§ 6
Long after midnight Sargon was still sitting up in that bleak greasy glare amidst the noises and disorder about him. He had lost all count of time; his watch had been taken from him. Somewhen in the small hours he was praying. And at times he wept a little.
He prayed. Sometimes he made sentences and whispered them to himself and sometimes the sentences never got to words but passed through his mind like serpents that are seen through deep, dark water. “Great is the task thou hast put upon me. I see now I am not worthy, O Master, to do the least thing that is required of me. I am not worthy. I am a petty man and a foolish man and all I have done so far is folly. But thou hast called me, knowing my folly. Forgive thou my folly and help thou my faith.” Silent and still he sat with tears upon his cheeks. “Any punishment and any trial,” he whispered at last, “only that thou shouldst not desert me and vanish out of my world.”
He prayed that the Power would yet make him the servant of the world and added falteringly and feebly, “even as it was in the ancient days.”
For had there even been those ancient days? Sumeria was now very far away from him, and the white towns and the blue river and the river galleys had faded and the worshipping crowds were just a faint smear upon his mind no stranger than the fading memory of a dream. He said nothing for a time, and then in a very loud whisper he said: “Help thou my unbelief.”
Sometimes he prayed in a whisper and sometimes he prayed silently and sometimes he sat quite still. Higgs came and looked at him once or twice but did not interfere with him. The poem in the adjacent bed still went on, but it had now become a mere rhyming stream of blasphemous obscenities.
For a time after he had made an end to his praying, Sargon must have slept; he must have slept because he was awakened by the dawn. It did not come gradually; he awoke to it.
A cold, shadowless light filled the ward and the electric lamps that had seemed so bright were just luminous orange-yellow threads. And Higgs was standing in the doorway peering intently at the red-haired man, who was lying with his head on the table as though he were asleep—but perhaps only pretending to be asleep.