A MODERN UTOPIA
this busy world that has done so much and so marvellously, and is still so little—you see it little as it is—and far off. All day long you go and the night comes, and it might be another planet. Then, in the quiet waking hours, one thinks of one's self and the great external things, of space and eternity, and what one means by God."
He mused.
"You think of death?"
"Not of my own. But when I go among snows and desolations—and usually I take my pilgrimage in mountains or the north—I think very much of the Night of this World—the time when our sun will be red and dull, and air and water will lie frozen together in a common snowfield where now the forests of the tropics are steaming. . . . I think very much of that, and whether it is indeed God's purpose that our kind should end, and the cities we have built, the books we have written, all that we have given substance and a form, should lie dead beneath the snows."
"You don't believe that?"
"No. But if it is not so— I went threading my way among gorges and precipices, with my poor brain dreaming of what the alternative should be, with my imagination straining and failing. Yet in those high airs and in such solitude, a kind of exaltation comes to men. . . . I remember that one night I sat up and told the rascal stars very earnestly how they should not escape us in the end."
He glanced at me for a moment as though he doubted I should understand.
"One becomes a personification up there," he said.
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