All the people are gone now. Only I and Maot linger.
I had not realized it would come so soon. Now that we are near the end, Nature seems to hurry.
I suppose that there are other stragglers here and there along the Nile, but I like to think that we are the last to see the vanishing fields, the last to look upon the river with some knowledge of what it once symbolized, before oblivion closes in.
Ours is a world in which lost causes conquer. After the second war of which I spoke, there was a long
period of peace in my native country across the sea. There were among us at that time a primitive people called Indians, neglected and imposed upon and forced to live apart in unwanted areas. We gave no thought to these people. We would have laughed at anyone who told us they had power to hurt us.
But from somewhere a spark of rebellion appeared among them. They formed bands, armed themselves with bows and inferior guns, took the warpath against us.
We fought them in little unimportant wars that were never quite conclusive. They persisted, always returning to the fight, laying ambushes for our men and wagons, harrying us continually, eventually making sizable inroads.
Yet we still considered them of such trifling importance that we found time to engage in a civil war among ourselves.
The issue of this war was sad. A dusky portion of our citizenry were enslaved and made to toil for us in house and field.
The Indians grew formidable. Step by step they drove us back across the wide midwestern rivers and plains, through the wooded mountains to eastward.
On the eastern coast we held for a while, chiefly by leaguing with a transoceanic island nation, to whom we surrendered our independence.
There was an enheartening occurrence. The enslaved Negroes were gathered together and crowded in ships and taken to the southern shores of this continent, and there liberated or given into the hands of warlike tribes who eventually released them.
But the pressure of the Indians, sporadically aided by foreign allies, increased. City by city, town by town, settlement by settlement, we pulled up our stakes and took ship ourselves across the sea. Toward the end the Indians became strangely pacific, so that the last boatloads seemed to flee not so much in physical fear as in supernatural terror of the green silent forests that had swallowed up their homes.
To the south the Aztecs took up their glass knives and flint-edged swords and drove out the. I think they were called Spaniards.
In another century the whole western continent was forgotten, save for dim, haunting recollections.
Growing tyranny and ignorance, a constant contraction of frontiers, rebellions of the downtrodden, who in turn became oppressors— these constituted the next epoch of history.
Once I thought the tide had turned. A strong and orderly people, the Romans, arose and put most of the diminished world under their sway.
But this stability proved transitory. Once again the governed rose against the governors. The Romans were driven back—from England, from Egypt, from Gaul, from Asia, from Greece. Rising from barren fields came Carthage to contest successfully Rome’s preeminence. The Romans took refuge in Rome, became unimportant, dwindled, were lost in a maze of migrations.
Their energizing thoughts flamed up for one glorious century in Athens, then ceased to carry weight.
After that, the decline continued at a steady pace. Never again was I deceived into thinking the trend had changed.
Except this one last time.
Because she was stony and sun-drenched and dry, full of temples and tombs, given to custom and calm,
I thought Egypt would endure. The passage of almost changeless centuries encouraged me in this belief. I thought that if we had not reached the turning point, we had at least come to rest.
But the rains have come, the temples and tombs fill the scars in the cliffs, and the custom and calm have given way to the restless urges of the nomad.
If there is a turning point, it will not come until man is one with the beasts.
And Egypt must vanish like the rest.
Tomorrow Maot and I set out. Our flock is gathered. Our tent is rolled.
Maot is afire with youth. She is very loving.
It will be strange in the desert. All too soon we will exchange our last and sweetest kiss and she will prattle to me childishly and I will look after her until we find her mother.
Or perhaps some day I will abandon her in the desert, and her mother will find her.
And I will go on.
The Ship Sails At Midnight
THIS is the story of a beautiful woman.
And of a monster.
It is also the story of four silly, selfish, culture-bound inhabitants of the planet Earth. Es, who was something of an artist. Gene, who studied atoms—and fought the world and himself. Louis, who philosophized. And Larry—that’s my name—who tried to write books.
It was an eerie, stifling August when we met Helen. The date is fixed in my mind because our little city had just had its mid-western sluggishness ruffled by a series of those scares that either give rise to oddity items in the newspapers, or else are caused by them—it’s sometimes hard to tell which. People had seen flying disks and heard noises in the sky—someone from the college geology department tried unsuccessfully to track down a meteorite. A farmer this side of the old coal pits got all excited about something “big and shapeless” that disturbed his poultry and frightened his wife, and for a couple of days men tracked around fruitlessly with shotguns—just another of those “rural monster” scares.
Even the townfolk hadn’t been left out. For their imaginative enrichment they had a “Hypnotism Burglar,” an apparently mild enough chap who blinked soft lights in people’s faces and droned some siren-song outside their houses at night. For a week high-school girls squealed twice as loud after dark, men squared their shoulders adventurously at strangers, and women peered uneasily out of their bedroom windows after turning out the lights.
Louis and Es and I had picked up Gene at the college library and wanted a bite to eat before we turned in. Although by now they had almost petered out, we were talking about our local scares—a chilly hint of the supernatural makes good conversational fare in a month too hot for any real thinking. We slouched into the one decent open-all-night restaurant our dismal burg possesses (it wouldn’t have that if it weren’t for the “wild” college folk) and found that Benny had a new waitress.
She was really very beautiful, much too exotically beautiful for Benny’s. Masses of pale gold ringlets piled high on her head. An aristocratic bone structure (from Es’s greedy look I could tell she was instantly thinking sculpture). And a pair of the dreamiest, calmest eyes in the world.
She came over to our table and silently waited for our orders. Probably because her beauty flustered us, we put on an elaborate version of our act of “intellectuals precisely and patiently explaining their desires to a pig-headed member of the proletariat.” She listened, nodded, and presently returned with our orders.
Louis had asked for just a cup of black coffee.
She brought him a half cantaloup also.
He sat looking at it for a moment. Then he chuckled incredulously. “You know, I actually wanted that,” he said. “But I didn’t know I wanted it. You must have read my subconscious mind.”
“What’s that?” she asked in a low, lovely voice with intonations rather like Benny’s.
Digging into his cantaloup, Louis sketched an explanation suitable for fifth-graders.
She disregarded the explanation. “What do you use it for?” she asked.
Louis, who is something of a wit, said, “I don’t use it. It uses me.”