I66 
IN THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GHIZEH 
 
synthesised, the whole was sorrow and despair ; agony 
biting through the fair ; meanness, contemptibility, en-
throned ; all proposeless, all unatoned ; all putrid of a 
hope, all vacant of a soul.  I called upon its master, as 
who should call on God.  Instead, arose a shining form, 
sweet as a whisper of soft air kissing the brows of a great 
storm ; his face with light was molten, musical with waves 
of his delight moving across :  his countenance utterly 
fair !  then was my philosophic vision shamed :  conjecture 
at a loss ; and my whole mind revolted ; then I blamed 
the vision as a lie ; yet bid that vision speak how he 
was named, being so wonderfully desirable.  Whereat he 
smiled upon me merrily, answering that whoso named him 
well, being a poet, called him Love ; or else being a lover 
of wisdom, called him Force ; or being a cynic, called him 
Lust ; or being a pietist, called him God.  The last—thou 
seest !—(he said), a lie of Hell’s, and all a partial course of 
the great circle of whirling dust (stirred by the iron rod 
of thought) that men call wisdom.  So I looked deep in 
his beauty, and beheld its truth.  The life of that fair 
youth was as a whiz of violent little whirls, helical 
coils of emptiness, grey curls of misty and impalpable 
stuff, torn, crooked, all ways and none at once, but 
ever pressed in idiot circles ; and one thing he lacked, 
now I looked from afar again, was rest.  Thence I with-
drew my sight, the eyeballs cracked with stain of my 
endeavour, and my will struck up with subtler skill than 
any man’s that in fair Crete tracked through the laby-
rinth of Minos, and awoke the cry to call his master ; 
grew a monster whirlwind of revolving smoke and then,