Page:Under the Sun.djvu/312

288 the sport of children is in the evening the favorite dish of princes. The lesser planets of the culinary firmament revolve round it in deferential orbits, confessing that their light is borrowed, that a greater attraction than their own holds the guests in station and regulates the festive board. No wonder, then, that the East believes this creature is an embodiment of the Divinity, and that the world rests upon a tortoise! The splendid significance of the Vedic legend is not less striking than its beauty, for here we see at once that the alderman keeps up the price of turtle, which keeps up the weight of the earth, and so the alderman himself becomes an avatar of the solar myth. Thus does history work in cycles and a pagan religion stand revealed.

It would be a nice point to decide whether the alderman was created for the turtle or the turtle for the alderman. Much is to be said on both sides. It is difficult to imagine either of them preceding the other in point of time, and equally difficult to consider them as eternally co-existent in point of space. Yet they must have been both contemporary and contiguous from the beginning of time, or else we are confronted with the preposterous problem of aldermen apart from turtles. Who knows when either began; or, if they proceeded from matter at different spots on the earth’s surface? Who can tell us what natural forces first brought them into contact?

For myself I dare not trust my imagination in such depths of conjecture, but prefer, more comfortably, to avoid the difficulty, and to believe that aldermen and turtles were simultaneous. The primitive alderman, it is certain, could not have eaten up the original turtle, or the species would then and there, in that one disastrous meal, have become extinct. He spared it until it laid