Generation after generation came and passed through this torturing fire, knowing not why they bore the pangs for threescore years and ten, or whither they were borne. They seemed to improve, but only sank deeper into the original barbarism. Here and there they picked out a name of one long dead and worshipped it; but the shrine was empty; it was only a name, and not the personality for which it had once stood. Behind I could hear the spirit wailing and cursing its fate and the falsehood and hypocrisy of his adorers. He knew the hollowness and pretence of the whole performance; he knew that the name had become a weapon for offending and maiming those who in their innocence were struggling for fame, as he had done, in vain. The deepest circle of hell was still to meet my eyes. I thought, as I was guided to it, that it must be that of murderers and furious criminals. My amazement grew, as I looked into the lens and saw that the actors, or I should more truly say the sufferers, were the great of the earth, the monarchs and statesmen and warriors, who drew all men’s eyes to them as the masters of life. A movement on the part of my guide touched some key, and a strange gleam of unearthly light threw out into relief the hidden mechanism of their existence. Round everyone was a network of threads like a spider’s web, and the controlling ends of the threads led up obscurely into the hands of a crowd of miscreants, who lay out of sight of the applauding mobs; when a limb or a lip or an eye seemed to move of its own accord to the music of huzzas, it was jerked by a thread in the control of some scowling villain who worked the movement for his own murderous purpose. These gorgeous figures were but puppets playing a marionette-play upon the stage of life. One or two of the strongest seemed instinct with the breath of originality, but a still stronger light revealed adamantine chains woven around them, and attached to these one master-chain which disappeared into infinity; they were in the spider-web of fate. Still more awful was the sight of their own hearts; each had a crimson-taloned vulture gnawing the vitals, and each saw every detail of the agonising sight; nor could he move to the right or left except to clutch at the bared heart of his rival and torture him. Who could imagine hell more appalling than this? Yet up the giddy approach to the seats of the mighty climbed eager competitors for any place in this torture-chamber death or defeat might empty. Then behind all stretched the curtain of infinity; and as it rose the ranks of worlds and universes appeared, dwarfing into pettiness the sights that had racked my eyes. Life and the ideals of life rose higher and higher up through the regimented worlds, and the little inferno I had watched became a microscopic speck on the round of existence. The shadow of their heaven fell over their heads. The agony I had seen became but an atom in infinity. CHAPTER XVII