Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 3 (1927-03).djvu/110

 upon a high rock, its wings outspread. At the base of this rock—upon which base rested the hind claws of the monster—was a platform some twenty feet square and raised five or six feet above the floor of the cavern. In the front and on either side of this platform there were steps, and, in the center of it, a stone of curious shape—a stone that sent a shudder through me.

And up above rose the colossal dragon itself, its scaly fore claws gripping the edge of the rock, twenty-five feet or so above the platform. The neck curved forward and down. The head hung over the platform, forty feet or more up in the air—the great jaws wide open, the forked tongue protruding hungrily, the huge teeth and the huge eyes sending back the rays from our lights in demoniacal, indescribably horrible gleams.

"Talk about Gorgons, Chimeras and Hydras dire!" I exclaimed, and it was as though unseen things, phantom beings, so eery were the echoes, repeated the words in mockery and in gloating. "Why should men create such a Gorgonic nightmare? And worship it—worship the monster of their own creating? Look at that stone there in the center of the platform. Ugh! The things that must have taken place in that spot—the thought makes the flesh creep and the blood itself turn cold in one's veins!"

"What a dark and fearsome cavern, after all, is the skull of man," said Milton Rhodes, "a place where bats flit and blind shapes creep and crawl!"

I turned toward him with a look of surprize.

"That from the man whom I have so often heard sing the Song of the Mind; that from a scientist, one who reveres Hipparchus, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton and Darwin; from one who so often has said that the only wonderful tiling about man is his mind and that that mind, in its possibilities, is simply godlike."

"And so say I again, and so shall I always say. In its possibilities, remember! But man is a sort of dual creature, a creature that achieves the impossible by being in two places at the same time: his body is in this the Twentieth Century, his mind is still back there in the Pleistocene, with cave-bears, hyenas and saber-toothed tigers."

I uttered a vehement dissent.

"But 'tis so, Bill," said Rhodes, "or at least back there beyond the year 1492. The world knows but one Newton, one Archimedes, one Galileo, one Darwin, one Edison; but heaven has sent the world thousands."

"I don't believe it. There are no mute, inglorious—Shakespeares."

"No; there are no mute, inglorious Shakespeares, no mute, inglorious Newtons: the world, this glorious mind that we hear so much about destroyed them."

"Or," said I, "they destroyed themselves."

"You are not making the mind's case any the brighter, Bill, by putting it that way. Yes, the mind, the glorious human mind destroyed them and turned forthwith to grovel in the dust before monsters like this one before us—before Prejudice, Ignorance, superstition and worse."

"What a horrible piece of work, then, is man!"

"Take the average of the human mind," went on Milton Rhodes, "not the exceptions, so brilliant and so wonderful, but the average of all the human minds in all the world today, from our Newtons—if we have any now—to your savage groveling in the dust before some fetish or idol made of mud; do that, and the skull of man is found to be just what I said—a dark and fearsome cavern, a habitat for bats and ghostly things."