His body simply threw off the effects of things. Yet he could taste and smell and feel. And the strange tinny music winding out of the gramophone gave him so much pleasure that he felt he might start weeping again.
So much to enjoy. So much to study! Since coming back from the museum, he had torn through five or six books in the library of Lawrence Stratford. He had read complex and exhilarating discussions of the" Industrial Revolution." He had dabbled a bit in the ideas of Karl Marx, which were sheer nonsense, as far as he could see. A rich man, it seemed, writing about poor men when he did not know how their minds worked. He had reexamined the world globe many times as he memorized the names of continents and countries. Russia, now that was an interesting country. And this America was the greatest mystery of all.
Then he had read Plutarch, the liar! How dare the bastard say that Cleopatra had tried to seduce Octavian, her last conqueror. What a monstrous idea! There was something about Plutarch which made him think of old men gossiping as they gathered on benches in public squares. No gravitas to the history.
But enough. Why think about that! There was a sudden confusion in him. What troubled him, made him a little afraid?
Not all the wonders he'd discovered in this twentieth-century world since morning; not the coarse abrasive English language, which he had mastered before afternoon; not the length of time (hat had passed since he'd closed his eyes. What troubled him was this entire question of the way his body constantly restored itself - wounds healing; cramped feet relaxing; brandy having little or no effect.
It was troubling him because for the first time in all his long existence he was beginning to wonder if his heart and mind were not subject to some similar system of uncontrollable renewal. Did mental pain leave him as easily as physical pain?
Not possible. Yet if that was not so, why hadn't his little trip to the British Museum made him cry out in agony? Numb and silent, he had walked among mummies and sarcophagi and manuscripts stolen from all the dynasties of Egypt even to the time in which he had retreated from Alexandria to his last tomb in the Egyptian hills. Yet Samir had been the one who suffered, beautiful golden-skinned Samir, whose eyes were black as Ramses' had once been. Great Egyptian eyes, those, the same after countless centuries. Samir, his child.
It was not that the memories weren't vivid. They were. Like yesterday, it seemed, that he had watched them carry the coffin of Cleopatra out of the mausoleum and down to the Roman cemetery by the sea. He could smell that sea again if he wanted to. He could hear the weeping all around him. He could feel the stones through the thin leather of his sandals as he'd felt it then.
Beside Mark Antony she had asked to be buried; and so it had been done. He'd stood in the crowds, a common man, with his coarse cloak wrapped around him, listening to the wailing of the mourners." Our great Queen is dead."
His grief had been an agony. So why was he not weeping now? He sat in this room staring at her marble bust, and the pain was just beyond his reach.
"Cleopatra," he whispered. Playfully, he envisioned her not as the woman on her deathbed, but as the young girt who had awakened him: Rise, Ramses the Great. A Queen of Egypt calls you. Come out of your deep sleep and be my counsel in this time of woe.
No, he did not feel either the joy or the pain.
Did this mean the capacity to suffer had been affected by the powerful elixir that never ceased its work in his veins? Or was it something else, that he had long suspected; that when he slept, he somehow knew the passage of time? Somehow even in that unconscious state, he travelled away from the things that had hurt him; and his dreams were only one indication of the reasoning that went on in darkness and in stillness. Without panic, he had known before the sunlight ever touched his body mat hundreds of years had passed.
Perhaps he was merely so shocked by all he'd seen about him in the twentieth century that the memories had not attained their fall emotional force. The pain would return all at once