* * * * * *

What are these flashes of light?  There are gleams of flame in my eyes; a surfeit of light is cast over me.  I can no longer cling to anything—­fire and water!

In the beginning, there is battle between fire and water—­the world revolving headlong in the hooked claws of its flames, and the expanses of water which it drives back in clouds.  At last the water obscures the whirling spirals of the furnace and takes their place.  Under the roof of dense darkness, timbered with flashes, there are triumphant downpours which last a hundred thousand years.  Through centuries of centuries, fire and water face each other; the fire, upright, buoyant and leaping; the water flat, creeping, gliding, widening its lines and its surface.  When they touch, is it the water which hisses and roars, or is it the fire?  And one sees the reigning calm of a radiant plain, a plain of incalculable greatness.  The round meteor congeals into shapes, and continental islands are sculptured by the water’s boundless hand.

I am no longer alone and abandoned on the former battlefield of the elements.  Near this rock, something like another is taking shape; it stands straight as a flame, and moves.  This sketch-model thinks.  It reflects the wide expanse, the past and the future; and at night, on its hill, it is the pedestal of the stars.  The animal kingdom dawns in that upright thing, the poor upright thing with a face and a cry, which hides an internal world and in which a heart obscurely beats.  A lone being, a heart!  But the heart, in the embryo of the first men, beats only for fear.  He whose face has appeared above the earth, and who carries his soul in chaos, discerns afar shapes like his own, he sees the other—­the terrifying outline which spies and roams and turns again, with the snare of his head.  Man pursues man to kill him and woman to wound her.  He bites that he may eat, he strikes down that he may clasp,—­furtively, in gloomy hollows and hiding-places or in the depths of night’s bedchamber, dark love is writhing,—­he lives solely that he may protect, in some disputed cave, his eyes, his breast, his belly, and the caressing brands of his hearth.

* * * * * *

There is a great calm in my environs.

From place to place, men have gathered together.  There are companies and droves of men, with watchmen, in the vapors of dawn; and in the middle one makes out the children and the women, crowding together like fallow deer.  To eastward I see, in the silence of a great fresco, the diverging beams of morning gleaming, through the intervening and somber statues of two hunters, whose long hair is tangled like briars, and who hold each other’s hand, upright on the mountain.

Men have gone towards each other because of that ray of light which each of them contains; and light resembles light.  It reveals that the isolated man, too free in the open expanses, is doomed to adversity as if he were a captive, in spite of appearances; and that men must come together that they may be stronger, that they may be more peaceful, and even that they may be able to live.