I lay, a child, upon a woman's bosom.
Was she my mother, or Eleanor, or Lillian? Or was she neither, and yet
all--some ideal of the great Arian tribe, containing in herself all future
types of European women? So I slept and woke, and slept again, day after
day, week after week, in the lazy bullock-waggon, among herds of grey
cattle, guarded by huge lop-eared mastiffs; among shaggy white horses,
heavy-horned sheep, and silky goats; among tall, bare-limbed men, with
stone axes on their shoulders, and horn bows at their backs. Westward,
through the boundless steppes, whither or why we knew not; but that the
All-Father had sent us forth. And behind us the rosy snow-peaks died into
ghastly grey, lower and lower as every evening came; and before us the
plains spread infinite, with gleaming salt-lakes, and ever fresh tribes
of gaudy flowers. Behind us dark lines of living beings streamed down
the mountain slopes; around us dark lines crawled along the plains--all
westward, westward ever.--The tribes of the Holy Mountain poured out like
water to replenish the earth and subdue it--lava-streams from the crater
of that great soul-volcano--Titan babies, dumb angels of God, bearing with
them in their unconscious pregnancy the law, the freedom, the science, the
poetry, the Christianity of Europe and the world.
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