So winter came, and there was still nothing to record, save the
witchery of the muffled white world with its blue shadows and
fantastic ice friezes and stalactites. Great icicles glittered on the
rocks, showing all the hues beneath. Peloni, wrapped in his blanket,
crouched on his monument over a log that burnt in an improvised grate.
It was very lonely. He had heard from no one, neither from Noah, nor
Smith, nor any Jewish or even Indian pilgrim to the New Jerusalem,
and the stock of winter provisions had exhausted his little hoard of
coin. The old despair began to twine round him like some serpent of
ice. As he listened in such moods to the distant thunder of
Niagara--which waxed louder as the air grew heavier, till it quite
dominated the ever present rumble of the rapids--the sound took on
endless meanings to his feverish brain. Now it was no longer the voice
of the Eternal Being, it was the endless plaint of Israel beseeching
the deaf heaven, the roar of prayer from some measureless synagogue;
now it was the raucous voice of persecution, the dull bestial roar of
malicious multitudes; and again it was the voice of the whole earth,
groaning and travailing. And the horror of it was that it would not
stop. It dropped on his brain, this falling water, as on the
prisoner's in the mediaeval torture chamber. Could no one stop this
turning wheel of the world, jar it grindingly to a standstill?
Spring wore slowly round again. The icicles melted, the friezes
dripped away, the fantastic mufflers slipped from the trees, and the
young buds peeped out and the young birds sang. The river flowed
uncurdled, the cataracts fell unclogged.
In Peloni's breast alone the ice did not melt: no new sap stirred in
his veins. The very rainbows on the leaping mist were now only
reminders of the Biblical promise that the world would go on forever;
forever the wheel would turn, and Israel wander homeless.
And at last one sunny day a boat arrived with a message from the
Master. Alas! even Noah had abandoned Ararat. "I am beginning to see,"
he wrote, "that our only hope is Palestine. Zion alone has magnetism
for the Jew. The great war against Gog prophesied in Ezekiel will be
in Palestine. Gog is Russia, and the Russians are the descendants of
the joint colony of Meshech and Tubal and the little horn of Daniel.
Russia in an attempt to wrest India and Turkey from the English and
the Turks will make the Holy Land the theatre of a terrible conflict.
But yet in the end in Jerusalem shall we reerect Solomon's Temple. The
ports of the Mediterranean will be again open to the busy hum of
commerce; the fields will again bear the fruitful harvest, and
Christian and Jew will together, on Mount Zion, raise their voices in
praise of Him whose covenant with Abraham was to endure forever, in
whose seed all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. This is our
destiny."
Peloni wandered automatically to the apex of the island at Burnt Ship
Bay, and stood gazing meaninglessly at the fragments of the sunken
ships. Before him raced the rapids, frenziedly anxious for the great
leap. Even so, he thought, had Noah and he dreamed Israel would haste
to Ararat. And Niagara maintained its mocking roar--its roar of
gigantic laughter.
Reerect Solomon's Temple in Palestine! A ruined country to regenerate
a ruined people! A land belonging to the Turks, centre of the
fanaticisms of three religions and countless sects! A soil which even
to Noah was the destined theatre of world-shaking war!
As he lifted his swimming eyes he saw to his astonishment that he was
no longer alone. A tall majestic figure stood gazing at him: a grave,
sorrowful Indian, feathered and tufted, habited only in buckskin
leggings, and girdled by a belt of wampum. A musket in his hand showed
he had been hunting, and a canoe Peloni now saw tethered to the bank
indicated he was going back to his lodge. Peloni knew from his talks
with the Tonawanda Indians opposite Ararat that this was Red Jacket,
the famous chief of the Iroquois, the ancient lords of the soil.
Peloni tendered the salute due to the royalty stamped on the man. Red
Jacket ceremoniously acknowledged the obeisance. Then they gazed
silently at each other, the puny, stooping scholar from the German
Ghetto, and the stalwart, kingly savage.
"Tell me," said Red Jacket imperiously, "what nation are you that
build a monument but never a city like the other white men, nor even a
camp like my people?"
"Great Chief," replied Peloni in his best Iroquois, "we are a people
that build for others."
"I would ye would build for my people then. For these white men sweep
us back, farther, farther, till there is nothing but"--and he made an
eloquent gesture, implying the sweep into the river, into the jaws of
the hurrying rapids. "Yet, methinks, I heard of a plan of your
people--of a great pow-wow of your chiefs in a church, of a great city
to be born here."
"It is dead before birth," said Peloni.
"Strange," mused Red Jacket. "Scarce twenty summers ago Joseph Elliott
came here to plan out his city on a soil that was not his, and lo!
this Buffalo rises already mighty and menacing. To-morrow it will be
at my wigwam door--and we"--another gesture, hopeless, yet full of
regal dignity, rounded off the sentence.
And in that instant it was borne in upon Peloni that they were indeed
brothers: the Jew who stood for the world that could not be born
again, and the Red Indian who stood for the world that must pass away.
Yes, they were both doomed. Israel had been too bent and broken by the
long dispersion and the long persecution: the spring was snapped; he
could not recover. He had been too long the pliant protege of kings
and popes: he had prayed too many centuries in too many countries for
the simultaneous welfare of too many governments, to be capable of
realizing that government of his own for which he likewise prayed.
This pious patience--this rejection of the burden on to the shoulders
of Messiah and Miracle--was it more than the veil of unconscious
impotence? Ah, better sweep oneself away than endure the long
ignominy. And Niagara laughed on.
"May I have the privilege of crossing in your canoe?" he asked.
"You are not afraid?" said Red Jacket. "The rapids are dangerous
here."
Afraid! Peloni's inward laughter seemed to himself to match Niagara's.
When he got to the mainland, he made straight for the Fall. He was on
the American side, and he paused on the sward, on the very brink of
the tameless cataract, that had for immemorial ages been driving
itself backward by eating away its own rock. His fascinated eyes
watched the curious smooth, purring slide of the vast mass of green
water over the sharp edges, unending, unresting, the eternal
revolution of a maddening, imperturbable wheel. O that blind wheel,
turning, turning, while the generations waxed and waned, one
succeeding the other without haste or rest or possibility of pause:
creatures of meaningless majesty, shadows of shadows, dreaming of love
and justice, and fading into the kindred mist, while this solid green
cataract roared and raced through aeons innumerable, stable as the
stars, thundering in majestic meaninglessness. And suddenly he threw
himself into its remorseless whirl and was sucked down into the
monstrous chaos of seething waters and whirled and hurled amid the
rocks, battered and shapeless, but still holding Noah's letter in his
convulsively clinched hand, while the rainbowed spray leapt
impassively heavenward.
The corner-stone of Ararat lies in the rooms of the Buffalo Historical
Society, and no one who copies the inscription dreams that it is the
gravestone of Peloni.
And while the very monument has mouldered away in Ararat, Buffalo sits
throned amid her waters, the Queen City of the Empire State, with the
world's commerce at her feet. And from their palaces of Medina
sandstone the Christian railroad kings go out to sail in their
luxurious yachts,--vessels not of bulrushes but driven by steam, as
predicted by Mordecai Manuel Noah, Governor and Judge of Israel.
* * * * *