Читать книгу The End of the World - Geoffrey Dennis - Страница 5

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Apart from those of the cometary ends which are also flaming ends, fire has fair chances of being the element that will conclude us.

Fire is the same word as pure, and many lands and ages have believed in its purifying virtue alike for soul and body. The impurer the flesh or spirit the purer had the flames to be. For the prostitute, fire of the forest; for this foul world, fire from on high.

Fire is elemental life; by burning, the individual life was given in sacrifice back to the elemental. This mode has therefore been accounted man’s most glorious mode of death; flames have made even self-murder noble and martyrdom, already noble, even nobler. In ancient India the pious one committed meritorious suicide if he chose fire, for thus he cleansed his soul at its passage from this world to the next. The ultimate success of the new religion in Reformation England, with the failure of the old, does not wholly explain, nor does the bias of our school-books nor our biassed selves their product wholly explain, why we regard with more shrinking the Marian persecution of the Protestants than the Elizabethan persecution of the Catholics, the balefires of Smithfield than the block of Tyburn, with more admiration the brave sectaries and reformers that perished in the one than the brave seculars and regulars that perished on the other. Success and bias together cannot explain the difference in our feelings; rather does the difference in our feelings explain both the success and the bias, and that difference is due, more than all else, to the greater glory and terror, inhumanity and purity, of death by fire. The sour sister burnt Protestantism into the English soul; the cynical sister could not axe Catholicism back. For triumph faith needs the torch.

As fiery death has been accounted most noble, so fiery obsequy has been accounted most magnificent. Iliad ends in a calm funeral twilight of great pyres. The loveliest Greek’s: for which they hewed high-foliaged oaks, and piled the wood, which they made a hundred feet this way and that, on which they set the corpse, while Achilles his lover slew twelve sons of Trojans (no daughters were there, whose bodies had burned better) as more glorious fuel, and prayed to the north wind and to the west wind till the flame kindled, and consumed the gentle body as they moaned around it: thus held they funeral for Patroklos son of Menoitos. The bravest Trojan’s: for which during nine days they gathered wood, which they built heaven-high, on which they laid him, on which they then cast fire, which burned his bones white as they wept tears around him: thus held they funeral for Hector, tamer of horses.

Of King Saul was fused everything, of King Pyrrhus all but his big toe. Then, following Greece, the pomped long history of Rome, pyrally alight with consular and imperial blazes, pyrally aloud with the conclamatio and the rustling of wings as the funeral eagles soar into heaven. So ancient Mexico; so the old North.

Many great nations, of course, not only declined but abhorred the practice; such as those of Zarathustrian faith who, holding that fire was God Himself, held that to burn their bodies would be to pollute Him—excluding perhaps those Bombay modernists who debate, Does electricity count as burning? Such as the pre-Aryan peoples of Europe, such as the pre-Homeric Greeks. Such as the later Jews: was not that transgression for which Jehovah would not turn away the punishment of Moab, the death with tumult and trumpet and with shoutings, that he had burned the bones of the King of Edom into lime?

Many great names had burial not burning: the first Adam, who was inhumed on Calvary; the Second, who crucially died there. Counting all peoples, cremation would doubtless be outnumbered by cadaverous burial.

Yet the balance of superber custom is the other way, and fire, while it purified and glorified, was seen of many to be the common-sense mode also. Worms do not devour our ashes as they do our inhumated flesh; foes cannot deface nor defile them; no greedy six foot is needed to detain them.

As for men, so for the world. Cremation indeed was a compliment, an ever repeated rehearsal of “the finall pyre of alle things.” Life itself is a flame, as was said long ago, and remains the truest comparison; in the cyanogen type of theory as to how life first began, fire is the force that synthesized the albumen, and Haeckel joins hands with Heraclitus. What flame has given flame will take away; the commonest credence through history is world’s end by the master element.

Earliest peoples hold it. If, whether flame-crested cockatoo or fire-tailed wren, scarlet-necked kingfisher or robin-redbreast, it was, as the old legends tell, a fowl of the air that first stole fire for mankind, lo! as he flew his own plumage caught fire in seared forfeit; if, as in Greek story, the thief was a demi-god, whether he rifled the sky-god in heaven or the forge-god in that Lemnian isle whither Zeus had down-hurled him, he too did Promethean penance by those three hundred centuries of torture on the Rock; if, as anthropology alleges, armed whether with fire-drill or fire-saw, fire-stone or fire-plough, it was impious man himself, the Inventor, who first raided the high sanctuary, then he too with his world shall atone, and perish beneath banners of burning.

The Romans maintained it, and Israel, and the Christians who inherited from both, and the Norsemen and the Aztecs who inherited from neither. Agni, whose banner is smoke, He shall devour—proclaim the Vedas.

Dies irae, dies illa!

Solvet saeclum in favilla!

calls the Church. The Bible echoes her (or she the Bible): The Lord will come with fire, cried the mightiest of the Hebrew prophets; the mountains shall be molten under Him, the heavens shall vanish away like smoke. The heaven and the earth are reserved unto fire, wrote the chief of the twelve apostles; the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Apocrypha concurs: The fire is kindled, and shall not be put out till it consume the foundation of the earth. Christian eschatology confirms, foretelling the final destruction always through spirit of burning. Which is indeed oftenest dwelt on as moral burning, purifying the righteous and the penitent, cleansing their souls while destroying the souls of the wicked—the earth’s flagrant end, though predicted as physical fact, being regarded as a spectacular side-issue, accompaniment or prelude to the real end, the religious end: the Last Judgment, the end of souls.

And we? Do the faith-free prophets of today think it likely or unlikely that this planet will so perish? Unlikely is their answer, clashing sharply with the old beliefs of man; though, as with the comet chance, they will hazard no stronger word.

How then?

Through deed of the sun’s....

Who might grow bigger, as many stars do. The light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days.

Or smaller but hotter. Some heliographers declare that this is even now happening. At one stage in the sun’s life the balance between the heat he is continually losing, sending forth into space and squandering, and the regenerative heat he gains through contraction must tilt in favour of the latter. That stage, the maximum density stage, the paradox stage, the sun’s apogee through shrinking, may be not in the past but in the future, may be upon us tomorrow or today.

Who might burst.

Who might break in two; his interior part rotating so fast that spinning would lead to splitting. Our orbit would then become violently irregular. The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage. Long before we actually collided with either, we should have swung so near to one or other of the two halves of the sundered sun that all life would have been charred away.

Who might lure some brother sun too near. In the middle of a line of force, the earth would be stopped still, its onward movement changed into molecular movement, and be reduced to steam.

Who might, on his endless journey, move into some new region of space filled with different matter, or denser matter, there soon to develop some new form of radiation, or greater radiation; drift into one of the nebulæ flung netwise through the cosmos, there at once to blaze like a meteor when it flies into our atmosphere; too near one of the hottest stars, an S Doradus, Gamma in Pegasus, Zeta in Perseus, able with their fifty thousand degrees of sidereal fire to ruin from very far; rush up against some heavenly medium resistant enough to convert into heat all the fearful energy of his progress.

Through deed of the earth’s own....

Unhelped of the sun, not in solar mode but Stygian, Earth may find fire for self-destruction. The heat is there. We are still a gaseous globe, with a solid crust much thinner in proportion than egg-shell to egg. The heat is there. Every fifty feet you go down the thermometer goes one degree up; two miles or so inward it is the boiling point of water, and there, below the lowest granite, the lowest gabbro, red-hot, white-hot, incalescent, incandescent, not a morning’s walk beneath our feet, glows the ardent underworld. Which, any hour, may renew its ancient zeal. No need to explode, to send flying the whole crust. The old channels to the old outlets show an easier way: forth of a thousand re-awakened volcanoes, from the lowliest to the highest, from Cosima to Cotopaxi or the Sahama, burning matter, tumults of lava molten and magmatic, will spout and spread, covering the earth already riven and afire from great earthquakes, and struck by purple lightning. In three millenaries seventeen million people have died plutonically; all the seventeen hundred million people on the earth today may so perish in three minutes.

In plutonic perishing to be included not only eruptions but earthquakes, not only burstings through the crust but the crust’s own fatal shiftings, not only vulcanism but seism. If the crust is cooling faster and contracting faster than the globe as a whole, then the shell will get too small for the egg, and will crack here, break there, split everywhere; as the moon they say once did, which her streamers of obsidian seem to argue. Tension is increasing, and the coming period of continent-wide cracks and breaks, ups and downs, loud interchanges of land and sea, will blot out, together with ourselves, our memories of those gentler seismic centuries from Pompei to Lisbon and Lisbon to San Francisco. Or if it is the earth that is getting smaller more quickly than her crust, then the crust is getting too big, and to adapt itself to the dwindling mass it encloses must further fold and crinkle, as though not already pulled and strained and faulted enough by the speed with which she turns (madly whirls) on her axis. Such adaptations also, such crinklings, will take the form of earthquakes more fearful than any in the past, and miserably destroy mankind.

Whether sun-helped or self-kindled, how bravely the earth will flare! Her garments of gladness are cinerable, incremable; her wood is all touchwood; her green tunic of verdure is wrought not of salamander’s wool, has no woof incombustible nor warp asbestine; every tree and every town shall be fuel, all people and all palaces for devouring, all life shall be food for the flames. Souls into slag and embers; burning instead of beauty.

There are gainsayers, who cap each pyromaniac might with fireproof won’t.

The sun won’t grow larger; he’s too old.

He won’t grow hotter; long ago he turned compression corner, and began spending more heat than he earns.

He won’t burst; having no crust to burst through.

He won’t divide; not having the special properties of the fissurable stars, will know no Great Schism.

With that line of force he cannot terrify us, torrify us; are we not already in a straight line, if straight lines there be, between him and every other star?

He may indeed drift into a nebula. That chance, unlike the others, is not fantastic; but it is small, and need not be fatal. We’ve been wandering through heaven this last few myriad years without such mishap.

Yet more hopeless of fulfilment are the non-solar prophecies of calorific end; firemongers come off even worse than with the sun.

The earth won’t explode. Her shell may be thin, but it’s strong—strong enough to have held its own against all the subterranean forces ever since they first permitted it to form.

Volcanoes are becoming extinct.

The seismic curve is downward.

Add and combine all their dire possibilities; together they touch not probability. Crueller gods than Vulcan lie in wait.

Yet, if burnt, think some, what matter? We shall live again. Earth is Phœnix.

Who had five hundred years of radiant life. Then, still splendid, his wings laden with spices, he flew from Hindustan to Heliopolis, entered the temple there; of sweet woods, frankincense and cassia, fuel-yew undeciduous, eternal, built him his own pyre on the altar, fanned with his own wings the flame, and was burned to ashes; wherein next day was born a new phœnix, feathered and fledged, who on the third day saluted the priest and flew away into India, for five hundred new years of radiant life.

Earth is Phœnix. Burned to ashes, she would live again, and, when the hour came round, through new fire of Easter Eve, lumen Christi, Paschal candle of destruction, again would die.

This is the Stoics’ theory. After its five hundred—five million million—years of life, the world is to end by violence of fire. An identical one will be born from the phœnical ashes, salute the sun, then set forth on its cycle of flight. And so for ever: through an endless cycle of decalescence, recalescence, there being no one world—rather an infinite series of identical worlds, having lived an eternity of times, with an eternity of times to live.

Sometimes we seem to remember, and to foresee.