I

       Table of Contents

      'What of the night?' they ask.

      No answer comes.

      For the blind Time gropes in a maze and knows not its path or purpose.

      The darkness in the valley stares like the dead eye-sockets of a giant, the clouds like a nightmare oppress the sky, and the massive shadows lie scattered like the torn limbs of the night.

      A lurid glow waxes and wanes on the horizon,

      is it an ultimate threat from an alien-star,

      or an elemental hunger licking the sky?

      Things are deliriously wild,

      they are a noise whose grammar is a groan,

      and words smothered out of shape and sense.

      They are the refuse, the rejections, the fruitless failures of life,

      abrupt ruins of prodigal pride,

      fragments of a bridge over the oblivion Of a vanished stream,

      godless shrines that shelter reptiles,

      marble steps that lead to blankness.

      Sudden tumults rise in the sky and wrestle

      and a startled shudder runs along the sleepless hours.

      Are they from desperate floods

      hammering against their cave walls,

      or from some fanatic storms

      whirling and howling incantations?

      Are they the cry of an ancient forest

      flinging up its hoarded fire in a last extravagant suicide,

      or screams of a paralytic crowd scourged by lunatics blind and deaf?

      Underneath the noisy terror a stealthy hum creeps up like

      bubbling volcanic mud,

      a mixture of sinister whispers, rumours and slanders, and hisses of derision.

      The men gathered there are vague like torn pages of an epic.

      Groping in groups or single, their torchlight tattoos their faces in chequered lines, in patterns of frightfulness.

      The maniacs suddenly strike their neighbours on suspicion and a hubbub of an indiscriminate fight bursts forth echoing from hill to hill.

      The women weep and wail,

      they cry that their children are lost in a wilderness of contrary paths with confusion at the end.

      Others defiantly ribald shake with raucous laughter

      their lascivious limbs unshrinkingly loud,

      for they think that nothing matters.

II

       Table of Contents

      There on the crest of the hill

      stands the Man of faith amid the snow-white silence,

      He scans the sky for some signal of light,

      and when the clouds thicken and the nightbirds scream as they fly

      he cries, 'Brothers, despair not, for Man is great.'

      But they never heed him,

      for they believe that the elemental brute is eternal

      and goodness in its depth is darkly cunning in deception.

      When beaten and wounded they cry, 'Brother, where art thou?'

      The answer comes, 'I am by your side.'

      But they cannot see in the dark

      and they argue that the voice is of their own desperate desire,

      that men are ever condemned to fight for phantoms

      in an interminable desert of mutual menace.