I had a strange dream last night. Like most dreams, it was a sort of
wild comment on the thought that had possessed me in my waking hours.
We had been talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked from
day to day into a future that stalked before us like a wall of
impenetrable night that we could almost touch and yet never could
overtake, how all the prophets (including ourselves) had been found
out, and how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as worthless
as the guesses of the foolish. Ah, if we could only get behind this
grim mask of the present and see the future stretching before us ten
years, twenty years, fifty years hence, what would we give? What a
strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writhing, surging,
blood-stained Europe. With what a shock we should discover the meaning
of the terror. But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable
secrecy. We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has written; we cannot
tell a syllable that it will write....
You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked like this....
When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some strange reminiscence of
myself, like an echo that had gone on reverberating down countless
centuries. It was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, and
now stood far beyond the confines of Time. I was alone in the world.
I forded rivers and climbed mountains and traversed endless plains; I
came upon the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed once
to have been railways, fragments of arches that had once sustained
great bridges, dockyards where the skeletons of mighty ships lay
rotting in garments of seaweed and slime. I seemed, with the magic of
dreams, to see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map. I
traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely altered they
were, and with invisible power passed breathlessly from continent to
continent, from desolation to desolation. Again and again I cried out
in the agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only startled a
solitude that was infinite. Time seemed to have no meaning in this
appalling vacancy. I did not live hours or days, but centuries, aeons,
eternities. Only on the mountains and in the deserts did I see
anything that recalled the world I had known in the immeasurable
backward of time. Standing on the snowy ridge of the Finsteraarjoch I
saw the pink of the dawn still flushing the summits of the Southern
Alps, and in the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man. He seemed stricken with
unthinkable years. His gums were toothless, his eyes bleared, his
figure shrunken to a pitiful tenuity. He sat at the foot of the
Sphinx, fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled to himself in
an infantile treble. As I approached he peered at me through his dim
eyes, and to my question as to who he was he replied in a thin, queasy
voice:
"I am Odin--hee! hee! I possess the earth, the whole earth ... I and
my sword ... we own it all ... we and the Sphinx ... we own it all....
All ... hee! hee!..." And he turned and began to fondle his sword
again.
"But where are the others? What happened to them?"
"Gone ... hee! hee! .... All gone.... It took thousands of years to do
it, but they've all gone. It never would have been done if man hadn't
become civilised. For centuries and centuries men tried to kill
themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and catapults, but they
couldn't do it. Then they invented gunpowder, but that was no better.
The victory really began when man became civilised and discovered
modern science. He learned to fly in the air and sail under the water,
and move mountains and make lightnings, and turn the iron of the hills
into great ships and the coal beneath the earth into incredible forms
of heat and power. And all the time he went on saying what a good
world he was making ... hee! hee! Such a wonderful Machine.... Such a
peaceful Machine ... hee! hee! ... Age of Reason, he said.... Age of
universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said.... hee! hee! ...
We have been seeking God for thousands of years, he said, and now we
have found Him. We have made Him ourselves--out of our own heads. We
got tired of looking for Him in the soul. Now we have found Him in the
laboratory. We have made Him out of all the energies of the earth.
Great is our God of the Machine. Honour, blessing, glory, power--power
of things. Power! Power! Power!"
His voice rose to a senile shriek.
"And all the time ... hee, hee! ... all the time he was making the
Machine for me--me, Odin, me and my servants, the despots, the kings,
the tyrants, the dictators, the enemies of men. I laughed ... hee,
hee! ... I laughed as I saw his Machine growing vaster and vaster for
the day of his doom, growing beyond his own comprehension, making him
more and more the slave of itself, the fly on its gigantic wheel. What
a willing servant is this Power we have made, he said. What a friend
of Man. How wonderful we are to have created this Machine of
Benevolence...
"And it was mine ... hee, hee! ... Mine. And when it was completed I
handed it over to my servants. And the Machine of Benevolence became
the Monster of Destruction. First one tyrant seized it and fell; then
another and he fell. This white race got the Machine for a season,
then another white race got it; then the yellow race. And they all
perished ... hee, hee! ... They all perished.... And with every
victory the Machine grew more deadly. All the gifts of the earth and
all the labour of men went to feed its mighty hunger. It devoured its
creators by thousands, by millions, by nations. It slew, it poisoned,
it burned, it starved. The whole earth became a desolation....
"And now I own it all ... hee, hee! ... I and my sword. We own it
all.... We and the Sphinx." His voice, which had grown strong with
excitement, sank back to its infantile treble.
"And what was the meaning of it all?" I asked. "And what will you do
with your victory?"
"The meaning ... the meaning ... I don't know.... I've come to ask the
Sphinx. I've sat here for years, centuries ... oh, so long. But she
says nothing--only looks out over the desert with that terrible calm,
as though she knew the riddle but would never tell it.... Look ...
look now.... Aren't her lips..."
His thin voice rose to a tremulous cry. The sword shook in his palsied
hands. His rheumy eyes looked up at the image with a senile frenzy.
I looked up, too.... Yes, surely the lips were moving. They were
about to open. I should hear at last the reading of the enigma of the
strange beings who made a God that slew them.... The lips were open
now ... there was a rattling in throat....
But as I waited for the words that were struggling into utterance there
came a sudden wind, hot and blinding and thick with the dust of the
desert. It blotted out the sun and darkened the vision of things. The
Sphinx vanished in the swirling folds of the storm, the figure of the
Man faded into the general gloom, and I was left alone in the midst of
nothingness....