Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight Part 24

In our company was a beautiful young maid; and, thinking she might furnish amus.e.m.e.nt for a dull afternoon, I gave orders that she be brought to my quarters.

She was carried thence, struggling and in tears. With her came one of our captains, who said she was to be his wife, and asked me to spare her discourtesy for his sake. He had many times been of service, but no more so than a subject should be. I directed that he be thrown from the top platform, and took the girl with me, so she might see the spectacle.

The guards lifted him over the wall and gave a shove. He started slowly, bracing and resisting with hands and feet, but was soon speeding meteor-like down the icy incline. He disappeared, in the snow and debris at the base, but in a few minutes reappeared, with right arm swinging useless at his side.

The girl, giving a cry, leaped over the wall and skimming along the incline as a swallow might the face of a white slanting cliff, sped towards her lover. The man leaped to the edge to break her fall and she struck him with destructive force. They were thrown some distance and lay still in the snow, which was crimsoned by their bleeding wounds.

Two great white bears, smelling the blood, came forth from behind the cliffs and feasted upon the pair.

In a few more days the icy waters of a polar sea covered the city of Theni; and in tears we witnessed the great dome of the temple of our G.o.ds sink beneath its surface. The next week great icebergs were floating across the plain and above the site of Theni. It grew intensely cold and the inner walls of our great upper hall were coated with frost crystals.

The wind shrieked; great waves striking the mountain side shook our pyramid. The sight was blotted out by a blizzard of snow and ice.

The guards are kept busy with spears and spades trying to keep the ventilators and the pinnacle area free of snow and ice so we can have air. Several have been blown from the top.

We made a mistake in the construction of our refuge. We should have s.h.i.+elded our ventilators to keep off the snow. It is a hard struggle for air. Tomorrow we must start work opening the pa.s.sageway for light and air. Nefert says I should have built a s.h.i.+p and sailed away, as did the prophet and his people.

Nefert awake. It is dark and cold. The air is foul. I hear rus.h.i.+ng waters. It comes in the ventilators above our heads. It is salty. We are being swallowed by the icy sea. I have found you! O! How cold! How cold!

I know not how long it has been, nor how many different habitations my soul has tenanted since our pyramid sank beneath the icy sea and, holding Nefert in my arms, I lost consciousness.

I am now in India, near the city of Bombay. A city presenting a magnificent front, but reeking with filth and disease, where, through the year, cholera daily claims its victims. It is the year 1790.

On the top of a high hill in a beautiful garden are three Dakhmas or Pa.r.s.ee towers of silence. These towers, built like a windowless colosseum, are ma.s.sive cylinders of hard black granite, open to the heavens.

The parapet supports a coping of motionless living vultures, waiting in patience to be fed. Here the death rate is high and there are many to die, so they do not suffer from hunger.

The vultures grow restless; they see a funeral cortege of black men in spotless white robes; they bear a black corpse in a white shroud. The body is hastily deposited within the area on its bed of stone and mattress of charcoal. The vultures swoop down to the feast. In a short while, satiated, they rise on heavy wing and lazily resettle upon the parapet.

All day long, my soul struggling for freedom or forgetfulness, is caged within the body of one of these vultures. I do not see the sun except through vulture eyes. I do not feed except upon the dead. My companions are vultures. I am never beyond the smell of the dead. I have no friends.h.i.+ps, no hopes.

There are times at night when my vulture body sleeps. Then the soul seems to break forth; but it does not go out in freedom as of old. I may go into the hovels of Bombay in the form of an old black beggar.

Then it is my overwhelming desire to do some act of kindness, but my clothes are in rags; my face is a horrid mask, and I smell of the dead and am driven away.

I found a man dying by the wayside, too weak to move, too blind to see.

When he asked for water, I thought now is my chance. I shuffled to the fountain and when I would dip up a cupful, it became as solid gla.s.s.

At a time of famine I found a child crying for bread without the city walls. At great strain upon my feeble limbs, I climbed a wall and stole from the kitchen of the enclosed villa a roasted fowl and carried it to the child. The child took it, but when he raised it to eat, it was the hand of a putrid corpse.

When I lift the head of the sick, they shudder and gasp and grow cold.

So I return to my vulture body, to my perch on the parapet, to breakfast on the dead and to my vulture consort.

(End of translation.)

I spent the next winter at law school, returning to the old farmhouse the middle of May.

The first time I went down to the springhouse, I saw a vividly-colored golden robin or hangnest restlessly flitting about the old elm trees and occasionally bursting into loud-noted song.

A few days later I heard and saw him again. He was not so restless, and his song was low-toned and had a rich and more pleasant refrain. His notes were of endless and individual variety.

When he ceased singing I heard an incessant warble of sweet, though feeble, notes and, looking above my head, saw the composer, his bride, dressed in olive and gold, weaving on the pendulous nest of moss and horse hair, near the tips of the overhanging limb. I then knew why his song had changed and understood the happy warble of the busy weaver.

They were so gaily colored, so happily situated, their home so far from harm, they were so exclusive, that I called the pair the little king and queen.

Bright pair of boundless wing and sweet song, did you first meet here?

You did not come together. How did the king mark the way for his queen?

Have you searched all the way from Panama, your winter home, for this old elm, to celebrate your bird marriage, pa.s.s your honeymoon and find much joy in nest-building and rearing a family? Do you know tears and night and nothingness? Or have you found and eaten of the fruit of the trees of life and eternal love?

In about three weeks all song ceased. They made incessant trips to the old orchard and returned with caterpillars to feed five cavernous yellow-throated mouths.

One warm sultry afternoon in June I sat in my old place by the springhouse, reading Story's Equity Jurisprudence and, closing the book, enjoyed the ease and peace of the lazy, if not the righteous.

I slept; and my mind jumbling the springhouse, the orioles, the dead boy and his strange tale, whispered that my little king and queen of the hanging nest were Santa and Nefert. Thereafter I called them as the dream had said.

The little nestlings grew apace and the nest made tight quarters. One, seeking room and adventure, climbed out and perched upon a twig. Growing careless or sleepy, or caught by a squall, he half flew, half fell from his perch.

The big black cat, who every week ate his weight in young birds, pounced upon the unfortunate one, who let out a squawk of terror.

Santa darted into the face of the cat with such fierce force as to rescue the baby bird, but lost his own life by his brave rashness.

Before the plumage of white, black and old gold had been marred I drove the cat away and picked up the little dead king.

In the corner of the old orchard, hedged about by a stone fence overhung with myrtle and honeysuckle, under three ancient cedar trees, were four graves; three of slaves long dead and the other of the half-witted boy.

Under the fresh green sod of the newer grave I buried the dead bird, and marked the spot with little cedar grave boards, on which I carved the name, "Santa." What a place to bury a king who had built a great pyramid for his sepulchre!

A CONSCIOUS MUMMY.

I sat under the old elm trees reading a work on Early Egyptian Civilization, which declared that the recorded history of that ancient people began when Menes was king, about 4300 B. C.

Placing the book, back up on the ground, I thought of their strange faith; the reverent care with which they embalmed the body to be again occupied by the soul, when, after many transmigrations from one animal to another, having expiated all sins done in the body, it should return purified to the old body. a.s.suming their belief true, where now might be those ancient believers in Osiris, Ra, Horus, Isis, Set and other nature G.o.ds, having ages before bowed in submission to Bes, the G.o.d of death?

How limited is sense; how weak intellect; how short bodily life. Yet the very frailty and uncertainty of life establishes the immortality of the soul and the soul, in turn, gives spontaneous testimony to G.o.d and of a life within which the body does not own.