Mortal.—“What wonders! Can this be nature?”
Immortal.—“We are approaching others.”
Mortal.—“Yes, look! What a vast lizard or crocodile yonder encased—five hundred feet long! But I see fins, also.”
Immortal.—“It is of the primeval species of sauroid fish. It has been frozen during cycles of time. This region was once warmer. Nature’s changeful developments are a curious mystery to man, but it ever unfolds in increasing knowledge.”
They wheel southward—anon traverse Chinese Tartary—sweep over the Chinese wall, and alight in Pekin. They poise themselves on a lofty pagoda.
Mortal.—“These Chinese are a mysterious people. I am curious about them. That wall was a great enterprise in its day, and a singular one.”
Immortal.—“They are a swarm from an ancient human hive, and have long been numerous and astute. They have been, and are superior to the average of mankind, but inferior to the more illumined and most cultivated. Their numbers and limited geographic sphere have made them feel want; yet their inventions, although multiplied, have been petty, fanciful, crude and clumsy contrivances to meet emergency, in comparison with the grander discoveries and more studied and beautiful designs of other and higher civilizations. Necessity has stimulated their cunning, but precludes their reflection; it has pinched their faculties, as the ‘iron shoe’ has their feet. Their mental contraction has been rendered more compressive by their moral and spiritual defects. They have had no conception of a God, per se. It is the conception which most expands man!”
Mortal.—“But this pagoda (truly it is a grotesque structure!) is a temple devoted to some worship.”
Immortal.—“It is a fane of the merest idolatry, and dedicated to idols, ‘of the earth, earthly,’ not to any images which are even typical of divine essences. But of this, anon.”
Mortal.—“The Chinese have, however, a demi-god—their ‘Celestial Emperor.’”