Costas Komborozos

Alexander Costas Komborozos

This new infinity knows no name. It is the past receding beneath another past, a future overtaking another future. It is an Alexander overshadowing another Alexander. Then everything concealed and concealing spreads out. It becomes an undulating sheet of sand upon which memory and yearning tread side by side. Gaugamela is a blinding, heaving mass, sand and dust swirling in a destructive embrace. He observes the unblemished white of the desert. His gaze falls upon burned skulls disgorged from crude, lifeless terrain. He recalls the heat of battle, the undiluted tremor of its beastly movements. The mere thought of conquest spreads before him like the solidifying half-whisper of endless Asian horizons ending. A field of unhealed scars returns and speaks like memory. But his heart is already far afield. His mind drains the air of sulphurous heat, silencing the unquiet bowels trembling beneath. One memory after another aligns itself with an outline blurred beyond recognition, the edge upon which memories of conquest fearlessly tread. The winds move with pulverizing force. Alexander treads upon the sand with meticulous ease. He sees the sands stretching deep into an oblivion battered bone-white. A continent contracts in his eyes, but then it spreads out unfathomably like endless ocean blue. The scene before him is a general's dream, and the impenetrable scene beyond it an emperor's. But he is a king. A soldier-king. A king yoking continent after continent with nearly the same breathless facility as boots crunching the sand. In a desert in which all scars fade, his footprints remain. He imagines the desert being a creature made of sand and dust. The creature instantly gains monstrous proportions and breathes a deathly roar. Alexander strides as though across a shining, spotless marble floor, and the creature falls deathly silent upon his approach. Then the creature dissolves and becomes the blanched horizon that was before. He looks at something half-buried in the sand. He believes that he should not leave destiny's sand untrodden. Alexander kneels and then scrapes away the sand. He sees that it is a skull, an alabaster skull. He holds the skull and peers into its orb-deprived caverns. Then he realizes that this is all a dream. Wake me, destiny, for I have now tread in your sands, he tells himself. Then the horizon melts like molten gold, a war-cracked crown envious of sublime uniformity. Alexander feels the dream reaching its end. A bright light slowly sweeps the horizon, and he feels the receding desert reflecting a quiet expansion within him. He sees a vast army approaching, and he feels the dread-fueled advance of the Persian king. He imagines a vast army contracting, and then he holds the last of the receding desert sand in his shimmering fist. Darius will come. Darius will die. Then inner worlds collide. Fear clashes with bravery. But then bravery conquers. It surpasses the dimming fog of senseless fright, but only to find a world already conquered by unknowing. Alexander imagines himself as suddenly being surrounded by ice. He sees himself as a traveler moving through a landscape consumed by frost. The more he approaches the horizon's edge, the more it grows distant. The warmth flees his body. But then it surpasses all coldness again. Courage outlasts fear, a stream shining clear with predictability. But war treads alongside me, its belabored breath nearly consuming mine. Valiance outraces fright, and then dread returns and blackens bravery's sky. Near- death surpasses life's totality, but then life's glorious length renders death's darkness meek, until tomorrow looks nothing like tomorrow.