XXII.
Like some great serpent black and still,
Old Morgan's men stole down the hill.
Far down the steep they wound and wound
Until the black line touched that land
Of gleaming white and silver sand
That knows not human sight or sound.
How broken plunged the steep descent;
How barren! Desolate, and rent
By earthquake's shock, the land lay dead,
With dust and ashes on its head.
'Twas as some old world overthrown,
Where Theseus fought and Sappho dreamed
In eons ere they touched this land,
And found their proud souls foot and hand
Bound to the flesh and stung with pain.
An ugly skeleton it seem'd
Of its own self. The fiery rain
Of red volcanoes here had sown
The death of cities of the plain.
The very devastation gleamed.
All burnt and black, and rent and seam'd,
Ay, vanquished quite and overthrown,
And torn with thunder-stroke, and strown
With cinders, lo! the dead earth lay
As waiting for the judgment day.
Why, tamer men had turn'd and said,
On seeing this, with start and dread,
And whisper'd each with gather'd breath,
"We come on the confines of death."
They wound below a savage bluff
That lifted, from its sea-mark'd base,
Great walls with characters cut rough
And deep by some long-perish'd race;
And lo! strange beasts unnamed, unknown,
Stood hewn and limn'd upon the stone.
The iron hoofs sank here and there,
Plough'd deep in ashes, broke anew
Old broken idols, and laid bare
Old bits of vessels that had grown,
As countless ages cycled through,
Imbedded with the common stone.
A mournful land as land can be
Beneath their feet in ashes lay,
Beside that dread and dried-up sea;
A city older than that gray
And grass-grown tower builded when
Confusion cursed the tongues of men.
Beneath, before, a city lay
That in her majesty had shamed
The wolf-nursed conqueror of old;
Below, before, and far away
There reach'd the white arm of a bay,
A broad bay shrunk to sand and stone,
Where ships had rode and breakers roll'd
When Babylon was yet unnamed,
And Nimrod's hunting-fields unknown.
Some serpents slid from out the grass
That grew in tufts by shatter'd stone,
Then hid beneath some broken mass
That Time had eaten as a bone
Is eaten by some savage beast;
An everlasting palace feast.
A dull-eyed rattlesnake that lay
All loathsome, yellow-skinn'd, and slept,
Coil'd tight as pine-knot, in the sun,
With flat head through the centre run,
Struck blindly back, then rattling crept
Flat-bellied down the dusty way ...
'Twas all the dead land had to say.
Two pink-eyed hawks, wide-wing'd and gray,
Scream'd savagely, and, circling high,
And screaming still in mad dismay,
Grew dim and died against the sky ...
'Twas all the heavens had to say.
The grasses fail'd, and then a mass
Of brown, burnt cactus ruled the land,
And topt the hillocks of hot sand,
Where scarce the hornèd toad could pass.
Then stunted sage on either hand,
All loud with odors, spread the land.
The sun rose right above, and fell
As falling molten as they pass'd.
Some low-built junipers at last,
The last that o'er the desert look'd,
Thick-bough'd, and black as shapes of hell
Where dumb owls sat with bent bills hook'd
Beneath their wings awaiting night,
Rose up, then faded from the sight:
Then not another living thing
Crept on the sand or kept the wing.
White Azteckee! Dead Azteckee!
Vast sepulchre of buried sea!
What dim ghosts hover on thy rim,
What stately-manner'd shadows swim
Along thy gleaming waste of sands
And shoreless limits of dead lands?
Dread Azteckee! Dead Azteckee!
White place of ghosts, give up thy dead:
Give back to Time thy buried hosts!
The new world's tawny Ishmaelite,
The roving tent-born Shoshonee,
Who shuns thy shores as death, at night,
Because thou art so white, so dread,
Because thou art so ghostly white,
Because thou hast thy buried hosts,
Has named thy shores "the place of ghosts."
Thy white uncertain sands are white
With bones of thy unburied dead
That will not perish from the sight.
They drown but perish not,—ah me!
What dread unsightly sights are spread
Along this lonesome dried-up sea.
White Azteckee, give up to me
Of all thy prison'd dead but one,
That now lies bleaching in the sun,
To tell what strange allurements lie
Within this dried-up oldest sea,
To tempt men to its heart and die.
Old, hoar, and dried-up sea! so old!
So strewn with wealth, so sown with gold!
Yea, thou art old and hoary white
With time, and ruin of all things;
And on thy lonesome borders night
Sits brooding as with wounded wings.
The winds that toss'd thy waves and blew
Across thy breast the blowing sail,
And cheer'd the hearts of cheering crew
From farther seas, no more prevail.
Thy white-wall'd cities all lie prone,
With but a pyramid, a stone,
Set head and foot in sands to tell
The tired stranger where they fell.
The patient ox that bended low
His neck, and drew slow up and down
Thy thousand freights through rock-built town
Is now the free-born buffalo.
The mountain sheep leaps free and bold
His high-built summit and looks down
From battlements of buried town.
Thine ancient steeds know not the rein;
They lord the land; they come, they go
At will; they laugh at man; they blow
A cloud of black steeds o'er the plain.
Thy monuments lie buried now,
The ashes whiten on thy brow,
The winds, the waves, have drawn away,
The very wild man dreads to stay.
O! thou art very old. I lay,
Made dumb with awe and wonderment,
Beneath a palm before my tent,
With idle and discouraged hands,
Not many days agone, on sands
Long gazing on her mighty shades,
I did recall a semblance there
Of thee. I mused where story fades
From her dark brow and found her fair.
A slave, and old, within her veins
There runs that warm, forbidden blood
That no man dares to dignify
In elevated song.
The chains
That held her race but yesterday
Hold still the hands of men. Forbid
Is Ethiop.
The turbid flood
Of prejudice lies stagnant still,
And all the world is tainted. Will
And wit lie broken as a lance
Against the brazen mailed face
None advance
Steel-clad and glad to the attack,
With trumpet and with song. Look back!
Beneath yon pyramids lie hid
The histories of her great race.
Old Nilus rolls right sullen by,
With all his secrets.
Who shall say:
My father rear'd a pyramid;
My brother clipp'd the dragon's wings;
My mother was Semiramis?
Yea, harps strike idly out of place;
Men sing of savage Saxon kings
New-born and known but yesterday,
And Norman blood presumes to say....
Nay, ye who boast ancestral name
And vaunt deeds dignified by time
Who hath worn
Since time began a face that is
So all-enduring, old like this—
A face like Africa's?
Behold!
The Sphinx is Africa. The bond
Of silence is upon her.
Old
And white with tombs, and rent and shorn;
With raiment wet with tears, and torn,
And trampled on, yet all untamed;
All naked now, yet not ashamed,—
The mistress of the young world's prime,
Whose obelisks still laugh at Time,
And lift to heaven her fair name,
Sleeps satisfied upon her fame.
Beyond the Sphinx, and still beyond,
Of Time; beyond tradition, loom
And lift ghostlike from out the gloom
Her thousand cities, battle-torn
And gray with story and with time.
Her very ruins are sublime,
Her thrones with mosses overborne
Make velvets for the feet of Time.
She points a hand and cries: "Go read
The letter'd obelisks that lord
Old Rome, and know my name and deed.
My archives these, and plunder'd when
I had grown weary of all men."
We turn to these; we cry: "Abhorr'd
Old Sphinx, behold, we cannot read!"
And yet my dried-up desert sea
Was populous with blowing sail,
And set with city, white-wall'd town,
All mann'd with armies bright with mail,
Ere yet that awful Sphinx sat down
To gaze into eternity,
Or Egypt knew her natal hour,
Or Africa had name or power.