Aphrodite, Pierre Louÿs [top 50 books to read .txt] 📗

“Where shall we put her?” asked Myrto.

“Near the god.”

“Where is the statue? I have never entered here. I was afraid of the tombs and of the steles. I do not know the Hermanubis.”

“It must be in the center of the little garden. Let us seek it. I came here once when I was a child, while pursuing a lost gazelle. Let us start through the avenue of the white sycamores. We cannot fail to discover it.”

They came to it, in fact.

The violet tints of the first dawn mingled with the moonlight on the marbles. Vague and distant harmony floated among the cypress branches. The rhythmic rustle of the palms, so like to drops of falling rain, shed an illusion of coolness.

Timon opened with effort a pink stone buried in the earth. The sepulcher was hollowed out beneath the hands of the funerary god who made the gesture of the embalmer. It must have contained a cadaver, formerly, but nothing more was found in the cavity save a heap of brownish dust.

The young man descended waist-deep and held out his arms: “Give her to me,” he said to Myrto. “I will lay her well within and we will close the tomb…”

But Rhodis threw herself upon the body.

“No! do not bury her so quickly! I want to see her again! A last time! A last time! Chrysis! my poor Chrysis! Ah! horror… What has she become!…”

Myrtocleia had put aside the covering rolled about the dead and the face had appeared, so rapidly altered that the two young girls recoiled. The cheeks had taken on a square shape, the eyelids and the lips were swollen like six white cushions. Already nothing remained of the more than human beauty. They closed the thick shroud. But slipped her hand under the stuff to place the obolos destined for Charon in Chrysis’s fingers.

Then both, shaken by interminable sobs, placed the relaxed, inert body in Timon’s arms.

And when Chrysis was placed in the depths of the sandy tomb, Timon reopened the winding sheet. He secured the silver obolos in the relaxed fingers, he supported the head with a flat stone; over the body, from the forehead to the knees, he spread the long mass of shadowy golden hair.

Then he came forth from the pit, and the musicians, kneeling before the gaping opening, cut off each other’s young hair, bound it in a single sheaf and buried it with the dead.

TOIONDE PERAS ESKhE TO SYNTAGMA

TUN PERI KhRYSIDA KAI DEMETRION

THE END