"I am the master of the great charity, the help of creatures, and I expound the law to believers and to the profane alike. To save the world I wished to be born amongst men; the gods wept when I went away. At first, I sought a woman suitable for the purposeof warlike race, the spouse of a king, exceedingly virtuous and beautiful, with a deep navel, a body firm as a diamond; and at the time of the full moon, without the intervention of any male, I entered her womb. I came out through her right side. Then the stars stopped in their motions."
Hilarion murmurs between his teeth:
"'And when they saw the stars stop, they conceived a great joy!'"
Antony looks more attentively at the Buddha, who resumes:
"From the bottom of the Himalaya, a religious centenarian set forth to see me."
Hilarion"'A man called Simeon, who was not to die before he had seen the Christ!'"
The Buddha"They brought me to the schools. I knew more than the doctors."
Hilarion" 'In the midst of the doctors; and all those who heard him were ravished by his wisdom.'"
Antony makes a sign to Hilarion to keep silent.
The Buddha"I went continually to meditate in the gardens. The shadows of the trees used to move; but the shadow of the one that sheltered me did not move. No one could equal me in the knowledge of the Sacred Writings, the enumeration of atoms, the management of elephants, waxworks, astronomy, poetry, boxing, all exercises and all arts. In compliance with custom, I took a wife; and I passed the days in my royal palace, arrayed in pearls, under a shower of perfumes, fanned by the flyflappers of thirtythree thousand women, and gazing at my people from the tops of my terraces adorned with resounding bells. But the sight of the world's miseries made me turn aside from pleasures. I fled. I went abegging on highways, covered with rags collected in the sepulchres; and, as there was a very learned hermit, I offered myself as his servant. I guarded his door; I washed his feet. All sensation, all joy, all languor, were annihilated. Then, concentrating my thoughts on a larger field of meditation, I came to know the essence of things, the illusion of forms. I speedily abandoned the science of the Brakhmans. They are eaten up with lusts beneath their austere exterior; they anoint themselves with filth, and sleep upon thorns, believing that they arrive at happiness through the path of death!"
Hilarion"Pharisees, hypocrites, whited sepulchres, race of vipers!"
The Buddha"I, too, have done astonishing thingseating for a day only a single grain of riceand at that time grains of rice were not bigger than they are nowmy hair fell off; my body became black; my eyes, sunken in their sockets, seemed like stars seen at the bottom of a well. For six years I never moved, remaining exposed to flies, to lions, and to serpents; and I subjected myself to burning suns, heavy showers, snow, lightning, hail, and tempest, without even shielding myself with my hand. The travellers who passed, assuming that I was dead, flung clods of earth at me from a distance.
"There only remained for me to be tempted by the Devil.
"I invoked him.
"His sons camehideous, covered with scales, nauseous as charcoal, howling, hissing, bellowing, flinging at each other armour and dead men's bones. Some of them spirted out flames through their nostrils; others spread around darkness with their wings; others carried chaplets of fingers that had been cut off; others drank the venom of serpents out of the hollows of their hands. They have the heads of pigs, rhinoceroses, or toadsall kinds of figures calculated to inspire respect or terror."
Antony, aside"I endured that myself in former times."
The Buddha"Then he sent me his daughtersbeautiful, wellattired with golden girdles, teeth white as the jasmine, and limbs round as an elephant's trunk. Some of them stretched up their arms when they yawned to display the dimples in their elbows; others blinked their eyes; others began to laugh and others unfastened one another's garments. Amongst them were blushing virgins, matrons full of pride, and queens with great trains of baggage and attendants."
Antony, aside"Ah! that also!"
The Buddha"Having vanquished the demon. I passed twelve years in nourishing myself exclusively on perfumes,and, as I had acquired the five virtues, the five faculties, the ten forces, the eighteen substances and penetrated into the four spheres of the invisible world, the Intelligence was mine, and I became the Buddha!"
All the gods bow down, those who have many heads lower them all at the same time. He raises his hand on high in the air, and resumes:
"In view of the deliverance of beings, I have made hundreds of thousands of sacrifices; I have given to the poor robes of silk, beds, chariots, houses, heaps of gold and diamonds. I have given my hands to the onehanded, my legs to the lame, my eyes to the blind; I have cut off my head for the decapitated. At the time when I was king, I distributed the provinces; at the time when I was Brakhman, I despised nobody. When I was a solitary I spoke words of tenderness to the thief who tried to cut my throat. When I was a tiger, I let myself die of hunger. And in this final stage of existence, having preached the law, I have nothing more to do. The great period is accomplished. The men, the animals, the gods, the bamboos, the oceans, the mountains, the grains of sand of the Ganges, with the myriads of myriads of stars, everything, must perish; and, until the new births, a flame will dance on the ruins of a world's overthrow."
Then a vertigo seizes the gods. They stagger, fall into convulsions, and vomit forth their existences. Their crowns break to pieces; their standards fly away. They get rid of their attributes and their sexes, fling over their shoulders the cups from which they drink immortality, strangle themselves with their serpents, and vanish in smoke; and, when they have all disappeared:
Hilarion, slowly"You have just seen the creed of many hundreds of millions of men!"
Antony is on the earth, his face in his hands. Standing close to him, and turning his back to the cross, Hilarion watches him.
A rather lengthened period elapses.
Then a singular being appears, with the head of a man and the body of a fish. He advances straight through the air, tossing the sand with his tail; and his patriarchal face and his little arms make Antony laugh.
Oannes, in a plaintive voice"Treat me with respect! I am the contemporary of the beginning of things.
"I have dwelt in the shapeless world, where slumbered hermaphrodite animals, under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the depths of gloomy waveswhen the fingers, the fins, and the wings were confounded, and eyes without heads floated like molluscs amongst humanfaced bulls and dogfooted serpents.
"Over the whole of those beings Omoroca, bent like a hoop, stretched her woman's body. But Belus cut her clean in two halves, made the earth with one, and the heavens with another; and the two worlds alike mutually contemplate each other. I, the first consciousness of chaos, I have arisen from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms; and I have taught men fishing, the sowing of seed, the scripture, and the history of the gods. Since then, I live in the ponds that remained after the Deluge. But the desert grows larger around them; the wind flings sand into them; the sun consumes them; and I expire on my bed of lemon while gazing across the water at the stars. Thither am I returning."
He makes a plunge and disappears in the Nile.
Hilarion"This is an ancient god of the Chaldeans!"
Antony, ironically"Who, then, were the gods of Babylon?"
Hilarion"You can see them!"
And they find themselves upon the platform of a quadrangular tower rising above other towers, which, growing narrower in proportion as they rise, form a monstrous pyramid. You may distinguish below a great, black massthe city, without doubtstretching along the plain. The air is cold; the sky is of a sombre blue; the multitudinous stars palpitate.
In the middle of the platform stands a column of white stone. Priests in linen robes pass and return all round, so as to describe in their evolutions a moving circle, and, with heads raised, they contemplate the stars.
Hilarion points out several of them to Saint Antony:
"There are thirty chief priests. Fifteen gaze upon the region above the earth, and fifteen on the region below it. At regular intervals one of them rushes from the upper regions to the lower, whilst another abandons the lower to mount towards the empyrean.
"Of the seven planets, two are benevolent, two malevolent, and three ambiguous; everything in the world depends on these eternal fires. According to their position and their movements, one may draw prognostications, and you are now treading on the most sacred spot on earth. There Pythagoras and Zoroaster may be met. Two thousand years have these men been observing the sky, the better to comprehend the gods."
Antony"The stars are not gods!"
Hilarion"Yes! say they; for, while things are continually passing around us, the sky, like eternity, remains unchangeable!"
Antony"Nevertheless, it has a master."
Hilarion, pointing at the column"That is Belus, the first ray, the sun, the male!the other, which is fruitful, is under him!"
Antony observes a garden lighted up with lamps. He is in the midst of the crowd in an avenue of cypresstrees. To right and left little paths lead towards huts erected in a wood of pomegranatetrees, which protect lattices of reeds. The men, for the most part, have pointed caps with laced robes, like the plumage of peacocks. There are people from the North clad in bearskins; nomads in brown woollen cloaks; pale Gangarides with long earrings; and the classes, like the nationalities, appear to be confused, for sailors and stonecutters jostle against princes wearing tiaras of carbuncles and carrying large walkingsticks with carved heads. All hurry forward with dilated nostrils, filled with the same desire.
From time to time they got out of the way, in order to allow a long, covered chariot, drawn by oxen, to pass, or perhaps it is an ass jolting on his back a woman closely veiled, who also disappears in the direction of the huts.
Antony is frightened. He desires to turn back. However, an inexpressible curiosity leads him on.
Beneath the cypresstrees women are squatted in rows upon deerskins, each of them having for a diadem a plait of cords. Some of them, magnificently attired, address the passersby in loud tones. The more timid keep their features hidden between their hands, whilst, from behind, a matronno doubt, their motherencourages them. Others, with heads enveloped in black shawls, and the rest of their bodies quite nude, seem, at a distance, like statues of flesh. As soon as a man flings money on their knees, they rise. And one can hear kisses amid the foliage, and sometimes a great, bitter cry.