Antony is on the earth, his face in his hands. Standing close to him, and turning his back to the cross, Hilarion watches him.
A rather lengthened period elapses.
Then a singular being appears, with the head of a man and the body of a fish. He advances straight through the air, tossing the sand with his tail; and his patriarchal face and his little arms make Antony laugh.
Oannes, in a plaintive voice—"Treat me with respect! I am the contemporary of the beginning of things.
"I have dwelt in the shapeless world, where slumbered hermaphrodite animals, under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the depths of gloomy waves—when the fingers, the fins, and the wings were confounded, and eyes without heads floated like molluscs amongst human-faced bulls and dog-footed serpents.
"Over the whole of those beings Omoroca, bent like a hoop, stretched her woman's body. But Belus cut her clean in two halves, made the earth with one, and the heavens with another; and the two worlds alike mutually contemplate each other. I, the first consciousness of chaos, I have arisen from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms; and I have taught men fishing, the sowing of seed, the scripture, and the history of the gods. Since then, I live in the ponds that remained after the Deluge. But the desert grows larger around them; the wind flings sand into them; the sun consumes them; and I expire on my bed of lemon while gazing across the water at the stars. Thither am I returning."
He makes a plunge and disappears in the Nile.
Hilarion—"This is an ancient god of the Chaldeans!"
Antony, ironically—"Who, then, were the gods of Babylon?"
Hilarion—"You can see them!"