The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX mouth. Then was he the priest of Nuit, and drank of the milk of the stars. 51. Let not the failure and the pain turn aside the worship- pers. The foundations of the pyramid were hewn in the living rock ere sunset; did the king weep at dawn that the crown of the pyramid was yet unquarried in the distant land? 52. There was also an humming-bird that spake unto the horned cerastes, and prayed him for poison. And the great snake of Khem the Holy One, the royal Urzeus serpent, an- swered him and said: 53. I sailed over the sky of Nu in the car called Millions- of-Years, and I saw not any creature upon Seb that was equal to me. The venom of my fang is the inheritance of my father, and of my father’s father; and how shall I give it unto thee? Live thou and thy children as I and my fathers have lived, even unto an hundred millions of generations, and it may be that the mercy of the Mighty Ones may be- stow upon thy children a drop of the poison of eld. 54. Then the humming-bird was afflicted in his spirit, and he flew unto the flowers, and it was as if naught had been spoken between them. Yet ina little while a serpent struck him that he died. 55. But an Ibis that meditated upon the bank of Nile the beautiful god listened and heard. And he laid aside his Ibis ways, and became as a serpent, saying Peradventure in an hundred millions of millions of generations of my children, they shall attain to a drop of the poison of the fang of the Exalted One. 56. And behold! ere the moon waxed thrice he became an 96