ODIN GROWN OLD
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, æons, 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....