I found myself upon a slender bridge that seemed to span the vault. It widened in the center to a small, square, stone-paved enclosure, like a flat altar-top, surrounded by a close-wrought grille that gleamed like gold. I halted here, and, looking down, saw, far beneath, a throng whose white faces stared upward like masks. Again that chant arose, and now I heard its burden:
“We are immortal in the germ-plasm; make us immortal in the body before we die.”
Then something beneath me began to assume shape as my eyes grew used to the obscurity. It was a great ant of gold, five hundred tons of it, perhaps, erected on a great pedestal of stone; where should have been the altar of the Savior of the world, there the abominable insect crawled, with its articulated, smooth body, and one antenna upraised.
The symbol was graven clear. This was the aspiration of mankind, and to this we had come, through Science that would not look within, through a feminism that had sought new, and the progressive aims of ethical doctrinaires that had discarded the old safeguards; Christ’s light yoke of well-tried moral laws, sufficient to centuries; through all the fanatic votaries of a mechanistic creed; polygamy and mutilation, and all the shameful things from which the race had struggled through suffering upward. All the old evils which we had thought exorcised forever had crept in on us again, out of the shadows where they had lain concealed.
I stood there, sick with horror, clinging to the rail.
How far from gentle St. Francis and St. Catherine, and all the gracious spirits of the dead and derided ages, progress had moved! Were those things false and forgotten, those saintly ideals which had shone like lamps of faith through the night of the world? Was this the truth and were those nothing?
I heard a sobbing in the shadows beneath. I looked down and perceived, immediately before the Ant, an aged man prostrate. He muttered; and, though I heard no words that I could understand, I realized that, in his blind, helpless way, he was groping toward the godhead.
Then I looked up and saw something that sent the blood throbbing through my head and drew my voice from me in gasping breaths.
At the edge of the platform on which I stood, out of the gloom, loomed the round body of the second cylinder. And inside, through the face of unbroken glass, I saw the sleeping face of Esther, my love of a century ago.
The cap of the cylinder was half unscrewed.