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carcasses in pond bottoms, and glacial gravels, and asphaltum lakes.
I have lived through the ages known to-day among the scientists as the
Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze. I remember when with our
domesticated wolves we herded our reindeer to pasture on the north shore
of the Mediterranean where now are France and Italy and Spain. This was
before the ice-sheet melted backward toward the pole. Many processions
of the equinoxes have I lived through and died in, my reader . . . only
that I remember and that you do not.
I have been a Son of the Plough, a Son of the Fish, a Son of the Tree.
All religions from the beginnings of man's religious time abide in me.
And when the Dominie, in the chapel, here in Folsom of a Sunday, worships
God in his own good modern way, I know that in him, the Dominie, still
abide the worships of the Plough, the Fish, the Tree--ay, and also all
worships of Astarte and the Night.
I have been an Aryan master in old Egypt, when my soldiers scrawled
obscenities on the carven tombs of kings dead and gone and forgotten
aforetime. And I, the Aryan master in old Egypt, have myself builded my
two burial places--the one a false and mighty pyramid to which a
generation of slaves could attest; the other humble, meagre, secret, rock-
hewn in a desert valley by slaves who died immediately their work was
done. . . . And I wonder me here in Folsom, while democracy dreams its
enchantments o'er the twentieth century world, whether there, in the rock-
hewn crypt of that secret, desert valley, the bones still abide that once
were mine and that stiffened my animated body when I was an Aryan master
high-stomached to command.
And on the great drift, southward and eastward under the burning sun that
perished all descendants of the houses of Asgard and Vanaheim, I have
been a king in Ceylon, a builder of Aryan monuments under Aryan kings in
old Java and old Sumatra. And I have died a hundred deaths on the great
South Sea drift ere ever the rebirth of me came to plant monuments, that
only Aryans plant, on volcanic tropic islands that I, Darrell Standing,
cannot name, being too little versed to-day in that far sea geography.
If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I
see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty
driftage of the races in the times before our present written history
began! Yes, we had our history even then. Our old men, our p
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