"I have studied it," I answered, "for many years. Also the language is spoken in Egypt and elsewhere."
"So it is still spoken, and there is yet an Egypt? And what Pharaoh sits upon the throne? Still one of the spawn of the Persian Ochús, or are the Achæmenians gone, for far is it to the days of Ochús."
"The Persians have been gone for Egypt for nigh two thousand years, and since then the Ptolemies, the Romans, and many others have flourished and held sway upon the Nile, and fallen when their time was ripe," I said, aghast. "What canst thou know of the Persian Artaxerxes?"
She laughed, and made no answer, and again a cold chill went through me. "And Greece," she said; "is there still a Greece? Ah, I loved the Greeks. Beautiful were they as the day, and clever, but fierce at heart and fickle, notwithstanding."
"Yes," I said, "there is a Greece; and, just now, it is once more a people. Yet the Greeks of to-day are not what the Greeks of the old time were, and Greece herself is but a mockery of the Greece that was."
"So! The Hebrews, are they yet at Jerusalem? And does the Temple that the wise king built stand, and if so what God do they worship therein? Is their Messiah come, of whom they preached so much and prophesied so loudly, and doth He rule the earth?"
"The Jews are broken and gone, and the fragments of their people strew the world, and Jerusalem is no more. As for the temple that Herod built----"
"Herod!" she said. "I know not Herod. But go on."
"The Romans burnt it, and the Roman eagles flew across its ruins, and now Judæa is a desert."
"So, so! They were a great people, those Romans, and went straight to their end--ay, they sped to it like Fate, or like their own eagles on their prey!--and left peace behind them."
"Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant," I suggested.
"Ah, thou canst speak the Latin tongue, too!" she said, in surprise. "It hath a strange ring in my ears after all these days, and it seems to me that thy accent does not fall as the Romans put it. Who was it wrote that? I know not the saying, but it is a true one of that great people. It seems that I have found a learned man--one whose hands have held the water of the world's knowledge. Knowest thou Greek also?"
"Yes, oh Queen, and something of Hebrew, but not to speak them well. They are all dead languages now."