Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Wednesday's Good Reading: "The Fisher and the Little Fish" by Aesop (translated into English)

 

It happened that a Fisher, after fishing all day, caught only a little fish. "Pray, let me go, master," said the Fish. "I am much too small for your eating just now. If you put me back into the river I shall soon grow, then you can make a fine meal off me."

"Nay, nay, my little Fish," said the Fisher, "I have you now. I may not catch you hereafter."

 A little thing in hand is worth more than a great thing in prospect.

Tuesday, 11 February 2025

Tuesday's Serial: “The Messiah of the Cylinder” by Victor Rousseau (in Englsih) - I

 

CHAPTER I - OVER THE COFFEE CUPS

If I recall the conversation of that evening so minutely as to appear tedious, I must plead that this was the last occasion on which I saw Sir Spofforth alive. In such a case, one naturally remembers incidents and recalls words that otherwise might have been forgotten; besides, here were the two opposed opinions of life, as old as Christianity, confronting each other starkly. And, as will be seen, the test was to come in such manner as only one of us could have imagined.

I picture old Sir Spofforth as on that evening: courteous, restrained, yet with the heat of conviction burning in his measured phrases; and Esther listening with quaint seriousness, turning from her father to Lazaroff and back, and sometimes to me, as each of us spoke. Outside, in the moonlight, the shadow of the Institute lay black across the garden of Sir Spofforth’s house. The dining-room was fragrant with the scent of the tea-roses that grew beneath the windows.

The Biological Institute was less than five years old, but the London smoke, which drifted beyond Croydon, already had darkened the bright-red bricks to a tolerable terra cotta. The ivy had grown a good way up the walls. The Institute was accommodating itself to the landscape, as English buildings had the knack of doing. Lazaroff and I had been there under Sir Spofforth since the foundation, and there never had been any others upon the staff, the Institute being organized for specialized work of narrow scope, though of immense perspective.

It was devoted to private research into the nature of life, in the application of the Mendelian law to vertebrates. The millionaire who had endowed it for this purpose and then died opportunely, had not had time to hamper us with restrictions. Next to endowing us, his death was, perhaps, the most imaginative thing that he had ever accomplished. The Government concerned itself only about our vivisection certificates. But our animal experimentation was too innocuous for these to be much more than a safeguard. Carrel’s investigations in New York, a year or two before, had shown the world that cell and tissue can not only survive the extinction of the general vital quantity, but, under proper conditions, proliferate indefinitely. We were investigating tissue life, and our proceedings were quite innocuous. It will be seen that we already had gotten away from Mendel, though we did breed Belgian hares, whose disappearance always caused Esther distress, and we made fanciful annotations inside ruled margins about “agoutis” and “allelomorphs.”

I am conscious now that we worked constantly under a sense of constraint; there was an unnecessary secrecy in all our plans and actions. Why? I think, when I look back, that it was not because of what we were doing, but rather of what it might become necessary some day to do. The work was so near to sacrilege—I mean, we viewed the animal structure as a mechanism rather than as a temple. That, of course, was then the way of all biologists; but that, I think, was the cause of our rather furtive methods. We were hot on the trail of the mystery of life, and never knew upon what intimacies we might stumble. We sought to discover how and where consciousness is born out of unconscious tissue vitality. Lazaroff had the intuition of genius, and his inductions were amazing. Still, that problem baffled him.

“Pennell,” I hear him say, “at a certain period of growth, when millions of cells, working cooperatively, have grouped themselves in certain patterns, completing the design, consciousness comes into play. Why? Is it a by-product, the creak that accompanies the wheel? But Nature produces nothing in vain. Then why should we know that we exist? Why?”

Lazaroff was a Prussian Pole, I believe, though he spoke half a dozen languages fluently. Keen and fanatical, daring, inflexible, he seemed to me the sort of man who would welcome the chance to proclaim a Holy War for Science and die in the front rank. He had the strange old German faith that was called monism, and his hope for the human race was as strong as his contempt for the man of our day.

“The race is all, Pennell,” I hear him say again. “We of this age, who pride ourselves on our accomplishments, are only emerging from the dawn of civilization. We are still encumbered with all the ghostly fears that obsessed our ancestors of the Stone Age. But others will build the Temple of Truth upon the foundations that we are rearing. Oh, if I could have been born a hundred years ahead! For the change is coming fast, Pennell!”

And, when I professed to doubt the nearness of that change: “If your frontal area varied by only five centimeters, Pennell, you would believe. That is your tragedy, to fall short of the human norm by five centimeters of missing forehead.”

I can see his well-proportioned figure, and the mane of black hair thrown back; the flashing eyes. Animated by religious impulse, Lazaroff would have gone to the stake as unconcernedly as he would certainly have burned others. He had invented a system of craniometry by which he professed to discover the mentality of his subject, and I was his first.

Certainly the conditions were ideal for our work. We were both young men, enthusiasts; and Sir Spofforth Moore, our chief, was nearing eighty. The Trustees had picked him for the post because of his great name in the medical world. He was an ideal chief. He interfered with us no more than the Trustees did. He asked for no results. The Institute existed only for patient research. Yes, the millionaire had certainly displayed imagination for a millionaire, and it was fortunate that he died before his hobby, whose inception came to him, I believe, from reading sensational newspaper articles, grew into an obsession.

The Trustees refused to accept Sir Spofforth’s resignation when he became infirm. He lent the Institute dignity and prestige. I doubt whether he knew much of Mendelism, or had followed the work of the past five years. He knew little of what we were doing, and initialed our vouchers without ever demurring. Of course he tried to keep in touch with us, and I will confess that our routine work was mainly a cover for the daring plan that Lazaroff had, bit by bit, outlined to me.

“You see, Pennell,” he explained in self-justification, “the work must be done. And where are there such opportunities as here? Science cannot be bound by the provisions of a dead man’s deed. It is not likely that Sir Spofforth would object, either, but the Trustees might have intelligence enough to pick up the idea from the quarterly reports if we were entirely frank, and a biologist with imagination is called a charlatan. And we must work quickly, while we have this chance. When Sir Spofforth dies the Trustees will probably pick some fussy little busybody who will want to poke his nose into everything and take personal charge. Then—what of our experiment?”

The idea aroused me to as much enthusiasm as Lazaroff. And yet there was disappointment in the knowledge that we should never know the results of it.

In brief, Lazaroff’s scheme was this: If animal tissues, removed from the entire organism, can exist in a condition of suspended vitality for an indefinite time, at a temperature suited to them in conditions which forbid germ life to flourish, why not the living animal? Lazaroff had selected three monkeys from among our stock for the experiment. They were to be sealed each in a vacuum cylinder of special design, and left for a century.

“The more I think about the plan, the more enthusiastic I become, Pennell,” Lazaroff cried. “If the unconscious cell life survives indefinitely, why not the entire organism plus consciousness?”

“Much may happen in a hundred years, Lazaroff,” I answered.

“True, Pennell. But they will never find the vault. Even now, before it is sealed, it would not be looked for, built as it is into the cellar wall beneath the freezing-plant. It was to this end, you know, that I brought down workmen from London, instead of employing local talent. Well—we shall leave papers. Earthquakes and revolutions may happen overhead, but a hundred years hence, when the papers are opened, a search will be made. Our traveling simians will be found by a very different world, I assure you, Pennell!”

He had the light of an enthusiast in his eyes, and his mood aroused my own imagination.

“What use is that, Lazaroff?” I cried. “We shall not know the results of our experiment. And what message can monkeys carry to that world concerning ours? If monkeys, why not men?”

He looked at me fixedly, smiling ever so little, and I perceived that he had drawn the expression of that thought out of the depths of my own mind by his strong will. Now he nodded in approbation.

“Pennell—” he began, with hesitation, “do you want to know why I myself do not—?” He stopped. “I am almost ashamed to tell you what it is that makes me wish to live out my life among my contemporaries,” he continued. “How strong the primal instincts are in all of us, Arnold! Nature, with her blind, but perfectly directed will, warring on mind, and mind rising slowly to dominate her, armed, as she is, with her dreadful arsenal of a thousand superstitions, instincts, terrors. It is a fearful battle, Arnold, and many of us fall by the way.”

He turned aside abruptly, as if he regretted the half-confidence. I thought I knew what he meant, and I was stirred too.

We dined that night with Sir Spofforth and Esther in their new house within a stone’s throw of the Institute. Esther was the only child; her mother had died during her infancy. We four had been intimates during the whole five years of the Institute’s existence; strangely alone, we four, in the busy Surrey town. The memory of that last night is the most poignant that remains to me. How far away it seems, and how long ago! If I could have known then that our companionship was ended!

The argument to which I have referred began after dinner, over our coffee. It was our usual hour for disputations, but they had never been so keen, nor Lazaroff so outspoken. Sir Spofforth was a man of the old school of thought, religious, tolerant, and withal more disquieted than he himself was aware, by the dominant materialism of the younger men; and Lazaroff had all the tactlessness of his Jena training. There were rumors of war with Germany, but Sir Spofforth was too old to adjust his mind immediately to this conception. He grew heated, as always, on the cynical scheme of the democratic government, dictated by its greed for power, to force Ulster beneath an alien yoke, upon the loud and stunning silence of our English pacifists and lovers of oppressed nations where their sincerity would be best proved. He deplored the new and dangerous doctrines that were permeating society, the decay of morals, the loss of reverence and pride in service. Civilization, he said, seemed dying, and democracy its murderer.

“Dying! It is still struggling in its birth throes!” cried Lazaroff impetuously. “I grant that the democracy of today has proved its futility. But there is a new democracy to come. We are enslaved by the traditions of the past, by a worn-out religious system based upon the primitive animistic notion of a soul. There is the fatal weakness of our democracy. Science has never found the smallest trace of a soul; on the contrary, we know beyond doubt that we live in a mechanistic universe of absolute determinism.”

I see Sir Spofforth’s tolerant, yet eager look as he answered him.

 

“I grant you that the soul is not to be found in the dissecting-room, Herman,” he answered. “I, as you know, have devoted my life to the empirical investigation of truth, and I do not decry the method. But you cannot ignore the interior way of analysis, through the one thing we know most intimately—consciousness.”

“A by-product of matter,” answered Lazaroff contemptuously. “Or, if we want to be precisely true, the sum and substance of cell consciousness.”

“Well, throw the blame on the cell, then, in the modern fashion,” said Sir Spofforth, smiling. “I doubt, though, whether you have solved the one big problem by creating some million smaller ones. On the contrary, you are postulating a hierarchy of intelligences, quite in the Catholic fashion. If brain consciousness is not a specialized form of omniscient consciousness, how does the brainless amoeba find its food and engulf it, or the vine its supports? If you have robbed us of the abortive hope of saving the little empire of the brain beyond the change of death—and I deny even that entirely—some of us have identified consciousness with a non-material personality functioning through all life and fashioning it.”

“Vitalism!” scoffed Lazaroff.

I watched Esther’s eager face as she looked from one speaker to the other. Sir Spofforth seemed more agitated than the situation warranted, and I saw him glance at his daughter a little nervously before he answered.

“Herman, I repeat that I have given my life to scientific investigation,” he replied. “But I have always recognized the validity of the metaphysical inquiry. I believe Faith and Science have found their paths convergent. Lodge thinks so, too. Kelvin took that stand. James, your great psychologist, shifted before he died. Science must confine her activities within their natural bounds and not seek to play a pontifical part, or the excesses of the Scholastics will be repeated in a new and darker age.”

“I cannot agree with you,” cried Lazaroff vehemently. “An age is dawning when, relieved from their chains, men will look open-eyed into Nature to learn her secrets. Today civilization is being choked to death by the effete, the defective, whom a too benign humanitarianism suffers to live beneath the shelter of a worn-out faith. The fearful menace of a race of defectives has laid hold of the popular imagination. Soon we shall follow the lead of progressive America, and forbid them to propagate their kind. Here any statesman who dared suggest sterilization would be hounded from office. But England is awakening.

“It will go, that relic of degrading, savage superstition called the soul, the barbarous legacy of the ages enshrined in a hundred fairy stories. Science will rule. Man will be free. The logical State, finely conceived by Wells, without its rudimentary appendixes and fish-gills, will be the nation of the future. For we are outgrowing childish things. Man is coming of age. If only I could live to see it! But I was born a century too soon!”

The expression on Lazaroff’s face at that moment was so singular that I could not take my eyes away from it.

“It will be a world of physical and mental perfection, too,” he cried. “Of free men and women, freely mating, separating when the mating impulse is dead—”

“Yes, he is right, Father,” Esther interposed eagerly. “Whatever else may come, the hour of woman’s liberation is striking.”

“That hour struck many times in the ancient world, my dear,” her father answered. “And it brought, not liberation, but slavery.” He turned to Lazaroff. “You want a world of men and women reared like prize cattle and governed by laws as mechanistic as your universe,” he said. “Well, Herman, you have had that world. That was the pre-Christian world. Your free love, your eugenics has been tried in Rome, in Sparta, in many an ancient kingdom. And we know what those civilizations were.

“If you eugenists only knew the dreadful crop of dragon’s teeth that you are scattering today upon the fertile soil of the unthinking mind! Because we, fortunately, live in the millennial lull of a transitional age, you think that human nature has changed; that the fury of the Crusades will never be renewed in fantastic social wars, and the madness of religious fratricide in the madness of Science become Faith. All the old evils are lying low, lurking in the minds of men, ready to spring forth in all their ancient fury when the wise and illogical compromises, evolved through centuries of experience, have been discarded. I sometimes think that Holy Russia has man’s future in her charge. For without Christianity the moral nature of man will be where it has been in ages past. Social and economic readjustments leave it unchanged.”

“A religion of slaves, of the weak and incompetent,” said Lazaroff loudly.

“You think, then, that human passions have become emulsified by education? What a delusion!”

“Unquestionably. Permit me to refer to myself as an example of the crass materialist. For I do not believe in anything but matter. Matter is soul, as Hæckel proves. Yet, I am not on that account a man of base impulses. I do not want to wound, to kill, to steal, to torture—”

“Are you quite sure you know yourself, Herman?”

“But I utterly reject the efficacy of your Christianity, except in this low order of civilization. It is a dead faith, with its foolish miracles, its preposterous and unscientific dualism.”

“And I say,” cried Sir Spofforth, rising out of his chair, “that it is precisely the Christian norm, the unattainable ideal of Christ, working in the human heart, that has freed civilization from cruelty and shame. Why, look backward before Christ lived, and forward: don’t you see that we are actually indwelling in Him, according to His promise? Think of the Christians burned as living torches in Nero’s time, and read the writings of contemporary Romans, men of disciplined lives and a mentality as great as ours. Read Pliny, Tacitus, Seneca; read of the hopelessness of life when Rome was at her highest, and see if this stirred them. Picture Marcus Aurelius, the noble Stoic, presiding over the amphitheater. Study the manners and morals of Athens when her light burned most brightly. Contrast a thousand years of man’s abasement, and try to set the Inquisition against that.

“Future ages will say this: that nobody, not one of our statesmen saw the course that had been set when the civil State was first established. Never before in history had tribe or nation existed but grew up round the focus of some god. The churchless State is a body without a soul. Warnings multiply—in France and in America—but who can read them? When religion goes, the spirit of the race is dying. It is just the ideal of Christ, enshrined in the minds of a few leaders of character and trained conviction, that has kept the world on its slow course of progress. And nothing else saves us from the unstable tyrannies of ancient days.”

I was so stirred by Sir Spofforth’s eloquence that I clapped my hands vigorously, although I did not wholly agree with him. Esther was staring at Lazaroff; she was partly convinced and wanted him to answer her father. But Lazaroff, ignoring her gaze, scowled at me across the table.

“So you are of the same mind, are you, Pennell?” he asked, not trying to disguise his sneer. “And you don’t imagine that it is your missing five centimeters? Well, I hope that you may have your chance to find out for yourself. I hope you may, indeed.” He nodded and smiled in a rather evil fashion.

“Well, I must really offer you all an apology,” said Sir Spofforth, penitently. “Enough of these debatable subjects for a week at least. We two shall never agree on politics or religion, Herman. Let us go upstairs.”

Saturday, 8 February 2025

Saturday’s Good Reading: “The Rajah's Gift” by E. Hoffmann Price (in English)

 

Strange tales are told of the rajah of Lacra-Kai, of the justice he dealt, of the rewards he gave; but the strangest of all these many tales is that of the gift he gave to Zaid, the Persian who had served him long and well. A crafty man was the rajah, an eastern Machiavelli who by his devices had retained the sovereignty of his petty state almost unimpaired by British rule; a keen, shrewd diplomat, a polished cosmopolitan, an oriental wearing a thick veneer of European culture. In short, he was an enlightened monarch, a tributary prince who was left quite to his own devices as regarded the internal administration of his state. But it is of his gift to Zaid whereof we are to deal.

In the privacy of his palace, screened from the view of his people, the rajah was quite European, dispensing with the pomp and glitter and formality that is supposed to surround all eastern potentates at all times. Therefore it was that Zaid the Persian, who had served his master long and well, not only sat, but also smoked in the royal presence as he listened to the words of his lord.

"Zaid," the prince was saying, "but for your courage and fidelity I would surely have been assassinated; therefore have I summoned you this afternoon so that you may receive some token of my gratitude. Name whatsoever you desire and it shall be yours, for I mean to reward you richly."

"My lord," replied Zaid, "there is but one request that I would make, and that is mad beyond all conception of madness ...."

"Nevertheless, let me hear it; tell me what is on your mind. Forget that I am rajah of Lacra-Kai, and consider me but as your friend who is indebted to you; therefore speak freely."

"For ten years I have been favored by your munificence," began Zaid, speaking slowly. "For ten years I have been the friend of kings; but all that is nothing."

Zaid paused. A far-away look had crept over his features; he seemed to be gazing through and beyond the rajah, and back to some dimly remembered, almost forgotten episode of the past. And then, picking his words as one groping in the dark picks his steps, he told how, twenty years previous, he had stood on the edge of the crowd in the square before the great temple of Kali, awaiting the arrival of the procession at whose head the present rajah would be riding. Zaid, a boy scarcely a dozen years old, ragged, dirty, half starved, part of the scum of an eastern city, stood that day to watch the rajah ride past in state. All the color and magnificence, all the barbaric pomp of that oriental court was there, dazzling, the concentrated, fiery splendor that marked a prince’s accession to his throne. And all this the boy saw, yet saw not, for he had eyes for none but the rajah. High above the crowd, on the back of a great elephant he sat, dark, calm, impassive, and arrogant as a god. Not as a man, exultant, but rather as some high, passionless fate solemnly advancing across the wastes of space. The prince was oblivious of the pomp and splendor, oblivious of the tumult and applause: on that day it seemed to Zaid that he saw not a man, but destiny itself in march. And as the rajah drew near, the great temple gong clanged with a reverberation that seemed to shake the very base of the universe: a strange, unearthly vibration that mingled with the resonance of brass the hiss of serpents and the rustle of silk: a sound that rose and fell, resonant, sonorous, awful. Through all this the rajah sat calm and inscrutable, above all exultation, above all human emotion. But at the sound of that gong, at the sight of that hard, impassive face, a great madness possessed Zaid, so that his blood became as a stream of flame. And he swore that he, too, would some day ride in such a procession, would bear himself with that same godlike hauteur, that same superb arrogance; he, Zaid, hungry beggar lad and scum of the streets, dared have such a vision.

Silent were the gongs; vanished the procession; and the new rajah ruled in Lacra-Kai. But with Zaid the vision remained, following him over half the earth, and returning with him to Lacra-Kai, where, ten years later, he entered the service of that same rajah, and, by strange turns of fortune, rose to rank and power in that same court; for in the East all things are possible. Who has not heard of the blacksmith who founded the Sassanian dynasty that once ruled Persia?

Such was the tale Zaid told the rajah.

 

"As strange a tale as I have ever heard." mused the prince. "You have indeed prospered." Then, suddenly, "And all this is apropos of what?"

Zaid started, as one waking from a dream, then laughed oddly.

"Hear my desire, then deal with me as you will. For twenty years that vision has haunted me. Much has happened since then; much have I seen and experienced, but through it all, this mad desire has persisted. And at last it happened that I entered you service, and that, having served you well, it has pleased you to grant me whatsoever I might desire. Therefore, seeing that this great madness has haunted me all these years, I make this request: that I be permitted to ride in state as I saw you ride twenty years ago, so that I may fulfil the oath I then swore."

Whereat the rajah replied in the tone of one who denies some child a dangerous toy: "Fool! To grant you that favor would be to sign your death-warrant. Were you to ride thus at noon, poison or dagger would find you before dawn; for no man may enjoy such a mark of favor and live. What? Have you lived in this land all these years and do not realize the penalty you would pay? Consider a moment: my son is dead; the succession to the throne lay among my three nephews. One of them sought to hasten his succession. The plot was discovered, and the plotter I punished by showing him a mark of extraordinary favor. Immediately it was rumored about that I had selected him as my heir; and within ten days he died. But not by my command, for that was superfluous. The princes of the blood, and the lords of the court ...."

The rajah made a suggestive, sweeping gesture with his hand, then continued, "Me you were able to save from assassination; yourself you could not save, nor could I save you. You would ride in state; rumors would drift about. And you know the rest."

"Even so, my lord; I know the rest. But I will take my chance. It is not good for a man to cherish a vision, however mad, without having made some effort to attain it."

"Think again, Zaid, think again! Cast aside your insanity. Choose whatsoever else you will ... a lakh of rupees .... ten lakhs if you will .... jewels the like of which you have never dreamed .... and I have a dancing girl whose equal is not to be found in the entire world .... all this, and more, is yours, for you have served me well; it is to you that I owe my life. Be reasonable, friend, be reasonable."

"Be reasonable? That is the one command I can not obey, for in me there is no reason. This mad vision has haunted me entirely too long. So, though it may cost me my life, as surely it may, let me see it to a finish. For there at least would be a roundness, a completeness to my career that in no way else could I attain. In the square before the great temple of Kali I found the inspiration that led me to enter your service, to attain your favor, to serve you well; and in that same square, if need be, I will meet my doom. The cycle will be complete. After that, let come what may, for I shall have cheated destiny of the rare gift of satisfaction, the gift so often denied to kings. And after all, is the assassin so sure of finding me? Is that conclusion inevitable?"

The rajah smiled as one upon whom great understanding has suddenly descended.

"Zaid," he said, "you are more than ever a man after my own heart. Mad you are, stark mad and raving; I understand, for I, too, have been haunted by visions. But none has understood my thoughts, even as none would understand your mad desire. It would be misconstrued, and .... you know the result."

 

Suddenly the rajah arose.

"Come, Zaid, let me tempt you with the things I have but named."

And Zaid was led through subterranean vaults, treasure vaults full of gilded arms and armor, trays of flaming jewels, great chests of age-old coins, dinars and mohurs of gold, the secreted plunder of a hundred generations.

"All this leaves you unmoved ? Then let me try again."

The Persian accompanied his master to the very heart of the palace, to a hall overshadowed with twilight—a broad, spacious hall whose walls were curiously carved with strange figures in unnamably odd postures, engaged in unmentionable diversions. And then his ears were caressed by the soft, sensuously wailing notes of reed and stringed instruments: his senses were stirred by the dull pulsing of atabals, throbbing like a heart racked with passion. And through the purple gloom of incense fumes he saw the lithe, swaying, gilded bodies of dancing girls, slim and wondrously beautiful. One, emerging from the figures of the dance, slowly advanced and made obeisance before the rajah.

"And this is Nilofal, the matchless bayadere, she whose equal is not to be found in the entire world. Should she please you ...."

The Persian, lost in admiration, saw that she was perfection incarnate, outstripping the maddest flight of the most voluptuous fancy. But when he turned to reply, the rajah had disappeared; and the door through which they had entered was barred.

What allurements. what sorceries, what fascinations Nilofal used to entice the fancy of Zaid during those three days, we shall never know. Suffice it to say that she failed in her efforts to separate the Persian from his madness.

Once again Zaid stood before the rajah, who smiled with the air of one whose cleverness has just reaped its reward in the solution of a difficult problem.

"What now, Zaid? Was Nilofal to your taste? Surely she must have been; and certainly she is worth all the dreams that have haunted men since the beginning of time."

"My lord," replied the Persian, "you have tempted me as man has never before been tempted; yet am I to sacrifice the vision of twenty years in favor of a treasure vault and a lupanar? Although you may refuse it, I nevertheless hold fast to my first desire."

"So be it then; and tomorrow at noon you shall see it satisfied."

And then and there were preparations made for Zaid to ride in royal state through the streets of Lacra-Kai.

 

Noon the next day. The rajah, watching from the roof of his palace, saw Zaid in the gilded howdah, mounted on the great elephant that carried none but princes of the blood. Calm and serene and godlike sat the Persian: a king he seemed, and the descendant of a hundred kings, for at that moment he was about to fulfil his destiny. Once again a great understanding descended upon the rajah.

"It was wrong indeed that I tried to dissuade him," reflected the rajah, "for whatever the end may be, it will be as nothing; Zaid is about to accomplish that which he set out to do when he was a beggar, a hungry, nameless urchin. There is something great and heroic in this madness .... but what will happen when he passes the temple of Kali? Can he ever become a man again? .... for in his madness he is more than a man; he has overturned destiny to fulfil a childish fancy ...."

And the prince, watching the procession get under way, was lost in admiration of the man who for half an hour would be rajah.

"And having attained his dream, will not the man Zaid have died, though he live a hundred years thereafter in security? And what would life mean to him?"

The procession, turning, had taken Zaid from the rajah’s view. Bestirring himself from his revery, he whispered a few words to Al Tarik, his trusted servant.

".... And do not fail me in the slightest detail."

The rajah repeated his instructions. Al Tarik departed. And in the meanwhile, Zaid rode to the fulfilment of his dream.

Through the streets of Lacra-Kai the procession wound. The Persian, as in a dream, bore himself not as a man but as the avatar of some god returning to judge the world. Vanity? A love of pomp? No; surely not that. Rather was it that strange madness that overwhelms men when they snatch from fate the achievement of a vision. On and on he rode, like the slow, sure march of destiny, immutable, irresistible. And but one thought flitted through his brain, the words of some long forgotten sage: "When indeed they do grant to a man the realization of his dream, they straightway reach forth to snatch from him his prize, lest in his triumph he become godlike and gaily toss them from their lofty thrones." His lips curled in the shadow of a smile, for swift indeed would have to be their envy to defeat him; the great temple of Kali was at hand. He was approaching the square where, twenty years ago, an obscure nobody, a starving beggar, a mere boy, he had seen the vision that now was materializing. And then the great gong in the temple rang, reverberating like the crash of doom, filling the entire universe with its shivering resonance—full-throated, colossal, then hissing with the rustle of silk—a sound that swelled, and died, and rose again.

As slowly as some animated Juggernaut the royal elephant advanced, pace by pace, deliberately. majestically, as though each step took him from world to world. And again the song, touched to life by the mallet wielded by a temple slave, rolled forth its sonorous, vibrant crash.

A few more steps, and Zaid, the Persian, whom the rajah loved to honor, was before the temple of Kali. High and arrogant was he, as Rama going forth to conquer the world; no longer a man, but transfigured beyond recognition. Again the temple gong gave forth its vibrant note, reverberant, awful; diminishing, then rising and swelling again. And the god, who but half an hour before had been Zaid, the Persian, toppled forward in the gilded howdah. The last roll of the gong had masked the smacking report of a high-powered rifle.

 

That evening the rajah gazed at the body of the man who had served him well, the man he had esteemed and loved as a friend. Pity and sorrow were on his lean, hard features; but regret was absent.

"A king and more than a king," he soliloquized, as he regarded the still, transfigured face of the Persian. "A madman, perhaps—or the avatar of a god, for by his own efforts he rounded his destiny. The cycle is complete, from the temple of Kali, and back again; the circle has closed upon itself. Yes, it is well that I commanded Al Tarik to fire before Zaid endured the agony of becoming mortal again...."

Such was the gift of the rajah of Lacra-Kai. Yet once, at least, though he did not know it, the rajah had made a futile move: the shot of Al Tarik had missed; and there was no wound on the Persian’s body.

Friday, 7 February 2025

Friday's Sung Word "Good Bye!" by Assis Valente (in Portuguese)

"Good-bye! Good-bye, boy"
Deixa a mania do inglês
É tão feio pra você
Moreno frajola que nunca freqüentou
As aulas da escola
"Good-bye! Good-bye, boy"
Antes que a vida se vá
Ensinaremos cantando a todo mundo
B, è, Bé; B, i, Bi; B, a, Ba!

Não é mais boa-noite
Nem bom-dia
Só se fala "good morning"
"Good night"
Já se desprezou o lampião de querosene
Lá no morro
Só se usa luz da "Light"

 

 You can listen "Good Bye!" sung by Carmen Miranda and Lamertine Babo here.