Page:Lieut Gullivar Jones - His Vacation - Edwin Arnold (1905).djvu/101

 "And the priests of Thebes were gone; the sand stood untrampled on the temple steps a thousand years; the wild bees sang the song of desolation in the ears of Isis; the wild cats littered in the stony lap of Ammon; ay, another thousand years went by, and earth was tilled of unseen hands and sown with yellow grain from Paradise, and the thin veil that separates the known from the unknown was rent, and men walked to and fro."

"Go on," I said.

"Nay," laughed the other, "the little mice in their eagerness have been before you—see! all this corner is gnawed away."

"Read on again," I said, "where the page is whole; those sips of knowledge you have given make me thirsty for more. There! begin where this blazonry of initialed red and gold looks so like the carpet spread by the scribe for the feet of a sovereign truth—what says he here?" and she, half pouting to be set back once more to that task, half wondering as she gazed on those magic letters, let her eyes run down the page, then began:—

"And it was the Beginning, and in the centre void presently there came a nucleus of light: and the light brightened in the grey primeval morning and became definite and articulate. And from the midst of that natal splendour, behind which was the Unknowable, the life came