Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/268

254 inglorious end. Adam sees mankind rapidly nearing the time when the last feeble spark of human life will be extinguished. The globe of the sun, shorn of its rays, so that Adam takes its blood-red disc for the moon, sheds its dim light upon a frozen world. The last men of the race, a few degenerate Esquimaux, are dragging out a miserable existence. When Adam arrives among them they take him for a god, and request that he would see that there were fewer Esquimaux but more seals.

So this is the goal to which all his struggles and aspirations are to lead, Adam thinks. His wretchedness is increased by the sight of Eve, as the mate of an Esquimaux, who humbly offers his wife's love to the stranger in accordance with the custom of the land. "I—I embrace this woman," cries Adam in horror, "I who once held Aspasia in my arms!"

La farce est jouée. Adam, who has stood beside both the cradle and the tomb of mankind, awakes from the awful dream. Was this to be the future of the race, his race? At the moment of waking, the visions just seen appear so terrible to him that he decides to put a speedy end to the long, painful struggle, of the dreadful issue of which he been warned by those prophetic dreams—yes, to put an end to it, or, rather, to prevent its ever beginning by stopping the stream of human life at its source—by his own self-destruction. But just as he is stepping on to the brink of a precipice, to carry out his fatal resolve, Eve approaches and whispers in his ear a secret, the first secret of the young world: she is going to become a mother. Adam sinks into the dust crying, "Lord, Thou hast vanquished me!" And the skies open, and God looks down upon the kneeling Adam and strengthens him for the coming struggle, in which he is not to be left