Diary of a Drug Fiend

Out of Harm's Way 307 - which was still flourishing, although the signs of decay were only too obvious. The modern town was not even built with the idea of defying the centuries. It was essentially flimsy and ramshackle, and the events of the last few hours had given repeated evidence not only of the state of social unrest which was likely at any moment to lay the modern structure in ruins, but of general lassitude and lack of energy on the part of everybody with whom we came into contact. Our little party obviously represented undreamed-of possibilities of doing good business. But no one seemed to want to fulfil even that last of human ambitions: the acquiring of the good will of prosperous travellers. “Don’t be downhearted,” laughed Lamus. ‘“ Your trouble is that you are looking for permanence in the wrong place. Do you see those two men?” On the road below us were two goatherds, one driving his flock up from the town after having been milked, the other driving them down for that p , Lamus quoted two lines of Greek poetry. I did not remember enough to be able to translate them, but the words had an extraordinarily familiar ring. Lamus translated. ““* The city Telepylus, where the shepherd who drives his flock into the town salutes another who is driving them out, and the other returns his salute. A man in that country could earn double wages if he could do without sleep, for they work much the same by night as they do by day.’ ‘That was written three thousand years ago, and even the name of the woman who wrote that poem, albeit it is one of the most famous poems in the world, is lost. But there are the shepherds saluting each other to-day as they did then. MANTA PEI said Heracleitus, ‘all things flow.’ And everything that tries to escape that law, that relies on its strength, that becomes nigid, that endeavours to calla halt, is broken up by the irresistible waves of time. We think steel stronger than water; but we cannot build a ship to resist its