"A lesson, those," remarked Gahan, indicating the rykors in an
enclosure above which they were drifting at the time, "to that
fortunately small minority of our race which worships the flesh and
makes a god of appetite. You know them, Tara of Helium; they can tell
you exactly what they had at the midday meal two weeks ago, and how the
loin of the thoat should be prepared, and what drink should be served
with the rump of the zitidar."
Tara of Helium laughed. "But not one of them could tell you the name of
the man whose painting took the Jeddak's Award in The Temple of Beauty
this year," she said. "Like the rykors, their development has not been
balanced."
"Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little good
and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own
callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate, for such as
these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by the egotism of him
whose head is so heavy on one side that all his brains run to that
point."
As Gahan ceased speaking Ghek made a little noise in his throat as one
does who would attract attention. "You speak as one who has thought
much upon many subjects. Is it, then, possible that you of the red race
have pleasure in thought? Do you know aught of the joys of
introspection? Do reason and logic form any part of your lives?"
"Most assuredly," replied Gahan, "but not to the extent of occupying
all our time--at least not objectively. You, Ghek, are an example of
the egotism of which I spoke. Because you and your kind devote your
lives to the worship of mind, you believe that no other created beings
think. And possibly we do not in the sense that you do, who think only
of yourselves and your great brains. We think of many things that
concern the welfare of a world. Had it not been for the red men of
Barsoom even the kaldanes had perished from the planet, for while you
may live without air the things upon which you depend for existence
cannot, and there had been no air in sufficient quantities upon Barsoom
these many ages had not a red man planned and built the great
atmosphere plant which gave new life to a dying world.
"What have all the brains of all the kaldanes that have ever lived done
to compare with that single idea of a single red man?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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