"Talk about Gorgons, Chimeras and Hydras dire!" I exclaimed, and it was as though unseen things, phantom beings, so eerie were the echoes, repeated the words in mockery and in gloating. "Why should men create such a Gorgonic nightmare? And worship it—worship the monster of their own creating? Look at that stone there in the center of the platform. Ugh! The things that must have taken place in that spot! The thought makes the flesh creep and the blood itself turn cold in one's veins!"
"What a dark and fearsome cavern, after all, is the skull of man," said Milton Rhodes, "a place where bats flit and blind shapes creep and crawl!"
I turned toward him with a look of surprise.
"That from the man whom I have so often heard sing the Song of the Mind; that from a scientist, one who has so great an admiration for Aristotle, Hipparchus, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton and Darwin; from one who so often has said that the only wonderful thing about man is his mind and that that mind, in its possibilities, is simply godlike."
"And so say I again, Bill, and so, I am sure, I shall always say. In its possibilities, remember. But you shouldn't have had scientists only on your list; you should have added these at least: Homer, Plato, Saint Augustine, Cicero, Dante and Shakespeare, and, yes, poor old Job in his Land of Uz. But man is a sort of dual creature, a creature that achieves the impossible by being in two places at the same time: his body is in this the Twentieth Century, his mind is still back there in the Pliocene, with cave-bears, hyenas and saber-toothed tigers."
I uttered a vehement dissent.
"But 'tis so, Bill," said Milton Rhodes, "or at least back there beyond the year 1492. The world knows but one Aristotle, one Newton, one Archimedes, one Galileo, one Darwin, one Edison; but Heaven has sent the world thousands."
"I don't believe it. There are no mute, inglorious—Shakespeares."
"No; there are no mute, inglorious Shakespeares, no mute, inglorious Newtons: the world, this glorious mind that we hear so much about destroyed them."
"Or," said I, "they destroyed themselves."