|
"No, no. I had no intention of it. I got out of there and started towork! As I said, this was His way and I knew that my only hope was tocome up with a Criterion of my own and make a case for it, don't yousee?""I think I do.""You know you do," he said. "All right. Picture this. The populationof the world has swelled to millions, and cities have risen thoughnot in very many places, and mostly in that very valley where I haddescended and left my marks on the walls of caves. Humankind hadwandered north and south as far as it could on the planet; settlementsand towns and forts existed in various stages of development. Theland of the cities is called Mesopotamia now, I think, or is it Sumer,or will it be Ur? Your scholars uncover more with every passing day.
"Man's wild imaginings of immortality and reunion with the deadhad everywhere given rise to religion. In the Nile Valley, a civilizationof astonishing stability had developed, while war was waged allthe time in the land we call the Holy Land.
"So I come to Sheol, which I have only observed from outsidebefore, and which is now enormous, containing still some of the firstsouls that ever sputtered with enduring life, and now millions ot soulswhose creeds and yearnings for the eternal have brought them to thisplace with great ferocity. Mad expectations have pitched countlessones into confusion. Others have grown so strong they exert a sort ofrulership amongst the others. And some have learnt the trick of goingdown to Earth, escaping from the pull of other invisible soulsaltogether, and for wandering close to the flesh they would possess again,or influence, or harm, or love as the case might be.
"The world is populated by spirits! And some, having no memoryanymore at all of being human, have become what men and womenwill for eternity call demons, prowling about, eager to possess, wreakhavoc, or make mischief, as their developments allow.""And one of those," I said, "passed into the vampiric mother andfather of our kind.""Yes, precisely. Amel created that mutation. But it was not theonly one. There are other monsters on earth, existing twixt thevisible and the invisible; but the great thrust of the world was and alwayshas been the fate of its millions of Humankind.""The mutations have never influenced history.""Well, yes, and no. Is a mad soul screaming from the mouth of aflesh-and-blood prophet an influence, if this prophet's words arerecorded in five different languages and for sale today on the shelves ofstores in New York? Let's say that the process which I had seen anddescribed to God had continued; some souls died; some grew strong;some managed to actually return in new bodies, though by whatknack I did not at that time know.""Do you know now?""Reincarnation isn't by any stretch common. Don't think of it.
And it gains very little for the souls involved. You can imagine thesituations that make it possible. Whether it always involves theextinction of an infant soul when it happens梩hat is, whether it alwaysinvolves a replacement in the new body梩his varies with individualcases. Those who persistently reincarnate are certainly somethingthat cannot be ignored. But that, like the evolution of vampires andother earthbound immortals, falls into a small realm. Once again, weare talking now about the fate of Humankind as a whole. We aretalking about the Whole Human World.""Yes, I really do understand, perhaps better than you know.""All right. I have no criteria, but I go into Sheol and I find there agreat sprawling replica of earth! Souls have imagined and projectedinto their invisible existence all manner of jumbled buildings andcreatures and monsters; it is a riot of imagination without Heavenlyguidance, and as I suspected, there is still an enormous majority ofsouls who don't know that they are dead.
"Now, I plunge into the very middle of this, trying to make myselfas invisible as I possibly can; to conceive of myself as utterly withoutany discernible form; but this is hard. For this is a realm of theinvisible; everything here is invisible. And so there I begin to wander onthe dreary roads in semidarkness, among the malformed, the half-formed, the unformed, the moaning and dying, and I am in my angelicform.
"Nevertheless, these confused souls don't take very much noticeof me! It's as if many can't see clearly at all. Now, you know this statehas been described by human shamans, by saints, by those who havecome close to death, passed through it, and then been revived andcontinued to live.""Yes.""Well, what human souls see of this is a fragment. I saw thewhole. I roamed extensively and fearlessly and regardless of Time, orout of it, though Time always continues to pass, of course, and I wentwhere I chose.""A madhouse of souls.""Very nearly, but within this great madhouse were many, manymansions, to use the Scriptural words. Souls believing in like faithshad come together in desperation and sought to reinforce eachother's beliefs and still each other's fears. But the light of Earth wastoo dim to warm anyone here! And the Light of Heaven simply didnot penetrate at all.
113/163 首页 上一页 111 112 113 114 115 116 下一页 尾页
|
