Short Fiction - Aleksandr Kuprin (best ebook reader for ubuntu .TXT) 📗

from east to west, in a kind of enchanted, incomprehensible fugue. So it was, no doubt, that the soldiers of ancient Rome received their victorious Caesar. The cohorts stationed on the hills and summits first perceived his car of triumph and hailed him from afar with joyful shouts, while from the legions in the plain arose the iron voices of the frenzied warriors, whose ranks already were aflame with the gleam of sparkling eyes.

I listened to this marvelous music with emotion, almost with inspiration. What a strange morning, what an extraordinary morning! Had it reached the cocks of the whole neighborhood, of the whole land, perhaps of all the universe? Who knows? Were they not celebrating, in this morning hour, the year’s longest day? Were they not praising all the charms of summer? The warmth of solar rays; the glowing sands; the odorous, savory herbs; the gladness of their victories in love; the gallant joy of combat, when two robust, spur-armed bodies struggled furiously in air, when the supple wings met with dull blows, when the sharp beaks buried themselves in flesh, and when in a cloud of billowing dust there flew plumes and drops of blood? Or were they, perhaps, glorifying the many-thousandth anniversary of the Ancestral Rooster⁠—the progenitor of all the cocks in the world, invincible warrior, sovereign monarch of immeasurable fields, rivers, and forests?

Or perhaps, I said to myself, before beginning the longest day of his summer’s work, the sun is late by the millionth part of a second; and with all the impatience of devotees, the cocks, the sun’s adorers, deifiers of light and warmth, are crying to their god to unveil his fiery face.

Behold, the sun! No living being⁠—man, beast, or bird⁠—has ever known how to seize the moment of his first appearance, to note the instant when everything in the world grows from pale to rose and from rose to gold. Already the golden flame has penetrated everything⁠—heaven, air, and earth. In an ecstatic effort of their highest forces, the innumerable choir, glorying in their happiness, raise a marvelous hymn. And now, I believe, the solar rays themselves resound, like golden bugles, and the hymn of the cocks glows like the face of the sun. The great Cock of Gold swings up across the firmament in fiery solitude. One is ready to recall again the ancient myth of the Phoenix, the fabulous bird that consumed himself to ashes in the fiery glow of evening to rise again from ashes the next morning, amid the smoking, glowing coals of the East.

The cocks of earth fall silent, one by one, first those near at hand, then those more distant, until at last, almost beyond the limit of my hearing, I hear a faint, sweet pianissimo, which presently dies away.

All day long I was held by the spell of that grand and beautiful music. In the afternoon I went to see some friends. In the middle of the court strutted an enormous gamecock. In the glowing light of the sun, the gold of his tunic, the green and blue reflections of his cuirasse of burnished steel, the satin of his red and white ribbons, flamed in dazzling light. Cautiously approaching, I bent above him to ask: “Was it you, glorious Cock, that sang so beautifully this morning, at the dawn?” He cast an oblique glance of dissatisfaction upon me, turned aside, scratched in the sand to right and left, and grumbled something in a great, hoarse voice. I am not sure I understood aright, and yet I think he said:⁠—

“What’s that to you?”

I took no offense. I am, I know, a man⁠—a poor and feeble man. My dry heart cannot know the sacred ardors of the cock, worshiping his Golden God. Yet is it not permitted to me also to adore, modestly, but after the best fashion that I know, the fair, good sun, eternal, fruitful?

Sulamith

Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.14

The Song of Songs I

King Solomon had not yet attained middle age⁠—forty-five; yet the fame of his wisdom and comeliness, of the grandeur of his life and the pomp of his court, had spread far beyond the limits of Palestine. In Assyria and Phoenicia; in Lower and Upper Aegypt; from ancient Tabriz to Yemen and from Ismar unto Persepolis; on the coast of the Black Sea and upon the islands of the Mediterranean⁠—all uttered his name in wonder, for there was none among the kings like unto him in all his days.

In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of Aegypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Zif,15 did the king undertake the erection of the great temple of the Lord in Mount Moriah, and the building of his palace in Jerusalem. Fourscore thousand stonesquarers and threescore and ten thousand that bare burdens wrought without cease in the mountains, and in the outskirts of the city; while ten thousand hewers that cut timber, out of a number of eight and thirty thousand, were sent each month, by courses, to Lebanon, where they spent a month in labour so arduous that they rested for two months thereafter. Thousands of men tied the cut trees into flotes, and hundreds of seamen brought them by sea to Jaffa, where they were fashioned by Tyrians, skilled to work at turning and carpentry. Only at the rearing of the pyramids of Khephren, Khufu, and Mencheres, at Ghizeh, had such an infinite multitude of labourers been used.

Three thousand and six hundred officers oversaw the works; while Azariah, the son of Nathan, was over the officers⁠—a cruel man and an active, concerning whom had sprung up a rumour that he never slept,