he back of her house and empty a
basket full of dust and rubbish right into the temple at Luxor, where
a dark green god is seated, three times the size of a man, buried as
high as his waist. I suppose that what I saw had been happening off
and on pretty well every morning for the last four thousand years.
Safe under the dust that that woman threw, and the women that lived
before her, Time hid his secrets.
And then I have seen the edges of stones in deserts that might or
might not have been cities: they had fallen so long that you could
hardly say.
At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin came
suddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out of
fashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearer
and nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not be
saddened by the faintest sorrow--for anything that happened to such a
different people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although their
horns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whose
elephants have turned against them; kings whose ancestors have
eclipsed their faces in heaven and left them helpless against the
onslaught of the stars; not a tear is given for one of these to-day.
But when in ruins as complete as Pompeii, as desolate as Timgad
amongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cards
lying with what remains of the stock of a draper's shop; and the
front part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side by
side together in equal, misery, as though there had never been a
barrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahogany
table with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blow
with dust along long-desolate floors one hears the whisper of
Disaster, saying, "See; I have come." For under plaster shaken down
by calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own age
that is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors are
relics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethune
the wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterly
passed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in the
older fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies under
plaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, will
appear an age of glory; and yet to thousands that went one day from
its streets, leaving all manner of small things behind, it may well
have been an age full of far other promise
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