"human serpentry;" and
last, by gathering the Consumed and Consumer into dust together, for the
meat of the death spirit, or serpent Apap. Neither could I, for long,
get rid of the thought of this strange dust-manufacture under the
mill-stones, as it were, of Death; and of the two colors of the grain,
discriminate beneath, though indiscriminately cast into the hopper. For
indeed some of it seems only to be made whiter for its patience, and
becomes kneadable into spiced bread, where they sell in Babylonian
shops "slaves, and souls of men;" but other some runs dark from under
the mill-stones; a little sulphurous and nitrous foam being mingled in
the conception of it; and is ominously stored up in magazines near
river-embankments; patient enough--for the present.

48. But it is provoking to me that the image of this child mingles
itself now with Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer
means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those
enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be
troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes
I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the
world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap,
which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises,
tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending
stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on
the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over
all things that pass and change;--quicksand of the desert in moving
pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and
unabiding, but she abiding;--to herself, her home. And sometimes I
think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for
he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is
seated on her sand-heap as the only treasure to be gained by human toil;
and that the little ant-hill, where the best of us creep to and fro,
bears to angelic eyes, in the patientest gathering of its galleries,
only the aspect of a little heap of dust; while for the worst of us, the
heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high
enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on
the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to
their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a grain of
salt."