Oracles

I66 IN THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GHIZEH synthesised, the whole was sorrow and despair ; agony biting through the fair ; meanness, contemptibility, en- throned ; all proposeless, all unatoned ; all putrid of a hope, all vacant of a soul. I called upon its master, as who should call on God. Instead, arose a shining form, sweet as a whisper of soft air kissing the brows of a great storm ; his face with light was molten, musical with waves of his delight moving across : his countenance utterly fair ! then was my philosophic vision shamed : conjecture at a loss ; and my whole mind revolted ; then I blamed the vision as a lie ; yet bid that vision speak how he was named, being so wonderfully desirable. Whereat he smiled upon me merrily, answering that whoso named him well, being a poet, called him Love ; or else being a lover of wisdom, called him Force ; or being a cynic, called him Lust ; or being a pietist, called him God. The last—thou seest !—(he said), a lie of Hell’s, and all a partial course of the great circle of whirling dust (stirred by the iron rod of thought) that men call wisdom. So I looked deep in his beauty, and beheld its truth. The life of that fair youth was as a whiz of violent little whirls, helical coils of emptiness, grey curls of misty and impalpable stuff, torn, crooked, all ways and none at once, but ever pressed in idiot circles ; and one thing he lacked, now I looked from afar again, was rest. Thence I with- drew my sight, the eyeballs cracked with stain of my endeavour, and my will struck up with subtler skill than any man’s that in fair Crete tracked through the laby- rinth of Minos, and awoke the cry to call his master ; grew a monster whirlwind of revolving smoke and then,