Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Read Online Free PDF

Theodosius through his agent the Christian Bishop Theophilus is allowed to bring so much sorrow to Alexandria.
    Father’s calling out to the gods of Egypt might once have amused.   When he was yet young, his god was Thales of Miletus and the god of Thales was water.   Water underlay all, not divinity.   But Thales saw only what he was looking at.   What he was not looking at was invisible to him—which explains how he could be walking in the desert at night, counting the stars, and fall directly into an open well.   In time, Father came to concern himself with Platonic form.   Woven through and through his work is the seven crystalline heavens and each is a heaven of mathematical precision proving the divine in all.   Water has been replaced by heavenly ether.
    But Father’s demand to see the gods of Egypt does not amuse, and it does not amuse us because it does not amuse Father.   He is more than serious, he is adamant.   Lais and I peek hourly in at him.   Where is the father we knew?   Where the man who spoke before eager crowds, who enthralled students come from everywhere to hear him, who stood higher than any in the halls of learning, who came home each night to preside at table and laugh…so much that even Jone might smile.
    He has, at least, allowed the Egyptian to undress him, to wrestle him into a sleeping robe, and then to be covered.   As soon as the covers touched his chin, he pulled them over his head.   To speak with him, we must raise a corner and whisper.   He seldom answers.   He must also have allowed Minkah to shelve his rescued books for they no longer litter the floor.
    Lais picks at her food, feeding most to Paniwi.   I merely stare at mine.   Reading, Jone has eaten two sweet buns and a bowl of soup.
    And how shall I describe Jone?
    She cannot sail.   She is made ill by the sea.   She cannot swim.   She sinks like a slab of cement.   She will not ride.   Horses frighten her.   She refuses to walk or to climb in the heat or the rain or the wind.   In truth, if she need not, she barely moves a muscle.   If she has friend at all, it is the African Ife, first among servants in the House of Theon, a house she runs calmly and precisely.   Jone reads.   She will sit for hours, rooted deep in the earth like a tree, devouring whatever she finds, preferring the epic poets and the novelists, and in the midst of the text, will stop and think about what she reads until one assumes her asleep, an assumption often correct.   She has no taste for mathematics but even these texts she samples.   Other than reading and eating and sleeping, Jone does nothing unless forced to do so.
    Lais once said: “I have too much imagination, Jone too little.”
    At this, I asked, as would anyone, “And I?”
    “Just enough.”
    I pondered her answer for days.   I ponder it still.
    Father is tall.   Lais is tall.   Even I am tall.   But Jone is short and soft and round.   Our mother, who was neither short nor tall, was not round.   Or was she?   I have one memory and one memory only.   At two, I clutch at Lais, who is four and clutches me.   Ife holds us both as we watch our mother die.   Even then, Lais was Lais.   All throughout, she whispered in my ear, slow sweet sounds to keep me from rushing away, to keep me from climbing into our mother’s bed.   Her room reeked of blood, as hot and as thick and as red as the shrieks of her agony.   On the third and last day, by the light of guttering candles, Jone was cut from our mother’s lifeless body.
    Her shrieks have receded from my mind, her size and her shape and her voice, but I shall never forget the sight and the smell of my mother’s dying.
    Though Father has never said so, he would never say so, to lose his wife for Jone was so terrible a blow, even now he finds it hard to look long at his last child.
    Does Jone know this is the cause of her father’s disregard?   Perhaps.   Perhaps not.   We are born who we are.   What we