CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
FINAL PEACE IS MADE WITH COSMIC LAW
These Guanches were splendid specimens of manhood, the remote forefathers of the warriors who, five hundred years ago, held their European conquerors at bay for more than a hundred years—never more than a handful of men at any time.
First the fierce and ruthless Normans, then the Portuguese, and lastly the Spanish, laid a destroying hand on the brave Guanches. Now, there is but little more than their goats left of the surviving Atlantians. These goats are of a Vandyke brown, with long twisted horns, venerable beards, and hair lengthening almost to a lion’s mane.
Teneriffe was the Island of the Blessed of the Hindus, the Elysian Fields of the Greeks, and the Tlapallapan of the Aztecs.
The Greeks had their Hermes; the Norsemen, Ymer; the Egyptians, Kema; all words correlated to, and having the same significance as Yermah,[30] which means the Divine Germ incarnate.
As El Dorado, his love nature was typified, but he transmuted passion, and became a god among men. He was Votan to the Quiches; to the Mayas, he was Kukulcan; and to the Peruvians he was Manco-capac—all types of the same character, and emanations from the same civilizing source.
The next morning the Guanches made a part of the company which gave escort to Yermah, as he essayed climbing the still smoking peak. After they had passed the line of vegetation there was naught to be seen save a sea of red rocks, and thirsty yellow pumice.
The scorching sun and blue, unvaried sky condemned everything far and near to barrenness and desolation forever.
Climbing higher, there was no solid rock, no soft earth—nothing but black stones, piled one upon the other so loosely that under the crenellated edge of the sky-line were frequent glimpses of daylight.
It was not necessary for the Guanches to explain that a marvelous bombardment of the heavens had but recently taken place. The wrenching and heaving, when the crater of eruption was active, had cracked the cooling and hardening surface repeatedly, sending masses of cinders and stones rattling down only to be caught and piled one over another fathoms deep.
The granular lava had crystals of white felspar mixed in it, liked chopped straw, which were formed into spherical shells, veined, curved and frothy. Under the varying effects of pressure, the still pasty mass was rolling, falling and crystallizing in grotesque cascades.
In some places the trade-winds had hardened them into wild, dreamlike faces, while some were pictures of contending beasts. Yermah could hear them grinding and crushing in low snarls and growls as they rolled heavily downward.
Many times these writhing and twisting forms threatened to remain forever suspended in mid-air.
The Dorado imagined that he recognized some of the effigies, and was made dizzy and seasick by their ceaseless progression in a community of pain.
How inexpressibly varied were the colors, bathed in the brilliant light of a vertical tropical sun, undimmed by impurities of the lower atmosphere!
The tired and thirsty party halted at the Guajara Springs near the spectral Lunar Rocks of the Cañadas, standing like white teeth newly cast from a granite mouth opened wide enough to admit a tongue of lava thousands of feet higher in air.
These grayish white spikes line the “Road of the Guanche Kings” where the crater of elevation sticks out its ragged and torn lips, eternal witnesses to one of nature’s most stupendous debauches.
Yermah groaned in spirit as he looked across the dreary waste, and he mourned unfeignedly for his lost people. It seemed to need this grand, harmonious outburst of unseen forces to give voice to the wild and passionate utterances seeking vent in his heart. Nature speaks to each soul alone, and no mortal may interfere with the communion.
In taking a tender farewell of his comrades, Yermah appointed the life work of each loyal heart; nor had he the least doubt of their faithful obedience.
“Go thou to Egypt, Gautama, and tell them the task is finished.”
“Mayst thou be eternally at one with the Divine.”
“And thou, Cezardis, journey on beyond Egypt, until thou art come to Lassa. Find Kadmon, and tell him all is well.”
“And thou, Yermah, wilt thou come with me?” asked Ben Hu Barabe.
“No. Thou must teach Gautamozin in my stead. He will learn from the Brotherhood. Farewell, beloved! I shall return, but not now.”
“Thou art come to thine own, Hanabusa,” he continued. “Stay thou here with the despoiled.”
He kissed each one on brow and cheeks, murmuring affectionate words of encouragement and farewell.
“Go now to the sea level. I am come to the end of my journey, and would fain be alone.”
It was difficult for him to persuade the Guanches to leave him.
“Thou wilt see me again,” he promised; “but at another time.”
The shepherds turned again and again, kissing their hands to him as long as he was in sight.
Weary and exhausted, Yermah slept soundly until the first streak of dawn appeared in the lowest place on the horizon, while the long glade of zodiacal light shot up amongst the stars of Orion and Taurus.
Yermah knew how to interpret this heavenly sign. Gradually a reddish hue appeared, and as soon as the lonely watcher comprehended its meaning the zodiacal light faded, and golden yellow gradually overcame and drove out the red tinge, grown to vermilion.
The cold region of gray at its upper limit blushed a rosy pink as the first point of the solar disk leaped from behind a horizon of ocean and clouds.[31]
The Dorado performed ablutions with marked care, dressed himself in fresh, white linen, and before the sun was an hour old was picking his way to the higher regions.
Finally, a bright spot of fire appeared in the malpais, then a lengthening red and smoking line, widening and growing deeper as it flowed down the mountain side.
Nothing but the extreme high altitude made the heat bearable. Occasionally a fresh tongue of fire shot up from the fountain head, and the whole mass of fluid lava and scoria felt the impulse. Alternate cascades of fire and dross thundered precipitately against the lower slopes.
The tense and elastic vapors in their struggles for freedom here made one collective heave to gain the light of day, as the Island of Atlantis slowly settled down on the bed of the ocean, and the crater of eruption came up like a huge lava bubble.
During this process the cold atmosphere did effective work on the outside.
The mass was hidebound with hardening stone; but the violence of the heated gases made a grievous rent in the wrinkled coating, thus causing the mountain to shake as with the ague.
Finally, the internal pressure being too great, the massive shell was shattered into a thousand pieces. Not once, but many times, has this battle between heated gases and cold air taken place in the years since then, as the extinct craters amply testify, before the pent-up, unruly spirits of the mountain finally escaped.
Prior to reaching his destination, Yermah discovered a lava figure resembling Kerœcia, kneeling with her hands joined in prayer, and appearing to have a heavy mantle thrown over her shoulders.
This effigy is still one of the many fantastic shapes pointing the way to the Ice Cavern—that wondrous sepulcher of the Dorado.
It was not then an ice-cold spring banked with snow, in the midst of desolation, but was a vent where three conical mouths of the volcano flared open from different quarters, and hardened there in a dome-shaped elevation.
Lying to the south is a particularly large mass of scoria turned upside down, which has been used from time immemorial by the Guanches as a place to pack and make up their parcels of cavern snow before venturing to carry it under a vertical sun, thirty miles to the capital below.
It was nightfall when Yermah reached this spot, where he found the pentagram mentioned in Akaza’s will.
Nature had made it for him of whitish felspar on the western side of the scoria table. Certain that he had been guided aright, he sat down to await the appearance of Venus in the eastern horizon.
Astronomers call it lateral refraction when a star oscillates and makes images in the heated atmosphere; but to Yermah it had a different significance. He first saw Venus seven degrees high, apparently motionless. The planet oscillated up and down, then horizontally, outlining a Maltese cross—the primordial sign of matter.[32]
Finally, it rose perpendicularly, descended sideways at an angle, and returned to the spot whence it started, completing a triangle—the universal emblem of spirit.
While Yermah sat on the rock lost in reverie, the sub-conscious man made its final peace with cosmic law. His entire life passed before him in successive events when he knew that here was the end; but with this realization he leaned confidently upon the Divine.
Under the impulse of utter helplessness, he arose and kissed his hand reverently to the evening star—a practice taught him in the nursery.
As a child it was his first act of adoration before his tongue learned to fashion appropriate speech or his mind to comprehend veneration. In this supreme moment, he turned back to that time insistently.
Finally, he knelt—and lifting up his arms as if to embrace a heavenly ray, Yermah kissed the air as if it were the raiment of God. Turning his face up to the sky, he closed his eyes in silent prayer.
Rising, he approached the mouth of the crater which faces north. He could hear the angry, hissing roar of the subterranean fires, and the scorching flames licked out at him as he fed them his belongings one by one.
But a short time previous, Yermah had passed his thirty-third birthday, and, as he now stood ready for self-immolation, he was in the prime and glory of vigorous manhood.
He had the illumined face of a saint, and was uplifted by that spirit which sustained martyrs in the after years. Even his fair young body seemed to be spiritualized.
“O Thou Ineffable One! Thou Spirit of Fire! Take that which is thine! Lap thy purifying tongue about me, and leave no dross!”
The desolation about him was the veritable home of black despair. Of what use was it to cry out to the deadly calm of the rarefied air, amidst the crushing, strangling and appalling stillness?
Coming nearer, Yermah looked down into the white heat of the pink-throated cavern.
“O Thou Sacred Fire! Thy kiss was welcome to her sweet lips. Feast Thou on mine!”
With the fervor of an enthusiast he rushed forward to fling himself headlong into the yawning chasm, but a dazzling effulgence obscured the way, and a voice from the land of shadows said:
“Yermah, son of light, no further sacrifice is required of thee!”
It was the gentle, unseen hand of Akaza which halted the action * * * then a Higher Power suffered Yermah’s lifeless body to be at rest.
“Kerœcia, beloved, receive thy twin spirit!” he cried, in passing.
In the transcendent radiance of the Presence enveloping all, the twain appeared—transfigured and glorified.
Being thus reunited, Kerœcia realized for the first time that she was out of the body.
Yermah was neither Krishna, nor the Christ, but the Ideal Man of all time, and of all people.
He was LOVE, the eternal mystery; that love which Madame de Staël has said confounds all notion of time, effaces all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
FINIS