“I sit in some old city of the past and look back upon the present and still further back into the future. Why not? Time is an endless circle, wheeling around one. Why trouble to imagine a beginning or an end? Why these unnatural conceptions? The old legends are more sensible. The ancient mystic symbol of matter, Ouroborro, the tail-devourer, a serpent coiled into a circle, symbol of evolution, of the evolution of matter. There is something there, something to think of. Let us all think of molecules, and remember the Philosopher’s Stone. Have you ever laughed at the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone that can transmute metals and give the elixir of life? What if it were discovered, this stone? Suppose radium were in the legend stone of long ago. Wouldn’t that suggest to you that we have only just discovered out of the long labour of our known cycle of civilization something that was known before by another race of men? Who knows, perhaps that race conquered its earth with this stone, turned it from a savage planet like this of ours into a Garden of Eden, and then, surfeited with ease, died of inertia, lapsed into darkness, fell from the Heaven it had made. That is to say, Adam, the father of our race, may have been the last survivor of a race of fallen gods, supermen.”
Clémentine took my arm as we went out of the dining-room.
“You find us a little mad?” she asked.
“Oh, no.”
“Tell us how you find us. You are different, big and strong and young and strange. Your point of view about us would be something new.”
“I find you extraordinarily happy.”
“Oh yes, we are gay.”
The men had followed us.
“We laugh.”
“We find the world so funny.”