three hundred and sixty thousand.
 
Those lost to the burning of Bishop Theophilus amounted to a tenth of these.
 
But no matter if full half were lost, that Minkah brought out from Alexandria so many amazed me then; it amazes me still.
 
He not only carried them here, but brought back an account of where each cave was sited, and which jars were placed in which cave.

“There,” says Minkah, pointing, “an hour more now, maybe less.”

I have waited these six years to bring my sister to the caves.
 
Sas, sissa, sex, sesh
; no matter the language, six is similar and similarly understood.
 
Only in Greek is it named
Hexad
for Greeks never hiss
sssss
, they exhale
h
.

The Christians say their god made the world in six days.
 
But they do not know why, though their book asks:
Doth not nature itself teach you?
 
The Nation of the Bee builds its hives by the number six, the fish orders its scales, the tortoise its shell, the insect its legs, the snake its skin.
 
In six is the perfect balanced three: structure, purpose, order.
 
Father taught, as did Nicomachus of Gerasa before him, that six is the number of completion.

I intend all I do for my sister to be
ma’at
, in perfect balance, as was she.
 
“Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.”
 
This was said by Hesiod who enjoyed many wonderful thoughts.
 
Therefore, Lais will rest in the Cave of Poets with Enheduanna of Ur, with Sappho, with Pindar, with Simonides of Ceos, with Stesichorus, with Telesilla…the list is wondrously endless.

Minkah’s hour has passed.
 
We arrive at the caves.

As he prepares himself, removing his cloak, uncoiling the rope of hemp from Ia’eh’s saddle, I ask that I might choose where best to honor her.

“That choice is your right.”

Something causes me concern.
 
“You would say more?”

“The cave is deep.”

“But you took down much larger jars.”

“I am strong, and I had help.”

“I am strong, and I have you.”

Minkah, who knows me well, does not argue.
 
“What we do, we do for Lais.
 
If we fall, we fall.”

“And if we fall?”

“We shall remain with the poets and Lais will sing as we die.”

“Where is the harm?”

“There is no harm.”

I lay aside my cloak, unpack the large bag Desher has carried as well as she has carried me.
 
Around my waist I tie the rope I too have brought.
 
I tie it also to Minkah’s rope.

Minkah is stronger; on his back he will carry my sister’s jars secured in a padded satchel and the satchel will be tied to his body so that it does not swing out as he climbs.
 
Our two lanterns apiece are tied to an arrangement of woven reeds, left hidden in a niche of rock for just such a return.
 
These weigh little and fit over our shoulders in a most cunning way.
 
This is also how we carry water.

“How clever these, Minkah.”

As he goes first and I follow, the color of his cheek tells me how pleased he is I know he has made them.
 
In moments, the memory of our coming here strips away the years.
 
Once, day after day, books arrived in their hundreds to be placed in twelve chosen caves.
 
Twelve labors of Hercules, twelve disciples of Jesus, twelve ordeals of Gilgamesh, Odysseus sailed twelve ships, Osiris walks with twelve retainers, twelve notes in the chromatic scale…and this only the smallest part of twelves.
 
Twelve numbers the Zodiac.

The cavern we enter is flooded with winter sunlight for half its distance, and I follow with care for this is a cave he alone explored.
 
Far above bats rustle and squeak, on either side the cave stretches out, farther in one direction than another, and as the cool of the day becomes cooler here, so too the light of the day grows dimmer and dimmer.
 
Louder than the bats are the crickets, a din on the ears.

Minkah ignores obvious tunnels, avoids as best he can the bat droppings swarming with tiny black beetles.
 
We cover our noses and mouths with thick cloth against the bitter stench, but there is nothing to stop the watering of my eyes.
 
In moments, my leather riding boots—not even I would go barefoot here—are damp with the droppings of unnumbered bats and the yellow grease of crushed beetles.

He stops.
 
“Here, we must light our lantern.
 
One only, for the second lantern will be needed later.”

This chills me more than the cooler air, but I make no sign.
 
I will follow where he leads, endure what he endures, so that my sister’s poems find the place that awaits them.

Farther into the dark where even bats do not venture, Minkah steps with care round an outcrop of rock half the height of Pharos, then drops to crawl through a tunnel created by fallen rock.
 
When finally we stand again, we are in a low cave full of what seem the carved columns lining the Street of the Soma, but are more as melted tallow in their twists and turns.
 
Minkah points at a small grouping of stones.
 
“These are here to mark the way.
 
Though they seem as random as sand, they are not.”

My Egyptian is long called Companion by a group secretly formed, one Synesius pleaded with me to secretly teach, for some, though they call themselves Christian, hunger for the old wisdom.
 
And how bright he is, how much he learns.
 
I may have only one living sister, but I have a twice-brother of idea and of family.
 
Touching his arm near the scar he no longer hides, I say, “They are seven which remains aloof from other numbers.
 
Not only do these mark the way, but declare that as the true shape of a heptagon eludes, neither will the library be found.”
 
Minkah stares at me for so long I am made uncomfortable.
 
“Do I err?”

“Theon is right to be filled with pride at fathering such as you, and right to be afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Your mind humbles all others.”

I now stare at Minkah until he too is made uncomfortable.
 
“My father fears me?”

“I was wrong to say so.
 
Come.
 
It is only now that we face true danger.”

Squeezing through a tight crevice of jagged rock which tears at my clothing, catches at my hair and the flat basket of reeds on my back, we come out onto a narrow ledge, less than that which encircles the lighthouse.
 
Here, shoulder to shoulder, we must face the wall for balance and touch.
 
Behind us, above us, below us, is nothing.
 
If not for our lanterns it would be blacker than black, for black has a sense to it, a shape.
 
This is an immaculate darkness in which the mind could lose its way.
 
Into mine comes an image of the gentle Didymus who lived without light, whose world was heard with the ear, inhaled through the nose, felt with the hand—was it as dark as this?
 
Here, the world of light has never reached.
 
Tricks are played on the senses, time fades, even dimension.
 
To know for certain which is down is to fall.

I press my hands harder against the cold uneven rock.
 
“You came here! You dared this?”

I am smiled at by lantern light.
 
As Minkah grows older, he grows more comely.
 
I wonder now on a spit of a ledge lit only by our two small lanterns whose light is helpless against the power of the dark, does he remain without the company of women?
 
If Lais causes this, she would not be pleased—and she would tell him so.
 
My sister was not of the body, but Minkah is.
 
As am I.
 
Does he deny his as I deny mine?
 
If so, are we fools?

“Not alone.
 
There were others: Synesius, a few Companions, friends of the streets of Rhakotis who dared it with me.”

“Then these must know where we have hidden the Library!”

“Each came blindfolded.
 
Each left blindfolded.
 
Even Synesius.
 
None were told what we carried.
 
Do not move.
 
It is time for our ropes.
 
When I call, you will follow me down.”

“The first time, how did you know you would find a bottom?”

“I did not know.”

What is there to say to that?
  
But Minkah is already gone, slipping over the ledge by his rope, a loop of which is passed round a thick thumb of stone.
 
Mere moments later, he calls…it could not be terribly far to the invisible floor below.
 
I, too, slip over the ledge, held steady by both Minkah’s rope and my own, only to find myself swinging in space.
 
“Minkah!
 
Once down, how do we climb up?”

“Do as I showed you, use the rope as a ladder.”

And then, I too am down, balancing on broken rocks, clinging to the rope that remains fastened to the ledge high above.

“Light your second lantern, Hypatia.
 
We are here.”

I gasp, though not with dismay.
 
I am filled with wonder.
 
All around are the great sealed jars, and in them, our books, our precious books.
 
There is more.
 
The walls are covered in images: men who are hunters, women who ride strange beasts, animals of every sort, birds, wheels, hands, feet, what seems to be writing.
 
I am struck dumb by the sight, my arm holding up my lantern as close as I can so I might see as much as I can.