When Merodach, the King of Uruk, sate down to his meals, he made his enemies his foot-stool; for beneath his table he kept an hundred kings, with their thumbs and great toes cut off, as living witnesses of his power and clemency. When the crumbs fell from the table of Merodach, the Kings would feed themselves with two fingers; and when Merodach observed how painful and difficult the operation was, he praised God for having given thumbs to man. "It is by the absence of thumbs," he said, "that we are enabled to discern their use. We invariably learn the importance of what we lack. If we remove the eyes from a man we deprive him of sight; and consequently we learn that sight is the function of the eyes."
2Thus spake Merodach, for he had a scientific mind, and was curious of God's handiwork; and when he had finished speaking the courtiers applauded him.
"Great is the power of the Great King, and most wonderful is his wisdom," cried the courtiers; and the King shook out his napkin under the table, shaking the crumbs among his prostrate enemies, for the applause was pleasant to him; but from beneath the table came a harsh, sarcastic voice.
"Great is the power of the Great King, and most wonderful is his wisdom," said the voice; "but neither from his power nor from his wisdom can he fashion us new thumbs."
Then was Merodach angry, and he bade his courtiers seize the speaker and draw him from beneath the table; and the man they drew out was Shalmaneser, who had been a king among the kings of Chald?a. And at first Merodach was of a mind to kill Shalmaneser; but, seeing that his captive sought for death, his heart relented, and he bade his courtiers restore him to his place beneath the table.
"My power and my wisdom are great," he said; "since I have so afflicted mine enemies that they fear not to tell me the truth."
And when Merodach had eaten, he rose 3from the table and went out into the gardens of the terrace where the nightingales were singing; but the kings beneath the table smote Shalmaneser sorely upon both cheeks, and upon his buttocks, and tore out the hair of his beard; for after that he had spoken, Merodach had shaken out the crumbs from his napkin among them no more, and they had supped poorly.
Then Merodach wandered about in his garden, listening to the song of the nightingales who nested there, and smelling the sweet smells of the flowers that were odorous in the cool of the evening; and behind him, fifty paces, there followed his guards, for he was afraid for his life. The dew fell upon the glazed bricks, gleaming in the moonlight, and hung from the trees and flowers like little trembling stars. Merodach leaned his arms upon a balustrade and looked over the city which he had builded on the left bank of the Euphrates, and watched the illuminated barges that went up and down the river, rowing with music upon the waters; and he looked toward the high temples looming into the night, and he thought of his glory and was exceeding sad.
"In a little time I die," he said; "but the 4city which I have builded will be a witness for me while man survives on the earth."
And from the barges came the pleasant sound of music, floating through the night, and Merodach regretted that he would have to die, and in a little while would walk no more through his garden in the cool of the evening, listening to the sounds of life, and smelling the sweet breath of the flowers.
"In a little while the race of man will have perished from off the earth," he said; "and there will be no memory of me, but the stars will shine still above my ruined and tenantless palace."
And the night-wind, laden with scents and sounds, shook the dew from the trembling leaves, and moved his silken raiment; and Merodach was overcome with a passion for life.
"In a little time," he thought, "even the stars will have vanished."
And from the adjoining gardens of his harem he heard the voices of women waiting to pleasure their lord; and he went in unto them for he feared to be alone.
In the garden of Merodach's harem, the Queen Parysatis held a feast in honour of 5her daughter, the Princess Candace, who was eleven years old. The Queen Parysatis lay upon a pile of cushions looking at a tragedy that was being enacted by a company of eunuchs. The Princess Candace was standing beside a deep basin of silver, seventy cubits in diameter, called the Sea of Silver; and she threw sugar-plums to a troop of little girls, who dived after them, gleaming fish-like in the luminous depths. When she saw the King, her father, she stopped throwing sugar-plums, and the little girls came out of the water, and sate upon the silver rim, their wet, naked limbs glimmering in the moonlight. Then the Princess Candace did homage before Merodach, bowing down before him and touching his feet; and he stretched forth his hand to her, and led her to a couch, because he loved his children, and she was as beautiful as the new moon before it is a day old.
Now it chanced that at that time the High-priest Bagoas, who was High-priest of the temple of Bel at Nippur, was in the palace of the King; and Merodach sent for him, desiring him to speak comfortable doctrine and words cheering to the heart; and Bagoas came in unto Merodach, and did homage 6before him, bowing down before him and touching his feet; and there was no one in the cities of Babylonia more powerful than Bagoas, unless it were the King himself.
"As I walked in the garden in the evening," said Merodach, "I became afflicted with a sense of human transience and of the vanity of greatness. In a little time, I said, I shall be but a handful of dust. Then I comforted myself with the thought that I should live in the memory of man, through my monuments, while man survives upon the earth; but in a little time man himself disappears, I said, and even the stars are lost in darkness."
And Bagoas smiled.
"It is true, O King, man cometh upon the earth and rules it for a little space, like a god. In hollow ships, he sails over the pathless sea; and he has mapped out the heavens naming the stars; and he follows the courses of the planets round the sun; and he knoweth the seasons of reaping and sowing, by the constellations rising or setting in the sky. His cunning mind has devised screws to draw water up out of the earth, and pulleys and levers to uplift masses beyond his strength. He is a master of populous cities, a weaver of delicate textures, a limner of images in 7fair colours; he is a tamer of horses, skilled in the knowledge of flocks and herds; with hooks he draweth fish out of the sea, and with an arrow transfixes a bird on the wing; he fashions the metals in fire, beating the gold and stubborn bronze to his will. He understands the laws of Nature, and has named the force which draws the earth round the sun, and the moon round the earth; but time is his master, and he cannot find a remedy against death."
"Nor fashion a thumb for man," said Merodach.
"The fear of death is the greatest incitement to live," continued Bagoas. "It is the goad which incessantly urges us to action. Our desire to live, to persist in one form or another, impels us to beget children, to overpower the imagination of future ages by the splendour of our monuments and the record of our lives. We seek to stamp our image upon our time, and influence our generation by every means in our power. But even this is not enough, so we have built ourselves a little world beyond the grave, a little haven beyond the waves of time. We believe that our souls will exist when our bodies have fallen into decay and escaped into a thousand 8different forms of new life, to be woven eternally on the loom of perpetual change. We believe that death is merely a transition, and that through virtue man is able to scale the brazen ramparts of the city of the gods."
"If he is very good," said the Princess Candace.
"Little Princess," said Bagoas, smiling, "your beauty is like a bright rainbow in the sky; the sunlight streaming upon drifting rain. Have you ever considered the personality of man, O King? Everything that has existed in the past exists in the soul of man. In its depths are the primeval monsters, Apsu and Tiamat. In its heights are enthroned the gods; action in it is heaped upon action to become habit, and habit upon habit to become character; all that we have seen, all that we have touched, the experience of the senses, the illusions of the brain, the desires of the heart, our ancestors, our companions, our country and occupations, all move and work mysteriously in our being. Each has left its trace upon the personality of man. Do you seek immortality for these? You will leave them with the world. Seek for yourself before you seek for self's immortality. Beneath what you seem to be lies what you 9think you are, and beneath that again lies what you are indeed."
"Alas," cried Queen Parysatis, "such an immortality is too unsubstantial. It is our illusions, our experiences, and our aspirations, which give a savour to existence. What is the use of immortality if we leave everything we love?"
"Mankind, O King," answered Bagoas, "loves its imperfections more than its perfections, and values as nothing an immortality which is devoid of our human frailties, our pitiful human friendships, our personal predilections which we obtusely term our principles."
"It is true," said Merodach, "I die; but that which is mortal of me remains upon earth to be a witness for me in the memory of man."
"The whole of recorded time is but a second, a pulsation, in the ages," answered Bagoas, "and the memory of man is the frailest of monuments. The Temple of Bel at Nippur is not two thousand years old; yet its bricks are engraven with a dead language, and we know not its builder's name. So it will be with thy temples and cities, O King!"
"I have said it," answered Merodach.
10"Perhaps after thousands of years have lapsed," continued Bagoas, "a peasant will find a brick with thy name upon it, and cast it aside, or tread it under foot. But even to-day I have met and spoken with a man in whose horoscope it was written that his name would be remembered while man exists upon the earth; yet he is naked, and his house is a cabin of boughs."
"Was it foreshadowed that he would become King?" enquired Merodach anxiously.
"No; his inheritance is poverty and pain."
"What is his name?" enquired the King.
"His name is Adam," answered Bagoas.
Then there was a silence in the garden of the King's harem; and Merodach wondered that the memory of one who went naked, and dwelt in a cabin of boughs, should outlast the memory of a King before whom the nations trembled, who went clothed in purple and fine linen, and whose palace was built of thirty-five million bricks. But he consoled himself with the thought that eventually even Adam would be forgotten, and the lights of Sirius and Aldebaran extinguished.
"Tell me of Adam," he said to Bagoas; and the Princess Candace drew closer to listen.
11"Our life, O King, is a series of accidents," said Bagoas. "A little thing is sufficient to divert the whole course of our progress; it has even been said by our philosophers that the world itself is an accident, and that God is chance. I am inclined to believe, being old-fashioned, in Providence; for chance is merely a cause that is imperceptible, and if the deflection of atoms falling through space caused the world, that deflection was the result of some feature peculiar to the atoms themselves. I believe that, if the world were formed in this way, the cause was inherent in the atoms, and I believe that the progress of each man through life is derived from causes inherent in himself. But the operations of the human mind are so far removed from our experience, and so elusive in themselves, that we cannot explain them otherwise than by saying that Bel, by the hands of his angels, puts into man's mind ideas of good or of evil according to the purpose of his inscrutable wisdom. The greater part of man's life is purely spontaneous, sensible rather than reasonable in so far as the majority of our actions do not result from any reflective process, and hence it is unreasonable to ask a man to give reasons for all his acts, as it 12would be to ask you, O King, to give a reason for your last campaign."
"That was a reason of State," said Merodach simply.
"The reason was the reason of a great King, whose wisdom is as inscrutable as the wisdom of Bel," answered Bagoas. "It was a lapse of the mind that led me to Adam; one might say almost an act of Providence, or to be scientific, chance. This morning at daybreak I had a desire to ride abroad, for I had not slept during the night, and the sweetness of the air enticed me into the country. I took a falcon upon my wrist. Falconry was a delight of my youth. But I had barely proceeded a mile before I became preoccupied with my own thoughts. The hares passed me unobserved; the doves were free of the air. I was thinking how often man has crept up toward civilisation, and then receded from it again, as the tides creep up and recede from the beach; how the light of the world has passed from nation to nation, and none have brought it to the goal; how man forgets the evils which the last generation had abolished, and rushes back upon them to escape from present evils; and it seemed to me impossible that our race could attain to perfection in 13conditions of such mutability. We sow our wisdom with full hands. We think that it may increase fifty-fold. Alas! some of our seed falls in marshy places, some among stones, some is devoured by the birds of the air, some flourishes exceedingly, and is beaten down by storms of hail, or withered by the fierce heat; and that which survives and bears fruit is scarcely sufficient for the sowing of the field again.
"Every night a priest of Bel watches the stars; with optic glasses he explores the vast abyss, through which the sun and its choir of planets journey toward their fate; and when his mind is troubled by that infinity, his eyes seek thy city, O King, and mankind to him is but a little heap of withered leaves, which a sudden wind whirls in a circling dance. From his tower, O King, he looks upon thy city, which to us, from here, is splendid with a multitude of lights, and murmurous with life. He knows that in the streets the young man is seeking pleasure, that women are bearing children, that the old are dying. All the wealth and misery of the world are at his feet; and he turns again to that star which is destined to burn up the world in a tumultuous kiss. What is the lust of the young to him; 14the pangs of child-birth; the bitterness; the regret; the anguish of approaching death? A little heap of withered leaves suddenly caught up in a windy dance; a little flame, flickering ere it goes out into darkness.
"From this spirit of detachment in the philosopher is bred a corresponding spirit of aloofness in the multitude. They see the towers of Bel, black against the evening sky, and the watcher to them is but a man enamoured of the silence, smitten with madness by the stars; a man whose life is in the future, whose wisdom is but a sure foreknowledge of death and fate, whose very presence among them is a prophecy of corruption and change; and they ask, well may they ask! what is his wisdom worth to us? The days are blue and gold, blue and silver are the nights; and the birds are clamorous among the dripping boughs; why should we pause to think of fate? What does his wisdom profit him when in a little time he dies, and is equal with us in the dust? The flowers bud, blossom, and seed, without thought for the departing year; the birds go delightfully upon the ways of the wind, though the arrows which shall bring them to earth are stored in the quiver. Shall we do otherwise?
15"Truly the worshipper of wisdom is a lonely man. The results which he obtains are never the possession of the many. They may excite the curiosity of the few, they may become an affectation with the amateur, but they do not touch the multitude, for to this last that only is good which is good in its immediate effect. Miserable indeed, the race of man seemed to me, O King; content that their mortal ambition should be bounded by the limits of a day; seeking only fat pastures and pleasant waters; and careless of the lot of their progeny, whose fate it is to cover the whole earth with populous cities, and stream like a river of fire, impetuous and consuming, into hidden and desolate places, which only the eyes of the gods have seen as yet. The treasure of wisdom is a treasure which is continually being lost, rediscovered, and lost again. It is like the gold of the miser, hidden in the ground; his son does not inherit it, but after many years some labourer turns it up with his deep-driven ploughshare, and the coins ring against the stones, and lie with tarnished brightness on the loose earth of the furrow.
"A confused murmuring distracted my thought. I seemed to swim back to reality out of a world of dreams. At first I thought 16that I had approached a hive of wild bees; but the humming murmuring noise seemed sweeter, more bird-like, until I saw that it came indeed from a parliament of birds, which had congregated in the boughs of an apple-tree, warbling there, and rising every now and then into the air, with a great rushing of wings, to wheel above the tree and descend upon it again in a thick cloud. I had strayed into a pleasant valley, where the Euphrates flows between level meadows of wild wheat, enclosed, like an amphitheatre, by well-wooded hills, which had already taken on the tawny and golden tints of autumn.
"On the lower slopes grew mulberries and oranges; above them, threaded with opulent colouring, plane-trees and sycamores, yellowing oaks, and the beautiful level boughs of dusky cedars, while from all sides came the sound of falling water, chiming and tinkling into little hollows, or thundering in cataracts, with a more imperious music, down precipitous and rocky glens. The sunlit fields of ripe wheat swayed in the wind like an undulating sea; the river gleamed like silver, and many coloured lilies grew beside the brimming water, filling the air with a delicate perfume. I looked about me in delight. It seemed a 17place sacred from the profaning feet of man. At the same time, I had a curious sense of being watched; and presently a young man rose out of the wild wheat before me, and stood watching me, with an expression of curiosity qualified with distrust."
A languid interest was apparent in the faces of his audience.
"It was Adam," said Merodach.
"At last," said Queen Parysatis.
"It was Adam," answered Bagoas, smiling. "I have attempted, O King, to give you some notion of the thoughts which preoccupied me at my meeting with him. My outlook upon things is historical, and therefore necessarily pessimistic. Adam broke in upon my thoughts as a prophecy, a promise. He was in his first manhood, almost still a boy, and represented, in consequence, an earlier stage of evolution. He seemed in fact half child, and half animal. He had the stature of a man; he was well built, muscular, giving one the impression of an immense but graceful strength, of easy movements. His features were handsome, but unlike those usual in our country; the nose was a little rapacious, the mouth cruel, but his eyes were full of dreams. It was the face of one who looks towards 18distant horizons, having the immense calm of the desert, and full of a sleeping energy. Youth softened it, and lent it a delicate charm; but in age it will be terrible. And suddenly I heard a sullen voice saying: 'This is my garden.'
"I have noticed in all nomadic peoples, and in small scattered communities, that however terse the language, and however limited the vocabulary, the words are capable of innumerable shades of meaning. Gesture and modulation lend force and precision to what is said. Perhaps this is why the art of the theatre is always, at its best, the art of a na?ve and unsophisticated people. Life in town tends to the production of a type, and individuality is suppressed; but life in the country, where the conventions are few and simple, tends to the formation of character. The theatric art, among town-dwellers, loses its broad simplicity and that directness of purpose which show man in immediate collision with facts, and is frittered away in mean motives and intangible temperaments, substituting for the play of circumstances the play of ideas. It is for the same reason that great empires always perish at the heart first; because dwellers in towns become uniform, and being surrounded by 19artificial circumstances are seldom brought into direct conflict with facts, but learn to cheat themselves with fine phrases and immaterial ideas."
"The good Bagoas is really a little prolix," whispered Parysatis to Merodach.
Bagoas heard the interruption and continued tranquilly:
"'This is my garden,' said Adam; and his words implied not only that I was an intruder, and that he was a proprietor, but also that the garden was beautiful, and that he was proud of it. I explained that I had lost my way, that I was hungry, that I was tired; and even as I spoke a young woman rose up out of the wheat and looked at me curiously.
"'We have little,' said Adam.
"They led me to their cabin of boughs, and brought me food; and they were naked and were not ashamed. They were strangers to the use of fire, and my meal consisted of nuts and honey, goat's milk and dates, such food as, our poets say, nourished the people of the golden age. In front of their cabin was an apple-tree, similar to the one upon which the birds had congregated, only with golden instead of ruddy fruit. I asked Adam if he would give me an apple from it.
20"'The tree is dedicated,' he said; 'and we may not eat of the fruit; it is forbidden to us.'
"'We may not even touch it with our hands,' said the woman, who was called Eve; and she looked at the fruit covetously.
"'To what god is it dedicated?' I enquired of them.
"'It is dedicated to God,' replied Adam simply.
"And I was surprised that this man, who had so many needs, should have only one god; but very soon I found that his monotheism was but a rude crystallisation of the spiritual forces of earth and air, a kind of shamanism, though with the many considered as one. His god was the god of fertility, who had caused the earth to put forth grass, and the trees to bear fruit, and all things to bring forth after their kind; a god whose voice was heard on the wind of the day, and who breathed into man the breath of life. In his loneliness Adam had told himself stories as children do, and, as with children, his imagination had laid hold with such intensity of vision upon these fanciful adventures of his mind that he seemed to live in a little world of his own creating, a land of enchantment 21and of dreams. The wind, the waters, the leaves of the never silent trees, the birds and the beasts of the field, all spoke in what was to him an intelligible voice; and his god was a being not far removed from himself, enjoying, even as Adam himself did, the cool of the day, the blithe air, and the breath of the sweet flowers.
"'How came it that this particular tree should be forbidden to you?' I enquired of them, for I was curious of the spiritual workings of their minds.
"'In the day that we came into this garden,' answered Adam, 'I had a desire to eat of the fruit, and I stretched my hand toward the tree when I heard a voice upon the wind, saying: "In the day that ye eat thereof ye shall surely die."'
"'It is curious,' I murmured. 'The fruit is wholesome, one would think that to eat thereof would give life rather than death.'
"'If we ate of the fruit would we not die?' enquired Eve.
"'If ye ate of it you would know,' I answered, smiling at the simplicity of the question; and then I spoke to Adam of other things. I love the conversation of the young, O King. It brings back to me the time when 22I, too, had illusions, hopes, and ideals. The sole illusions remaining to mine old age are the illusion of life, and the hope that where we have failed our children may succeed. Adam believes that all men are naturally good, and that it is society which makes them evil; he does not see that society cannot be different from what it is since it is a purely natural development, and that its laws were not made by men, but are merely a recognition of certain instincts peculiar to mankind, and of the effects which the exercise of these instincts invariably produces. His point of view is that of the individual; and the egoism of the individual is always in conflict with the collective egoism of the state. He believes that men are born equal, and that society loads them with chains. He cannot grasp the seeming paradox that what he imagines to be the natural man is really artificial, and that what he imagines to be an artificial society is really the expression of natural laws. Adam himself is not natural, he is kindly and hospitable to strangers, he is gentle, and loves his wife, he is practically a monotheist.
"Every individual is like Adam in this. We are all idealists. All of us have excellent intentions; but the world is so constituted 23that we can never carry them out. Adam has never been in a great city, but he has seen from afar the huge towers of Uruk looming into the night, and they are to him in their proud invasion of the sky a symbol of man's rebellion against the decrees of God, who fashioned him to be a feeble creature, scratching about upon the surface of the earth, and to draw his whole being from that shallow deposit of productive soil which he cultivates laboriously. He considers our temples to be the work of some demonic agency, for he does not think it possible that beings similar to himself should uplift these gigantic masses into the air. Our works of pride are, therefore, evil to him, since they differ from the works of his native humility; to live like Adam is to live virtuously; and that which is different from his mode of life is evil."
Here Merodach and the Queen Parysatis laughed at the simplicity of Adam, and the Princess Candace also laughed because she did not understand why they were amused. Bagoas looked at his audience with a faint tolerant smile.
"You find Adam's standard of good and evil laughable," he said. "It is in fact a little comic, but human, quite human, and quite 24logical. He says in effect: 'I, Adam, am good; those who differ from me, differ from what is good, and are consequently evil.' This position, which we find so laughable in others, is really common to us all; only, unfortunately, a sense of humour is a sense which we never apply to ourselves. Who will deny that Adam is wise in limiting his desires to such things as lie easily within his reach, if happiness be the end of wisdom? The earth gives him of her fulness, the climate of his valley is mild and temperate, snow does not fall there nor is it vexed by winds; the misery of his fellows is hidden from him, he is without care for the morrow; in limiting his desires he has extended the possibilities of delight, and joy comes to him unexpectedly as if it were a miracle wrought by God."
"A charming life!" exclaimed the Queen. "Your barbarians are like children."
"Yes; they are like children," answered Bagoas. "In fact they still are children, and so I have treated them. I cast Adam's horoscope, and read therein the wonderful things which the stars ordain for him. In this horoscope I read that Adam is to be the father of a race which shall revolutionise the world; a little obstinate people inhabiting 25a country in the west toward the sea; a people of slaves, outraged and despised, yet leavening all the peoples among whom they dwell. It is this race of slaves that will pass on the light and wisdom of Chald?a to nations as yet unborn. While thy monuments, O King, are sleeping beneath the drifted sands of the desert, the name of Adam will pass from tongue to tongue, and distant peoples will come to think of him as the father of the whole human race. The arts and sciences of Uruk will be forgotten, and the world will be duped by a record of events which never happened, myths and legends stolen from surrounding nations and woven into a curious asymmetrical whole, full of contradictions and puerilities.
"Truly in Adam's horoscope everything is a contradiction. From being the happiest man, he will become the most miserable; after a life spent in obscurity he will achieve almost an eternity of fame, and his children, a race of slaves, will impose their law upon the world for nearly two thousand years. It is incredible. Surely my meditation as I rode toward him was not without cause. Our wisdom, the science of Chald?a, is the miser's gold which shall be lost in the earth, and whatever of us 26survives in the memory of man will survive through the children of Adam. I told him nothing of this, but prophesied that he would be a wanderer until his death, at which he smiled.
"'That may not be,' he said; 'because God has put me into this garden to dress it and keep it.'
"Then the woman filled a bowl with milk and took it over toward the tree, and a great bronze serpent came out from the roots of the tree and drank the milk which she offered him; wherefore, in spite of their monotheism, I think that they ............