But When We Left That Broad, Gay Ante-Room And Came To The Narrower
Passage Where Once His Body Had Lain And Where All His Doom Was
Portrayed, I Could Not Follow Him So Well.
I did not see how he, so
experienced in life, could be cowed by friezes of brute-headed
apparitions or satisfied by files of repeated figures.
He explained,
something to this effect:
'We live on the River - a line without breadth or thickness. Behind us
is the Desert, which nothing can affect; wither no man goes till he is
dead, (One does not use good agricultural ground for cemeteries.)
Practically, then, we only move in two dimensions - up stream or down.
Take away the Desert, which we don't consider any more than a healthy
man considers death, and you will see that we have no background
whatever. Our world is all one straight bar of brown or green earth,
and, for some months, mere sky-reflecting water that wipes out
everything You have only to look at the Colossi to realise how
enormously and extravagantly man and his works must scale in such a
country. Remember too, that our crops are sure, and our life is very,
very easy. Above all, we have no neighbours That is to say, we must give
out, for we cannot take in. Now, I put it to you, what is left for a
priest with imagination, except to develop ritual and multiply gods on
friezes? Unlimited leisure, limited space of two dimensions, divided by
the hypnotising line of the River, and bounded by visible, unalterable
death - must, ipso facto - - '
'Even so,' I interrupted.
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