THE MONSTER
Rhodes made no response. Still he stood there, peering towards the end
of the chamber. Then of a sudden, to my inexpressible surprise, he
began moving forward--moving towards that monstrous thing which reared
itself up out of the gloom and the shadows, up and up, almost to the
very roof itself.
"What are you doing?" I cried. "I tell you, I saw it move!"
Rhodes paused, but he did not look back.
"It didn't move," he said. "How _could_ it move? It must have been only
the shadows that you saw, Bill."
"Shadows?"
"Just so--shadows."
He moved his light slowly back and forth.
"See that. A certain way you look at it, that thing up there seems to
be moving instead of the shadows."
"But what on earth can it be?" I asked, slowly advancing to his side.
"And what is that white which, though so faint, yet gleams so horribly?
It looks like _teeth_."
"It is teeth," said Milton, whose eyes were better than mine. "But the
thing, of course, is not animate. You just thought that you saw it
move. The thing is simply a man-made monster, like the great Sphinx of
the Pyramids, like the Colossi of Thebes."
We were moving toward it now.
"And look at all those horrors along the walls," I said, "dragons,
serpents, horrors never seen on land, in the air or in the sea--at any
rate, in that world we have left. And look there. There is a demon--I
mean a sculptured demon. And that's what the colossus itself is--a
monstrous ape-bat."
"Not so, Bill. See, it is becoming plainer and plainer, and it is
unequivocally a dragon."
Yes; it was a dragon. And I wondered if a monster more horrible than
this thing before us ever had been fashioned by the wildest imagination
of artist or madman.
The dragon (not carven from the rock but made of bronze) crouched upon
a high rock, its wings outspread. At the base of this rock, upon which
base rested the hind claws of the monster, was a platform some twenty
feet square and raised five or six feet above the floor of the cavern.
In the front and on either side of this platform, there were steps,
and, in the center of it, a stone of curious shape--a stone that sent a
shudder through me.
And up above rose the colossal dragon itself, its scaly foreclaws
gripping the edge of the rock, twenty-five feet or so above the
platform. The neck curved forward and down. The head hung over the
platform, thirty feet or more up in the air--the great jaws wide open,
the forked tongue protruding hungrily, the huge teeth and the huge
eyes sending back the rays from our lights in demonical, indescribably
horrible gleams.
"Talk about Gorgons, Chimeras and Hydras dire!" I exclaimed, and it
was as though unseen things, phantom beings, so eerie were the echoes,
repeated the words in mockery and in gloating. "Why should men create
such a Gorgonic nightmare? And worship it--worship the monster of their
own creating? Look at that stone there in the center of the platform.
Ugh! The things that must have taken place in that spot! The thought
makes the flesh creep and the blood itself turn cold in one's veins!"
"What a dark and fearsome cavern, after all, is the skull of man," said
Milton Rhodes, "a place where bats flit and blind shapes creep and
crawl!"
I turned toward him with a look of surprise.
"That from the man whom I have so often heard sing the Song of the
Mind; that from a scientist, one who has so great an admiration for
Aristotle, Hipparchus, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton and Darwin; from one
who so often has said that the only wonderful thing about man is his
mind and that that mind, in its possibilities, is simply godlike."
"And so say I again, Bill, and so, I am sure, I shall always say. In
its possibilities, remember. But you shouldn't have had scientists
only on your list; you should have added these at least: Homer, Plato,
Saint Augustine, Cicero, Dante and Shakespeare, and, yes, poor old Job
in his Land of Uz. But man is a sort of dual creature, a creature that
achieves the impossible by being in two places at the same time: his
body is in this the Twentieth Century, his mind is still back there in
the Pliocene, with cave-bears, hyenas and saber-toothed tigers."
I uttered a vehement dissent.
"But 'tis so, Bill," said Milton Rhodes, "or at least back there beyond
the year 1492. The world knows but one Aristotle, one Newton, one
Archimedes, one Galileo, one Darwin, one Edison; but Heaven has sent
the world thousands."
"I don't believe it. There are no mute, inglorious--Shakespeares."
"No; there are no mute, inglorious Shakespeares, no mute, inglorious
Newtons: the world, this glorious _mind_ that we hear so much about
destroyed them."
"Or," said I, "they destroyed themselves."
"You are not making the mind's case any brighter, Bill, by putting it
that way. Yes, the mind, the glorious human mind destroyed them and
turned forthwith to grovel in the dust before monsters like this one
before us--before Prejudice, Ignorance, Superstition and Worse."
"What a horrible piece of work, then, is man!"
"Take the average of the human mind," went on Milton Rhodes, "not the
exceptions and those so brilliant and so wonderful, but the average of
all the human minds in all the world today, from our Newtons--if we
have any now--to your savage groveling in the dust before some fetish
or idol made of mud; do that, and the skull of man is found to be just
what I said--a dark and fearsome cavern, a habitat for bats and ghostly
nameless things."
"What a strange, a horrible idea!" I exclaimed.
"The world is proud of its Newtons now," said Rhodes. "But was it
proud of them when they came? Whenever I see a man going into ecstasy
over the wonders and the beauties and the glories of the human
mind--remember, Dante was driven from his country--then I think of
these words, written by the Philosopher of Ferney:
"When we reflect that Newton, Locke, Clarke, and Liebnitz, would have
been persecuted in France, imprisoned at Rome, and burned at Lisbon,
what are we to think of human reason?"
"Alas, you poor, poor humans," said I, "you are only a breed of vile
Yahoos!"
"Oh, don't misunderstand me, Bill. The mind of man is a fearful thing,
but it is wonderful too, as wonderful as it is dreadful; and the more
wonderful, perhaps, than it intrinsically is because of the very
grossness and the very sordidness that it has to conquer. We are prone,
some of us, to think the record of the intellect a shabby one; but,
after all, the record is not, all things considered, so bad as it may
seem at a first glance to be. It might have been better, much better;
but we should rejoice that it is not worse, much worse; that the mind,
the hope of the world, has made even the slightest advance that it has.
Man, however, is on his way at last. And, with Science on his right
hand and Invention on his left, he can not fail to conquer the ape and
the tiger, to win to a future brighter even than the most beautiful of
our brightest dreams."
"Well," said I, turning and seating myself on one of the steps, up
which steps perhaps many victims had been dragged to sacrifice, "this
is a fine time truly and a fine place indeed in which to discuss man
and the glorious destiny that may await him, in view of the fact that
some spot in these cursed caverns may soon be our tomb.
"And," I added, "there come the Dromans."
Never shall I forget that look of awe and horror upon their white faces
when at last they stood there in a huddled group before, almost under,
the great dragon. Rhodes had seated himself beside me, and it was
obvious that this temerity on our part was a source of astonishment to
the Dromans. What dread powers they feared the monster might possess,
I can only conjecture; but I do know that we could never have induced
even Drorathusa herself to thus, on the very steps of his altar, hazard
the wrath of an offended deity.