“Oh! if Ja-bol-he-moth,” he suddenly exclaimed with a fierce earnestness, “if Ja-bol-he-moth and other great antediluvian giants could only escape from their imprisonment, we would soon transform the whole earth to our liking.”
“Unhappy spirit!” said I, “do you find pleasure in the contemplation of such a thought?”
“The only pleasure that is left me,” he replied; and passed into a frigid state with a deadly, stony stare, more like a statue than a man.
“Come,” said my father, “our sphere has paralyzed him. I have one more strange thing to show you before we return to the world of spirits.”
We left the ebony palace; and turning from the dark river with its colossal reeds and rushes, we passed into a wilderness of sand, over which hung a gloomier twilight than any we had before witnessed.
Presently there appeared before us a great black dome of iron, reaching across the horizon from east to west, and sloping upward from the sand even to the sky. The blackness, the immensity, the gloom of this strange object cast a fearful shadow on my soul.
“This,” said my father with deep solemnity, “is the tomb of the antediluvian world, which none can open or shut but Christ. In the terrible abysses underneath are imprisoned the evil spirits whose judgment is described in the Scriptures as a flood. Unless the Messiah had come in the flesh, this antediluvian sphere would have broken forth and deluged the world of spirits and the world of men.”
“What would be the consequence?” said I.
“The total suffocation of the spiritual life, as the natural life is suffocated by drowning; a complete torpor of the moral sense, a paralysis of the intellectual faculties. Mankind would relapse into barbarism. The physical system would degenerate. The skin would become black and fetid; the hair woolly, the nose flat, the forehead low and debased. One step more, and from barbarians men would become beasts.
“This process of degeneration had already made sad havoc with a large portion of the human race, when the closure of the antediluvian hells and the institution of a new order of things arrested its march. So the African now stands torpid, unprogressive, sensual, barbaric, bearing on his very body the typical shadows of hell.”