Little Poems in Prose

VI EVERYONE HAS HIS CHIMERA BENEATH the great gray sky, in a vast and dusty plain that hath no road nor grass, with- out one thistle, without one nettle, I met sev- eral men walking, bowed over. Each of them bore upon his back an enor- mous chimera, as heavy as a sack of corn or coal, or the heavy marching of a Roman infan- tryman. But the monstrous brute was not a dead weight. On the contrary, it wrapped round and oppressed the man with its powerful and elas- tic muscles. It clutched with its two great claws at the breast of its mount, and its fables head crowned the forehead of the man like one of those horrific helmets by which the warriors of old time hoped to add to the terror of the en- emy. I questioned one of these men, and asked him where they were going. He answered me that neither he nor the others knew anything of this, but that evidently they were going