Who could tell that, on opposite sides of the Equator, Ferlie and Cyprian were both battling against that apathy which descends, like a canopy of darkness, upon ultra-sensitive spirits who have reached their limit of controlled mental suffering, blinding a vision ordinarily (since the high gods are just) unusually clear to distinguish between immortal and merely mortal beauty, and affecting them with that terror, however diffidently one may approach the Example, which wrung a cry of agony from the Leader of all Christs, whose lips were silent in the utmost extremities of bodily pain?
And these, as yet devoid of the Christ-Power assured to every struggling heart that responds to its stirring, whose sun is withdrawn and who possesses no artificial light to relieve the paralysing blackness of the Shadowy Valleys of Self-mistrust, may well lose their way in strange unexplored by-paths before they win through into the open country to find the dawn-star shining still above the distant hills.
CHAPTER IX
Up the valley, beyond the well-established mines, where Burmese, European and International pariah digs the disguised jewels from Earth's mountainous breasts, Cyprian sat limply in an office with red wooden walls, smiling to himself at the remembrance of the untravelled folk who might picture ruby-mining as a series of endless descents into Aladdin's cave.
The washing of the ruby dust was about the most interesting part. The routine work and the daily examination of the naked coolies, who had even been known to swallow promising earth-stained lumps of treasure, in the hope of secreting them later for private exploitation, very soon lost its excitement. The rough surroundings and dusty atmosphere were, in themselves, the ordinary lot of colonists and pioneers, but the average man had some purpose for their endurance.
Cyprian was conscious of none. He sometimes asked himself, seriously, what he had done in binding himself to drive, interminably, another man's plough. There appeared to be no reason why he should remain, save the natural reluctance of his type to look back before the furrow was run. And that might not be for some while yet.
His Company's mine, a small one, had been a secret discovery above the area in those wilds where the mines were supposed to reach. He contrasted the life he had chosen with that of the average business man. The roads he travelled from the green banks of the Irrawadi, more than fifty miles into the interior, lay through a bewildering loveliness of mountain pass and rocky defile.
The country on either side of the river, steaming down which one encountered the unique floating villages of the log-raftsmen, remained primitively Eastern the whole way to Bhamo, where Burma joins hands with China.
The philosophy of Gautama's fatalistic children was beginning to soak into Cyprian's ego. From this point of the valley, breathing incessantly an atmosphere of absorbing toil connected with those open workings from which the Byon, or ruby-earth, was hauled up by washers of half a dozen different nationalities, he grew almost able to persuade himself that Ferlie's England of tall houses and dignified streets humming with modern traffic, belonged to a lost pre-existence.