IX
“Look,” said Jules Thessaly, “below you stretches the Capital of the greatest empire man has ever known.”
They stood in the topmost gallery of the campanile looking down upon a miniature London. The viridescent ribbon of the Thames bound bridge to bridge running thematically through a symphony of grey and green and gold. A consciousness of power leapt high within Paul. Only the sun was above him, the sun and the suave immensity of space. How insignificant an episode was a human life, how futile and inept; a tiny note in a monstrous score. Below in the teeming streets moved a million such points, each one but a single note in this vast orchestration, a bird note, faint, inaudible ’mid the music of the spheres. Yet each to each was the centre of the Universe; all symbolised the triumph to the false Self-centre as opposed to the true God-centre. Men lived for the day because they doubted the morrow. Palaces and hovels, churches and theatres, all were products of this feverish striving of the ants to plumb the well of truth and scale the mountain of wisdom; to drain at a draught the gourd of life which the gods had filled in the world’s morning. Thessaly began to speak again, standing at Paul’s elbow, and his deep rich voice carried power and authority.
“Look at London and you look at an epitome of humanity. The best that man can do, and the worst, lie there beneath you. In that squat, grey, irregular mound which from earth level we recognise to be the Houses of Parliament, men are making laws. The laws which they are making are the laws of necessity—the necessity of slaying Prussians. Many of the larger buildings in the neighbourhood are occupied by temporary civil servants engaged in promulgating those laws. Thus by the passing of an Act having twenty clauses, twenty thousand clerks are created and five more hotels sequestered for their accommodation. No laws which do not bear directly or indirectly upon the slaying of Prussians have been made in recent years. This is sometimes called government, but used to be known as self-preservation when men dressed in yellow ochre and carried stone clubs.
“Eastward over the Thames hangs a pall of smoke. It is the smoke of Silvertown. Left, right, and all about are other palls. They are created by the furnaces of works which once were making useful things and beautiful things; paints and enamels and varnishes, pottery and metal ware, toys for sport and instruments of science. To-day they make instruments of death; high explosives to shatter flesh and bone to pulp and powder, deadly gases to sear men’s eyes, to choke out human life. It is called work of national importance, but Christ would have wept to see it. Squatting in Whitehall—look, the setting sun strikes venomous sparks from its windows—is the War Office. Ponder well the name of this imposing pile—the War Office. Nearly two thousand years have elapsed since the last of the Initiates delivered His Sermon on the Mount. See! the city bristles with the spires of His churches; they are as thorns upon a briar-bush. Look north, the spire of a church terminates the prospect; south, it is the same; east and west—spires, spires, spires. And squatting grimly amid a thousand shrines of Jesus Christ is the War Office—the War Office, my friend. Watch how the spears of light strike redly into that canopy of foulness hanging above Kynoch’s Works. A Ministry of Munitions controls all that poisonous activity. Mario, it is the second Crucifixion. The Jews crucified the Body; all the world has conspired to crucify the Spirit.
“The Word has failed. There lies the reading of your day dream, Mario, your dream of the Sheikh of El Wasr. Look how the shadow of the campanile creeps out beneath us, over church and War-Office-Annexe, over life and over death. Religion is a corpse and the world is its morgue. But out of corruption comes forth sweetness. No creature known to man possesses more intense vitality than the dermestes beetle which propagates in the skull of a mummy. From the ashes of the Cross you arise. Christ is dead; long live Christianity. Behold the world at your feet. Courage, my friend, open the Gates and lead mankind into the garden of the gods.”