That was the last that the hunters saw of Porphyry; after cruising about for a few days they returned. The crew had talked matters over among themselves, and agreed on a story that satisfied their pride. According to them, Belisarius had shot with his bow but missed, and they had then shot with the catapult. The spear had gone straight into Porphyry's open jaws, but Porphyry had bitten the shaft off and gone away bellowing, with the head of the spear deeply embedded in his throat. 'Soon he will die of his wounds,' they boasted, 'and you will recognize our spear-hcad by its colour.' The Greens refused to accept these claims, particularly as Belisarius had not supported them. All that he would say was: 'The militia-men fought their catapult energetically and showed themselves accurate marksmen. I have handed in an official report to his Serenity the Emperor. Doubtless he will publish it, in due course.' But, for the honour of the Blues, Justin withheld the report.
Porphyry continued to destroy nets and shipping for many years after this. The Greens, though convinced that the Blues had been cowards, were not anxious to make fools of themselves by volunteering to put an end to Porphyry.
CHAPTER 5
The Emperor of the Romans and the Great King of the Persians are ancient enemies; yet they think of themselves, together, as the twin eyes of the world and as the joint light-houses of civilization. Each finds the existence of the other a comfort to him in the loneliness of his sacred office, and there is a note of comradeship which constantly recurs in the royal letters that they exchange — in time of war no less than in time of peace. They greet each other like two veteran backgammon players who play together in the wine-shop every day for the price of the day's drinks. One eye, or one light-house, shines over a great part of Europe, and over Asia Minor, and part of Africa; the other, over immense territories in Greater Asia. It is true that in both cases the sovereignty exercised over many regions is only titular. The Persian cannot control such distant satrapies as Bactria and Sogdiana and Arachosia; and the Roman, at the time of which I am writing, had in all but title lost Britain to the Picts and Saxons, Gaul to the Franks and Burgundians, North Africa to the Vandals and Moors, Spain to one nation of Goths, and Italy, with Rome itself, to the other. Nevertheless, the true control of a large part of the world remained, and remains, in the power of one or the other, and so also does the nominal control of another large part.
Fortunately for world peace, there are deserts of sand and great rocky uplands intervening between the two realms for practically the entire length of their common frontier — which runs from the eastern end of the Black Sea through Armenia and behind Syria and Palestine to the northern end of the Red Sea. Seldom in the history of the world have Western armies succeeded in conquering parts of Asia beyond these boundaries, or Eastern armies overflowed into Europe or Africa. Even when this has happened the invasion has not been lasting. Xerxes the Persian failed to conquer Greece, despite the immense armies he brought over into Europe by his bridge of boats across the Hellespont; Alexander the Greek conquered Persia, but his swollen Empire did not survive his death. More usually the invaders from cither side have been defeated close to the frontier; or, if successful, have not attempted to retain the territories occupied, but have retired home after exacting tribute in some form or other. Such conflicts have almost all taken place in Mesopotamia, in the region between the upper waters of Euphrates and Tigris. This is the most convenient campaigning ground — which, however, favours the Persians in the matter of ready access to food depots and garrison towns.
For several centuries after the time of Alexander, the Persian Empire was known as the Parthian because the Arsacids, the ruling dynasty, were of Parthian origin; but, about a hundred years before Constantine turned Christian and transferred the capital of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, a descendant of the old Persian Kings, by name Artaxerxcs, had revolted and overthrown the Arsacids. His new dynasty, the Sassanids, restored the Persian name and tradition to the Empire and has maintained itself in power ever since. (At the time of which I write, Kobad, the nineteenth of the line, wore the regal diadem.) The Sassanids had purified and strengthened the ancient religion of the Persians, which is the worship of fire according to the revelation of the Prophet and Mage Zoroaster. This religion had been much corrupted by Greek philosophy — as the ancient Roman and Jewish religions had also been, and the Christian religion too. (Compare the fine, simple story contained in the four Gospels, obviously born among illiterate peasants and fishermen who had never studied cither grammar or rhetoric, with the wearisome philosophic Christianity of our time!) But King Artaxerxes banished all the philosophers from his realm. They returned to us with Persian notions and inflicted on Christianity a new heresy, the Manichean. These Manichees have hit upon a totally original theory of the nature of Christ. They hold that it was dual, and not only dual but contradictory: Jesus, the historical man, being imperfect and a sinner, and Christ, his spiritual counterpart, being a Divine Deliverer. Manichees are hated both in Persia and Christendom, and I have not a word to say in their defence. The Persians encourage them only in Persian Armenia, in order to weaken the bonds of religious sympathy between that country, which is Christian, and Roman Armenia, which is Christian too and rigidly Orthodox.
By forbidding talk of an unnecessary sort — this is all that philosophy appears to be to a practical person like me — and ordering a return to a primitive directness of action, speech, and thought, Artaxerxes restored the native power of the Persians alike in the civil and military sides of government. Great wars were waged between his descendants and successive Roman Emperors, in which, on the whole, the Persians had the advantage. But the fourteenth of the line was Bahram the Hunter, so called because he had a passion for hunting the wild ass of the desert. He became involved in a war with us because he persecuted Christians as fanatically almost as we persecute our fellow-Christians; and was conquered in battle and forced to pledge his royal honour to keep the peace for a hundred years. His sons and grandsons, for fear of provoking the anger of his ghost, kept the peace strictly, and the hundred years did not expire until modern times. Then, as I have already mentioned, war broke out again, and Anastasius's army, disgracefully led, was disgracefully defeated. This was the campaign which the burgess Simeon had witnessed.
The quarrel had several causes, but the chief of these was the wholesale price of silk. Silk is a material for clothes that is far superior in coolness, lightness, and handsome appearance to any other known. It was invented by a primitive Chinese queen, and for centuries it has been imported from China by sea and land for the use of rich and well-bred people and for dancing girls and prostitutes and such; and from a rare luxury it has become a common vanity. Silk takes dye readily, especially the purple dye of the shell-fish. Cotton is another useful importation from the East, principally from India; it is the fibrous flower of a marshy shrub, and can be woven into a light, tough cloth, cooler than woollens and easy to wash. However, cotton has not the glossiness or fineness of silk. There was never any mystery about cotton; but what the nature and origin of silk was nobody but the Chinese themselves knew, and they would not reveal the secret, because they wished to preserve their most valuable monopoly. Raw silk came to us in yellowish skeins wound on grass-stalks, each skein containing a certain weight of thread. Natural historians guessed that it was the thread of a gigantic Chinese spider, but others believed that it was fibre drawn from the bark of a certain palm-tree, and still others that it was made from the scrapings of the furry undersides of mulberry leaves. However, nobody could prove his own view to be the correct one, because our relations with China have always been maintained through middlemen — except for a short period 400 years ago when our ships sailed directly into the ports of Southern China. We have dealt either with the Persian merchant colony in Ceylon, by the sea-route, or with Persia itself, by the land-route. The silk caravans from China take 150 days to reach the Persian frontier by way of Bokhara and Samarkand, and another eighty to reach our frontier by way of Nisibis on the upper Euphrates; from thence a journey of twenty days brings the silk to Constantinople. The sea-voyage is perhaps less hazardous, but the silk must go through the hands of the Abyssinian traders of the Red Sea, and thus pay a double toll.