Heart-rending scenes greeted them everywhere, and many of the frenzied inhabitants rolled convulsively upon the ground. Others accused themselves with frantic insistence of all kinds of crime. Others could not speak. Some were helpless paralytics, and numbers could not retain food, so terrible was the reflex action on the nervous system.
The mind that has passed through such a calamity has lost its tone. Instead of being braced up, as by war, the earth’s epilepsy makes the mental fabric flabby, and paralyzes by a hopeless fear from which there is no known refuge. The fluttering soul, tying itself to matter as something solid and enduring, finds that the globe itself is but a poor shivering thing, liable to be taken in some monster demon’s clutch and shaken back into its component parts. No language can adequately express the stupendous feeling of instability conveyed by the idea of the earth’s possible dissolution and dispersion.
Yermah sat in a stupor, and it was with difficulty that he could be aroused when Ben Hu Barabe came to speak to him. He was completely worn out with anxiety and exertion on behalf of his people. At first the Dorado did not recognize his visitor in the semi-darkness. When he finally caught sight of the ravaged and altered face before him, he went almost insane with grief. He had hoped against hope to the very last. Now he knew without a word that his worst fears were realized.
Six weeks later, when brain-fever loosed its grip upon him, Akaza found Yermah lying face downward at the door of the Temple of Neptune. He was moaning and sobbing piteously. In a half-crazed condition, he had eluded observation, and started out to find his foster-father, but had fallen by the wayside, overcome by sheer bodily weakness. Akaza lifted him up, and hushed him as he would a child.
“Thou art wrong to grieve like this,” he said gently and soothingly. “The Father in the Trinity is the Universal Creator; the Son is man himself. Therefore, thou art in essence—God, since thou art in possession of this higher principle and must live.”
Yermah was like a maimed lion—a pathetic and pitiable object—as he lay with his head on Akaza’s shoulder, while his pent-up feelings found vent in choking sobs.
“Thou art weakening thy sacred manhood in yielding thus to despair. Thou art intrusted with a mission for all peoples, for all tongues, and for all time. Think, my son, of being the world’s ideal lover through all the eons to follow! It is a blessed privilege! Thou hast witnessed a demonstration of the destructive majesty of cosmic force. Now thou art called upon to obey thine individual destiny. THOU HAST PERFORMED THE EIGHTH LABOR!”
“And the gold for the temple?” questioned Yermah, in a stricken voice.
“It was alchemical gold thou wert sent to find. Thy body is the temple, and the Perfect Way of Life is the magic which produces alchemical gold. Dost thou comprehend the occult significance of Osiris, with a crook in one hand and a flail in the other?”