Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

“My dear lady,” Major Sweet began in tones more consistent with “My good woman”—“My dear lady, there’s no occasion for hysteria. Yes — well, of course, if you insist. Be glad to. No doubt,” said the Major hopefully, “we’ll meet your nephew on our way.”

Clinging to him she appealed to Grant and Alleyn. “I know you think me too hopeless and silly,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Not at all,” Alleyn said politely and Grant muttered something that might have been “claustrophobia.”

Mr. Mailer said to the Major: “There’s a continuation of this stairway that goes up into the basilica. If you’ll take Lady Braceley that way I’ll go back and find Mr. Dorne and send him to her.”

Lady Braceley said: “It’s maddening of him. Honestly !”

Sophy said: “Would you like me to come with you, Lady Braceley?”

“Oh no,” she said. “No. Thank you. Too kind but—” Her voice trailed away. She still gazed at Alleyn and Grant. “She wants an entourage,” Sophy thought.

“Well,” Major Sweet said crossly. “Shall we go?”

He piloted her towards the upper flight of the spiral stairway. “I’ll come back,” he shouted, “as soon as that young fellow presents himself. Hope he’s quick about it.”

“You’ll carry on, won’t you?” Mr. Mailer said to Grant.

“Very well.”

Grant, Alleyn and Sophy embarked on the downward flight. They could hear Lady Braceley’s heels receding up the iron treads together with the duller clank of Major Sweet’s studded brogues. Behind them the Van der Veghels shouted excitedly to each other.

“It is only,” roared the Baroness, “that I do not wish to miss a word, my darlink, that he may let fall upon us.”

“Then on! Go and I will join you. One more picture of the Mercury. Joost one!” cried the Baron.

She assented and immediately fell some distance down the iron stairs. A cry of dismay rose from her husband.

“Mathilde! You are fallen.”

“That is so.”

“You are hurt.”

“Not. I am uninjured. What a joke.”

“On, then.”

“So.”

The descending spiral made some two or three turns. The sound of running water grew louder. They arrived at a short passage. Grant led them along it into a sort of anteroom.

“This is the insula,” he said. “You might call it a group of flats. It was built for a Roman family or families somewhere about the middle of the first century. They were not, of course, Christians. You will see in a moment how they worshiped their god. Come into the triclinium. Which is also the Mithraeum.”

He motioned them into a cave-like chamber. The roof was vaulted and studded with small stones. Massive stone benches ran along the sides and in the centre was an altar.

Grant said: “You know about the Mithraic cult. There’s no need for me-”

“Please! But please ,” Implored the Baroness, “We would like so much! Everythink! Please!”

Alleyn heard Grant say “Oh God!” under his breath and saw him look, almost as if he asked for her support, at Sophy Jason.

And, for her part, Sophy received this appeal, with a ripple of warmth that bewildered her,

“Only if he wants to,” she said,

But Grant, momentarily shutting his eyes, embarked on his task. The Baroness, all eyes and teeth, hung upon his every word. Presently she reached out an imploring hand and whispered; “Excuse! Forgive me. But for my husband to miss this is too much, I call for him.” She did so with a voice that would have done credit to Brunnehilde. He came downstairs punctually and nimbly and in response to her finger on her lips fell at once into a receptive attitude.

Grant caught Sophy’s eye, scowled at her, momentarily shut his own eyes, and in an uneven voice told them about the cult of the god Mithras. It was, he said, a singularly noble religion and persisted, literally underground, after other pagan forms of worship had been abolished in Christian Rome.

“The god Mithras,” he said, and although at first he used formal, guidebook phrases, he spoke so directly to Sophy that they might have been alone together- “the god Mithras was born of a rock. He was worshiped in many parts of the ancient world including England and was, above all, a god of light. Hence his association with Apollo, who commanded him to kill the Bull which is the symbol of fertility. In this task he was helped by a Dog and a Snake but a Scorpion double-crossed him and spilled the Bull’s blood from which all life was created. And in that way evil was let loose upon mankind.”

“Yet another expulsion from Eden?” Sophy said,

“Sort of. Strange, isn’t it? As if blind fingers groped about some impenetrable, basic design.”

“Curse of mankind!” Major Sweet proclaimed.

He had rejoined the party unnoticed and startled them by this eruption. “Religion,” he announced, “Bally-hoo! The lot of them! Scoundrels!”

“Do you think so?” Grant asked mildly. “Mithras doesn’t seem so bad, on the whole. His was a gentle cult for those days. His worship was a Mystery and the initiates passed through seven degrees, It was tough going. They underwent lustral purification, long abstinence and most severe deprivation. Women had no part of it. You wouldn’t have been allowed,” he told Sophy, “to enter this place, still less to touch the altar. Come and look at it.”

“You make me feel I shouldn’t.”

“Ah, no!” cried the Baroness. “We must not be superstitious, Miss Jason. Let us look, because it is very beautiful, see, and most interestink.”

The altar was halfway down the Mithraeum. The slaughter of the Bull was indeed very beautifully carved on one face and the apotheosis of Mithras assisted by Apollo on another.

To Grant’s evident dismay Baron Van der Veghel had produced out of his vast canvas satchel a copy of Simon .

“We must,” he announced, “hear again the wonderful passage. See, Mr. Grant, here is the book. Will the author not read it for us? How this English Simon finds in himself some equivalent to the Mithraic powers. Yes?”

“Ah, no!” Grant ejaculated. “Please!” He looked quickly about and beyond the group of listeners as if to assure himself that there were no more. “That’s not in the bargain,” he said. “Really.” And Alleyn saw him redden. “In any case,” said Grant, “I read abominably. Come and look at Mithras himself.”

And at the far end of the chamber, there was the god in a grotto, being born out of a stony matrix: a sturdy person with a Phrygian cap on his long curls and a plumpish body: neither child nor man.

Alleyn said: “They made sacrifices, didn’t they? In here.”

“Of course, on the altar,” Grant said quickly. “Can you imagine! A torch-lit scene, it would be, and the light would flicker across those stone benches and across the faces of initiates, attenuated and wan from their ordeal. The altar fire raises a quivering column of heat, the sacrificial bull is lugged in: perhaps they hear it bellowing in the passages. There is a passage, you know, running right round the chamber. Probably the bull appears from a doorway behind Mithras. Perhaps it’s garlanded. The acolytes drag it in and the priest receives it. Its head is pulled back, the neck exposed and the knife plunged in. The reek of fresh blood and the stench of the burnt offering fills the Mithraeum. I suppose there are chanted hymns.”

Sophy said drily: “You gave us to understand that the Mithraic cult was a thoroughly nice and, did you say, gentle religion.”

“It was highly moral and comparatively gentle. Loyalty and fidelity were the ultimate virtues. Sacrifice was a necessary ingredient.”

“Same idea,” Major Sweet predictably announced, “behind the whole boiling. Sacrifice. Blood. Flesh. Cannibalism. More refinement in one lot, more brutality in another. Essentially the same.”