Something About Eve

    BUT when three huge men beckoned to him, and Gerald had moved forward, he found, with wholly tolerant surprise, that this mirror was in reality a warmish golden mist, through which he entered into the power of these three giant blacksmiths, and into the shackles of adamant with which they bound him fast to a gray, lichen-crusted crag, the topmost crag above a very wide ravine, Among a desert waste of mountain tops; and he entered, too, into that noble indignation which now possessed Gerald utterly. For it was Heaven he was defying, he who was an apostate god, a god unfrightened by the animosity of his divine fellows. He had preserved, somehow,—in ways which he could not very clearly recall, but of which he stayed wholly proud,—all men and women from destruction by the harshness and injustice of Heaven. He only of the gods had pitied that futile, naked, cowering race which lived, because of their defenselessness among so many other stronger animals, in dark and shallow caverns, like ants in an ant-hill. He had made those timid, scatter-brained, two-legged animals human: he had taught them to build houses and boats; to make and to employ strong knives and far-smiting arrows against the fangs and claws with which Heaven had equipped the other animals; and to tame horses and dogs to serve them in their hunting for food. He had taught them to write and to figure and to compound salves and medicines for their hurts, and even to foresee the future more or less. All arts that were among the human race had come from Prometheus, and all these benefits were now preserved for his so inadequate, dear puppets, through the nineteen books in which Prometheus had set down the secrets of all knowledge and all beauty and all contentment,—he who after he had discovered to mortals so many inventions had no invention to preserve himself. Prometheus, in brief, had created and had preserved men and women, in defiance of Heaven’s fixed will. For that sacrilege Prometheus atoned, among the ends of earth, upon this lichen-crusted gray crag. He suffered for the eternal redemption of mankind, the first of all poets, of those makers who delight to shape and to play with puppets, and the first of men’s Saviors. And his was a splendid martyrdom, for the winged daughters of old Ocean fluttered everywhere about him in the golden Scythian air, like wailing seagulls, and a grief-crazed woman with the horns of a cow emerging from her disordered yellow hair paused too to cherish him, and then went toward the rising place of the sun to endure her allotted share of Heaven’s injustice.

    But he who was the first of poets burst Heaven’s shackles like packthread, ridding himself of all ties save the little red band which yet clung about one finger, and rising, passed to his throne between the bronze lions which guarded each of its six steps, and so sat beneath a golden disk. All wisdom now belonged to the rebel against Heaven, and his was all earthly power: the fame of the fine poetry and the comeliness and the grandeur of Solomon was known in Assyria and Yemen, in both Egypts and in Persepolis, in Karnak and in Chalcedon, and among all the isles of the Mediterranean. He sported with genii and with monsters of the air and of the waters; the Elementals served King Solomon when he began to build, as a bribe to Heaven, a superb temple which was engraved and carved and inlaid everywhere with cherubim and lions and pineapples and oxen and the two triangles. There was no power like Solomon’s: his ships returned to him three times each year with the tribute of Nineveh and Tyre and Parvaam and Mesopotamia and Katuar; the kings of all the world were the servants of King Solomon: the spirits of fire and the lords of the air brought tribute to him, too, from behind the Pleiades. His temple now was half completed. But upon his ring finger stayed always the band of blood-colored asteria upon which was written, “All things pass away.” These glittering and soft and sweet-smelling things about him, as he knew always, were only loans which by and by would be taken away from him by Heaven. He turned from these transient things to drunkenness and to the embraces of women, he hunted forgetfulness upon the breasts of nine hundred women, he quested after oblivion between the thighs of the most beautiful women of Judea and Israel, of Moab and of Ammon and of Bactria, of Baalbec and of Babylon: he turned to wantoning with boys and with beasts and with bodies of the dead. These madnesses enraptured the flesh of Solomon, but always the undrugged vision of his mind regarded the fixed will of Heaven, “These things shall pass away.” The temple which he had been building lacked now only one log to be completed. He cast that gray and lichen-crusted cedar log into the Pool of Bethesda: it sank as though it had been a stone: and Solomon bade his Israelites set fire to the temple which all these years he had been building as a bribe to Heaven.