It was dusk. A herd of cattle
passed, and George came close behind them. And around him Roger saw,
emerging from the semi-dark, faces turning like his own to the summits of
the mountains and the billowy splendors there. It grew so dark he could see
no more. There fell a deep silence, not a sound but the occasional chirp of
a bird or the faint whirr of an insect. Even the glow on the peaks was
gone. Darkness, only darkness.
"Surely this is death," he thought. After that he was alone. And presently
from far away he heard the booming of a bell, deep and slow, sepulchral, as
it measured off his life. Another silence followed, and this time it was
more profound; and with a breathless awe he knew that all the people who
had ever lived on earth were before him in the void to which he himself was
drifting: people of all nations, of countless generations reaching back and
back and back to the beginnings of mankind: the mightiest family of all,
that had stumbled up through the ages, had slaved and starved and dreamed
and died, had blindly hated, blindly killed, had raised up gods and idols
and yearned for everlasting life, had laughed and played and danced along,
had loved and mated, given birth, had endlessly renewed itself and handed
on its heritage, had striven hungrily to learn, had groped its way in
darkness, and after all its struggles had come now barely to the dawn. And
then a voice within him cried,
"What is humanity but a child? In the name of the dead I salute the
unborn!"
Slowly a glow appeared in his dream, and once again the scene had changed.
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