Alexandria

In the capital of the world, its enchanted Greek-Coptic city, with its monks, its merchants, its acrobats, its representatives, its seducers, and its craftsmen, its patriarchs and its prostitutes, its mobs, its seductresses, its helmets, its one and only non-repeated library, its baths with thousands, its secret underground churches, and the fine marble columns of its temples. Its torments and festivals. The circus, the lighthouse, the theater, the temples of Jupiter, Zeus, and Amun, the altars in the squares, the wine presses, the golden granaries, the sails of ships spread and tied with ropes in the eastern harbour, and the remaining persecuted remnants of the priests of the ancient religion and the martyrs of the new Jesuit heresy, and the Jewish philosophers, geographers, naturalists, and poets who painted ancient Greek Persian with dyes and decorations. There is no life in it, and the people, the people, the people who have no name, are in multitudes of their poor and never-ending lives, they eat, they suffer, they have mercy, they seek mercy, they buy a martyr, they are torn apart with indescribable healing, and they die without meaning. No one knows them, and no one will ever know them.