One of them said: "Back there we may have known him." And he
jerked his head to the south.
"You came from back there?" I asked. He looked at me in surprise.
"We all come from there," he said. "After a while we go there."
And this time he jerked his head toward the north. "Be Galus,"
he concluded.
Many times now had we heard this reference to becoming Galus.
Ahm had spoken of it many times. Lys and I decided that it was
a sort of original religious conviction, as much a part of them
as their instinct for self-preservation--a primal acceptance of
a hereafter and a holier state. It was a brilliant theory, but
it was all wrong. I know it now, and how far we were from
guessing the wonderful, the miraculous, the gigantic truth which
even yet I may only guess at--the thing that sets Caspak apart
from all the rest of the world far more definitely than her
isolated geographical position or her impregnable barrier of
giant cliffs. If I could live to return to civilization, I
should have meat for the clergy and the layman to chew upon for
years--and for the evolutionists, too.
|