Free Count Belisarius by Robert Graves Page B

the attendant well. In the synagogue at Nazareth he also deposited the identical horn-book from which the infant Jesus had been set to learn His alphabet, and the bench on which He sat with other children. My master Barak used to tell the pilgrims: ‘This bench may be easily moved or lifted by Christians, but no Jew can stir it.’ He had a Jew or two always within call to prove the truth of one-half of this assertion; the pilgrims themselves could prove the other half, if they paid for the privilege.
    To the Church of the Holy Sepulchre my master Barak had no need to make any pious additions, for the brazen lamp which had once been placed at Jesus’s head was already there, burning day and night; and the stone by which the tomb was closed lay there, too, at the entrance. It was as large as a millstone, and encrusted with gold and precious stones. From iron rods on the walls of the shrine hung armlets, bracelets, chains, necklaces, coronets, waist-bands, sword-belts, crowns bequeathed by Emperors, of pure gold and Indian jewels, and a great number of rich head-ornaments bequeathed by Empresses. The whole tomb (which recalled the winning-post at the Hippodrome on New Year’s Day hung with prizes for the Inaugural Stakes) was plated with solid silver – walls, floor and roof. An altar stood in front of the tomb, under hanging golden lamps in the form of suns.
    Barak visited Constantinople one summer (the pilgrim-seasons being spring and autumn) to sell relics to the monks there. He hadforged a document purporting to be a testimonial from the Patriarch of Alexandria that a certain couch was the identical one on which Jesus had reclined at the Last Supper. He was asking ten thousand gold pieces for it. It happened that the private secretary to the Patriarch had just arrived in the City; hearing of the matter, he denounced the testimonial as a forgery. But my master Barak, not wishing to be scourged and mutilated as the law required, fled away at once, and took ship, and was not seen again in our Eastern part of the Empire for a great many years. Then a warrant was sworn against him by the landlord from whom he had rented a furnished house. This landlord was a Hippodrome charioteer, the father of the girl Antonina. He was owed a considerable sum of money; and the judge allowed him to distrain upon any goods that Barak had left behind. But Barak had succeeded in carrying away all his possessions except myself; for I had been sent by him on a shopping errand and had lost myself in the City streets. When I came home at last, very late, expecting a severe beating, I found my master Barak gone. Thus it was that I passed into the ownership of the charioteer, who handed me over to his wife to help in the kitchen, who later bequeathed me to her daughter Antonina, whom I served faithfully for more than fifty years.

CHAPTER 3
MEGARAEAN SPHINXES
    You may perhaps have been puzzled by the term ‘Megaraean Sphinx’: that was the name given by some epigrammatist or other to the prostitute of Constantinople. The Sphinx was a devouring monster that kept its secrets to itself, and it was from the Greek city of Megara that Constantinople was first colonized. The story is that the prospective colonists were instructed by an oracle to sail to the north-east until they came to the land opposite to ‘the city of the blind men’; they were to found their own city there, which would become the finest in the world. So they sailed north-east across the Aegean, and up the Hellespont until they reached the Bosphorus, and there they founded their city on the European bank – opposite Hieron, which was already colonized. This was clearly the place intended, for the men of Hieron had built their city on the more unfavourable bank, where currents were troublesome, fish scarce, and the ground unfertile, when they could readily have chosen the other bank with its fine natural harbour, the Golden Horn – so blind they were.