He flung the stump of his cigar among the vines, where it expired in a shower of rosy sparks; and his footsteps died away forever. NAY, not forever; for though we should see him no more in this life, shall we not see him again throughout the Cycles and the Æons? YEA, alas, forever; for even though we should see him again throughout the Cycles and the Æons, will it not be so that he always departeth under the same circumstances and at the same moment, in sæcula sæculorum?
THE UNDYING ONE[14]
I have lived for three thousand years; I am weary of men and of the world: this earth has become too small for such as I; this sky seems a gray vault of lead about to sink down and crush me.
There is not a silver hair in my head; the dust of thirty centuries has not dimmed my eyes. Yet I am weary of the earth.
I speak a thousand tongues; and the faces of the continents are familiar to me as the characters of a book; the heavens have unrolled themselves before mine eyes as a scroll; and the entrails of the earth have no secrets for me.
I have sought knowledge in the deepest deeps of ocean gulfs;—in the waste places where sands shift their yellow waves, with a dry and bony sound;—in the corruption of charnel houses and the hidden horrors of the catacombs;—amid the virgin snows of Dwalagiri;—in the awful labyrinths of forests untrodden by man;—in the wombs of dead volcanoes;—in lands where the surface of lake or stream is studded with the backs of hippopotami or enameled with the mail of crocodiles;—at the extremities of the world where spectral glaciers float over inky seas;—in those strange parts where no life is, where the mountains are rent asunder by throes of primeval earthquake, and where the eyes behold only a world of parched and jagged ruin, like the Moon—of dried-up seas and river channels worn out by torrents that ceased to roll long ere the birth of man.
All the knowledge of all the centuries, all the craft and skill and cunning of man in all things—are mine, and yet more!
For Life and Death have whispered me their most ancient secrets; and all that men have vainly sought to learn has for me no mystery.