Leaving the lantern, he went out.
The wind had turned west and slackened somewhat, the air was clear, and the stars of heaven sparkled. Guided by the lights from the cottages he went down to the harbor, sneaked into a boat house and took out sails to a boat.
After he had hoisted the sail, he threw the painter loose, took the tiller and kept for aft-wind straight out to sea.
He made a tack to look once more on the little fragment of the earth, where he had last suffered, and when he saw a three branched candle in the custom house window, where the murderer celebrated the birthday of Jesus, the forgiver, the idol of all criminals and wretches, who licensed everything wicked that the civil law punished, he turned back and spat, pulled the sheet and made full sail. With his back towards land he steered out under the great starry map and took bearings from a star of the second magnitude between the Lyre and Corona in the east. It seemed to him that it shone brighter than any other, and when he searched in memory, there came a glimpse of something about the Christmas star, the guiding star to Bethlehem, where three dethroned kings pilgrimaged as fallen great ones to worship their own insignificance in the smallest child of human being and which afterwards became the declared god of all little ones. No, it could not be that star, for as a punishment to the Christian wizards for having spread darkness over the earth, not a single dot of light on the arch of heaven bears the name of any one of them, and therefore they celebrated the darkest time of the year—so sublimely ridiculous!—to light wax tapers! Now as his memory cleared up—it was the star Beta in Hercules. Hercules, Hella's moral ideal, the god of vigor and prudence, who killed the Lernean hydra with its hundred heads, who cleaned Augias' stable, captured Diomedes' bullocks which devoured human beings, who tore the girdle from the Amazon queen, fetched Cerebus up from Hades, to finally fall for a woman's stupidity, who poisoned him from pure love, after he in lunacy had served the nymph Omphale for three years....
Out towards the one that at least had been placed in heaven, who never let anyone strike him or spit in his face without man-like to strike and spit back, out towards the self-destroyer, who could only fall by his own strong hand without begging for mercy from the chalice, out towards Hercules, who freed Prometheus, the light giver, who was himself the son of a god and a woman, and who was afterwards falsified by savages to be the son of a virgin, whose birth was greeted by milk drinking shepherds and braying asses.
Out to the new Christmas star led the way, out over the sea, the mother of all, from the womb of whom life's first spark was kindled, the inexhaustible spring of fecundity and love, life's origin and life's foe.
THE END
CONTENTS
[PREFACE]
[CHAPTER FIRST]
[CHAPTER SECOND]
[CHAPTER THIRD]
[CHAPTER FOURTH]
[CHAPTER FIFTH]
[CHAPTER SIXTH]
[CHAPTER SEVENTH]
[CHAPTER EIGHTH]
[CHAPTER NINTH]
[CHAPTER TENTH]
[CHAPTER ELEVENTH]
[CHAPTER TWELFTH]
[CHAPTER THIRTEENTH]
[CHAPTER FOURTEENTH]