Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 53: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

know that the mistakes have been made, the irrevocable steps taken, the last chances lost. We only await the event. It would seem that there must have been some special reason for the extremity of our hopelessness and horror. As if there had been previous worldwide wars and we had struggled back from each, desperately prom- ising ourselves that it would be the last. But of any such, I can remember nothing. I and the world might well have been created under the shadow of that catastrophe, in a universal disinterment. The months wear on. Then, miraculously, unbelievably, the war begins to recede. The tension relaxes. The clouds lift. There is great activity, con- ferences and plans. Hopes for lasting peace ride high. , This does not last, In sudden holocaust, there arises an oppressor named Hitler. Odd, how that name should come back to me after these millennia. His armies fan out across the globe. : But their success is short-lived. They are driven back, and Hitler trails off into oblivion. In the end he is an obscure agitator, almost forgotten. Another peace then, but neither does it last. Another war, less fierce than the preceding, and it too trails off into a quieter era. And so on. 7 7 I sometimes think (I must:hold on to this) that time once flowed in the opposite direction, and that, in revulsion from the ultimate war, it turned back upon itself and began to retrace its former course. That our present lives are only a return and an unwinding. A great retreat. In that case time may turn again. We may have another chance to scale the barrier. But no... ® : The thought has vanished in the rippling Nile. | Another family is leaving the valley today. All morning they have toiled up the sandy gorge. And now, returning perhaps for a last glimpse, to the verge of the yellow cliffs, they are outlined against the morning sky— upright specks for men, flat specks for animals. Maot watches beside me. But she makes no comment. She is sure of me. The cliff is bare again. Soon they will have forgotten the Nile and its. disturbing ghosts of memories. _ 3 All our life is a forgetting and a closing in? As the child is absorbed by its mother, so great thoughts are swallowed up in the mind of genius. At first they are everywhere. They environ us like the air. Then there is a narrowing in. Not all men know them. Then there comes one great man, and he takes them to himself, and they are a secret. There only remains the disturbing conviction that something worthy has vanished. I have seen Shakespeare unwrite the great plays. I have watched Socrates unthink the great thoughts. I have heard Jesus unsay the great words. There is an inscription in stone, and it seems eternal. Coming back centuries later I find it the same, only a little less worn, and I think that s) - i) € FARES eEhookszeconi,