The years passed. Their visits to the cemetery became more frequent. Accompanying them once, I noted that the worn inscription on the headstone was growing clearer and sharper, just as was happening to their own features. “John, loving husband of Flora…”
Often Flora would sob through half the night, and Helen went about with a set look on her face. Relatives came and spoke comforting words, but these seemed only to intensify their grief.
Finally the headstone grew brand-new and the grass became tender green shoots which disappeared into the raw brown earth. As if these were the signs their obscure instincts had been awaiting, Flora and Helen mastered their grief and visited the minister and the mortician and the doctor and made certain arrangements.
On a cold autumn day, when the brown curled leaves were whirling up into the trees, the procession set out—the empty hearse, the dark silent automobiles. At the cemetery we found a couple of men with shovels turning away unobtrusively from the newly opened grave. Then, while Flora and Helen wept bitterly, and the minister spoke solemn words, a long narrow box was lifted from the grave and carried to the hearse.
At home the lid of the box was unscrewed and slid back, and we saw John, a waxen old man with a long life before him.
Next day, in obedience to what seemed an age-old ritual, they took him from the box, and the mortician undressed him and drew a pungent liquid from his veins and injected the red blood.
Then they took him and laid him in bed. After a few hours of stony-eyed waiting, the blood began to work. He stirred and his first breath rattled in his throat. Flora sat down on the bed and strained him to her in a fearful embrace.
But he was very sick and in need of rest, so the doctor waved her from the room. I remember the look on her face as she closed the door.
I should have been happy too, but I seem to recall that I felt there was something unwholesome about the whole episode. Perhaps our first experiences of the great crises of life always affect us in some such fashion.
I love Maot. The hundreds I have loved before her in my wanderings down the world do not take away from the sincerity of my affection. I did not enter her life, or theirs, as lovers ordinarily do—from the grave or in the passion of some terrible quarrel. I am always the drifter.
Maot knows there is something strange about me. But she does not let that interfere with her efforts to make me do the thing she wants.
I love Maot and eventually I will accede to her desire. But first I will linger awhile by the Nile and the mighty pageantry conjured up by its passage.
My first memories are always the most difficult and I struggle the hardest to interpret them. I have the feeling that if I could get back a little beyond them, a terrifying understanding would come to me. But I never seem able to make the necessary effort.
They begin without antecedent in cloud and turmoil, darkness and fear. I am a citizen of a great country far away, beardless and wearing ugly confining clothing, but no different in age and appearance from today. The country is a hundred times bigger than Egypt, yet it is only one of many. All the peoples of the world are known to each other, and the world is round, not flat, and it floats in an endless immensity dotted with islands of suns, not confined under a star-speckled bowl.
Machines are everywhere, and news goes round the world like a shout, and desires are many. There is undreamed-of abundance, unrivaled opportunities. Yet men are not happy. They live in fear. The fear, if I recall rightly, is of a war that will engulf and perhaps destroy some enemy city. Others that dart up beyond the air itself, to come in attacking from the stars. Poisoned clouds. Deadly motes of luminous dust.
But worst of all are the weapons that are only rumored.
For months that seem eternities we wait on the brink of tluu war. We know that the mistakes have been made, the irrevocable steps taken, the last chances lost. We only await the event.
It would seem that there must have been some special reason for the extremity of our hopelessness and horror. As if there had been previous worldwide wars and we had struggled back from each desperately promising ourselves that it would be the last. But of any such, I can remember nothing, I and the world might well have been created under the shadow of that catastrophe, in a universal disinterment.
The months wear on. Then, miraculously, unbelievably, the war begins to recede. The tension relaxes. The clouds lift. There is great activity, conferences and plans. Hopes for lasting peace ride high.
This does not last. In sudden holocaust, there arises an oppressor named Hitler. Odd, how that name should come back to me after these millennia. His armies fan out across the globe.
But their success is short-lived. They are driven back, and Hitler trails off into oblivion. In the end he is an obscure agitator, almost forgotten.
Another peace then, but neither does it last. Another war, less fierce than. the preceding, and it too trails off into a quieter era.
And so on.
I sometimes think (I must hold on to this) that time once flowed in the opposite direction, and that, in revulsion from the ultimate war, it turned back upon itself and began to retrace its former course. That our present lives are only a return and an unwinding. A great retreat.
In that case time may turn again. We may have another chance to scale the barrier.
But no…
The thought has vanished in the rippling Nile.
Another family is leaving the valley today. All morning they have toiled up the sandy gorge. And now, returning perhaps for a last glimpse, to the verge of the yellow cliffs, they are outlined against the morning sky—upright specks for men, flat specks for animals.
Maot watches beside me. But she makes no comment. She is sure of me.
The cliff is bare again. Soon they will have forgotten the Nile and its disturbing ghosts of memories.
All our life is a forgetting and a closing in. As the child is absorbed by its mother, so great thoughts are swallowed up in the mind of genius. At first they are everywhere. They environ us like the air. Then there is a narrowing in. Not all men know them. Then there comes one great man, and he takes them to himself, and they are a secret. There only remains the disturbing coviction that something worthy has vanished.
I have seen Shakespeare unwrite the great plays. I have watched Socrates unthink the great thoughts. I have heard Jesus unsay the great words.
There is an inscription in stone, and it seems eternal. Coming back centuries later I find it the same, only a little less worn, and I think that it, at least, may endure. But some day a scribe comes and laboriously fills in the grooves until there is only blank stone,
Then only he knows what was written there. And as he grows young, that knowledge dies forever.
It is the same in all we do. Our houses grow new and we dismantle them and stow the materials inconspicuously away, in mine and quarry, forest and field. Our clothes grow new and we put them off. And we grow new and forget and blindly seek a mother.
All the people are gone now. Only I and Maot linger.
I had not realised it would come so soon. Now that we are near the end, Nature seems to hurry.
I suppose that there are other stragglers here and there along the Nile, but I like to think that we are the last to see the vanishing fields, the last to look upon the river with some knowledge of what it once symbolised, before oblivion closes in.
Ours is a world in which lost causes conquer. After the second war of which I spoke, there was a long period of peace in my native country across the sea. There were among us at that time a primitive people called Indians, neglected and imposed upon and forced to live apart in unwanted areas. We gave no thought to these people. We would have laughed at anyone who told us they had power to hurt us.
But from somewhere a spark of rebellion appeared among them. They formed bands, armed themselves with bows and inferior guns, took the warpath against us.
We fought them in little unimportant wars that were never quite conclusive. They persisted, always
returning to the fight, laying ambushes for our men and wagons, harrying us continually, eventually making sizable inroads.
Yet we still considered them of such trifling importance that we found time to engage in a civil war among ourselves.
The issue of this war was sad. A dusky portion of our citizenry were enslaved and made to toil for us in house and field.
The Indians grew formidable. Step by step they drove us back across the wide midwestern rivers and plains, through the wooded mountains to eastward.
On the eastern coast we held for a while, chiefly by leaguing with a transoceanic island nation, to whom we surrendered our independence.
There was an enheartening occurrence. The enslaved Negroes were gathered together and crowded in ships and taken to the southern shores of this continent, and there liberated or given into the hands of warlike tribes who eventually released them.
But the pressure of the Indians, sporadically aided by foreign allies, increased. City by city, town by town, settlement by settlement, we pulled up our stakes and took ship ourselves across the sea. Toward the end the Indians became strangely pacific, so that the last boatloads seemed to flee not so much in physical fear as in supernatural terror of the green silent forests that had swallowed up their homes.
To the south the Aztecs took up their glass knives and flintedged swords and drove out the… I think they were called Spaniards.
In another century the whole western continent was forgotten, save for dim, haunting recollections.
Growing tyranny and ignorance, a constant contraction of frontiers, rebellions of the downtrodden, who in turn became oppressors—these constituted the next epoch of history.
Once I thought the tide had turned. A strong and orderly people, the Romans, arose and put most of the diminished world under their sway.
But this stability proved transitory. Once again the governed rose against the governors. The Romans were driven back from England, from Egypt, from Gaul, from Asia, from Greece. Rising from barren fields came Carthage to contest successfully Rome’s preeminence. The Romans took refuge in Rome, became unimportant, dwindled, were lost in a maze of migrations.
Their energising thoughts flamed up for our glorious century in Athens, then ceased to carry weight.
After that, the decline continued at a steady pace. Never again was I deceived into thinking the trend had changed.
Except this one last time.
Because she was stony and sun-drenched and dry, full of temples and tombs, given to custom and calm, I thought Egypt would endure. The passage of almost changeless centuries encouraged me in this belief. I thought that if we had not reached the turning point, we had at least come to rest.
But the rains have come, the temples and tombs fill the scars in the cliffs, and the custom and calm have given way to the restless urges of the nomad.
If there is a turning point, it will not come until man is one with the beasts.
And Egypt must vanish like the rest.
Tomorrow Maot and I set out. Our flock is gathered. Our tent is rolled.
Maot is afire with youth. She is very loving.
It will be strange in the desert. All too soon we will exchange our last and sweetest kiss and she will prattle to me childishly and I will look after her until we find her mother.
Or perhaps some day I will abandon her in the desert, and her mother will find her.
And I will go on.
The Dark Side Page 20