My empire is of the imagination.[SHE said.]***
~Ayesha
These and many such thoughts passed through my
mind that night. They come to torment us all at times.
I say to torment, for, alas! thinking can only serve to
measure out the helplessness of thought. What is the
use of our feeble crying in the awful silences of space?
Can our dim intelligence read the secrets of that star-
strewn sky? Does any answer come out of it? Never
any at all, nothing but echoes and fantastic visions. And
yet we believe that there is an answer, and that upon a
time a new Dawn will come blushing down the ways of
our enduring night. We believe it, for its reflected beauty
even now shines up continually in our hearts from beneath
the horizon of the grave, and we call it Hope. Without
Hope we should suffer moral death, and by the help of
Hope we yet may climb to Heaven, or at the worst, if
she also prove but a kindly mockery given to hold us
from despair, be gently lowered into the abysses of eternal
sleep.
Then I fell to reflecting upon the undertaking on
which we were bent, and what a wild one it was, and yet
how strangely the story seemed to fit in with what had
bcen written centuries ago upon the sherd. Who was this
extraordinary woman, Queen over a people apparently as
extraordinary as herself, and reigning amidst the vestiges
of a lost civilisation ? And what was the meaning of this
story of the Fire that gave unending life ? Could it be
possible that any fluid or essence should exist which might
so fortify these fleshy walls that they should from age to
age resist the mines and batterings of decay? It was possible, though not probable. The indefinite continuation
of life would not, as poor Vincey said, be so marvellous a thing as the production of life and its temporary endurance.
And if it were true, what then?
~L.H.Holly
***[sic]'It is by terror.' |
