Caesar and Cleopatra

An Excerpt from the book-

ACT I

An October night on the Syrian border of Egypt towards the end of
the XXXIII Dynasty, in the year 706 by Roman computation, afterwards
reckoned by Christian computation as 48 B.C. A great radiance of silver
fire, the dawn of a moonlit night, is rising in the east. The stars
and the cloudless sky are our own contemporaries, nineteen and a half
centuries younger than we know them; but you would not guess that from
their appearance. Below them are two notable drawbacks of civilization:
a palace, and soldiers. The palace, an old, low, Syrian building of
whitened mud, is not so ugly as Buckingham Palace; and the officers in
the courtyard are more highly civilized than modern English officers:
for example, they do not dig up the corpses of their dead enemies and
mutilate them, as we dug up Cromwell and the Mahdi. They are in two
groups: one intent on the gambling of their captain Belzanor, a warrior
of fifty, who, with his spear on the ground beside his knee, is stooping
to throw dice with a sly-looking young Persian recruit; the other
gathered about a guardsman who has just finished telling a naughty
story (still current in English barracks) at which they are laughing
uproariously. They are about a dozen in number, all highly aristocratic
young Egyptian guardsmen, handsomely equipped with weapons and armor,
very unEnglish in point of not being ashamed of and uncomfortable in
their professional dress; on the contrary, rather ostentatiously and
arrogantly warlike, as valuing themselves on their military caste.

Belzanor is a typical veteran, tough and wilful; prompt, capable and
crafty where brute force will serve; helpless and boyish when it
will not: an effective sergeant, an incompetent general, a deplorable
dictator. Would, if influentially connected, be employed in the two last
capacities by a modern European State on the strength of his success
in the first. Is rather to be pitied just now in view of the fact that
Julius Caesar is invading his country. Not knowing this, is intent on
his game with the Persian, whom, as a foreigner, he considers quite
capable of cheating him.

His subalterns are mostly handsome young fellows whose interest in
the game and the story symbolizes with tolerable completeness the main
interests in life of which they are conscious. Their spears are leaning
against the walls, or lying on the ground ready to their hands. The
corner of the courtyard forms a triangle of which one side is the front
of the palace, with a doorway, the other a wall with a gateway. The
storytellers are on the palace side: the gamblers, on the gateway side.
Close to the gateway, against the wall, is a stone block high enough
to enable a Nubian sentinel, standing on it, to look over the wall. The
yard is lighted by a torch stuck in the wall. As the laughter from the
group round the storyteller dies away, the kneeling Persian, winning the
throw, snatches up the stake from the ground.

BELZANOR. By Apis, Persian, thy gods are good to thee.

THE PERSIAN. Try yet again, O captain. Double or quits!

BELZANOR. No more. I am not in the vein.

THE SENTINEL (poising his javelin as he peers over the wall). Stand. Who
goes there?

They all start, listening. A strange voice replies from without.

VOICE. The bearer of evil tidings.