When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and ArbuthnotHaggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Science
When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot
Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Adventure stories; Science fiction
Such is the summary of all that has been important in my life. It is, I
admit, an odd story and one which suggests problems that I cannot
solve. Bastin deals with such things by that acceptance which is the
privilege and hall-mark of faith; Bickley disposes, or used to dispose,
of them by a blank denial which carries no conviction, and least of all
to himself.
What is life to most of us who, like Bickley, think ourselves learned?
A round, short but still with time and to spare wherein to be dull and
lonesome; a fateful treadmill to which we were condemned we know not
how, but apparently through the casual passions of those who went
before us and are now forgotten, causing us, as the Bible says, to be
born in sin; up which we walk wearily we know not why, seeming never to
make progress; off which we fall outworn we know not when or whither.
Such upon the surface it appears to be, nor in fact does our
ascertained knowledge, as Bickley would sum it up, take us much
further. No prophet has yet arisen who attempted to define either the
origin or the reasons of life. Even the very Greatest of them Himself
is quite silent on this matter. We are tempted to wonder why. Is it
because life as expressed in the higher of human beings, is, or will be
too vast, too multiform and too glorious for any definition which we
could understand? Is it because in the end it will involve for some, if
not for all, majesty on unfathomed majesty, and glory upon unimaginable
glory such as at present far outpass the limits of our thought?
The experiences which I have recorded in these pages awake in my heart
a hope that this may be so. Bastin is wont, like many others, to talk
in a light fashion of Eternity without in the least comprehending what
he means by that gigantic term. It is not too much to say that
Eternity, something without beginning and without end, and involving,
it would appear, an everlasting changelessness, is a state beyond human
comprehension. As a matter of fact we mortals do not think in
constellations, so to speak, or in æons, but by the measures of our own
small earth and of our few days thereon. We cannot really conceive of
an existence stretching over even one thousand years, such as that
which Oro claimed and the Bible accords to a certain early race of men,
omitting of course his two thousand five hundred centuries of sleep.
And yet what is this but one grain in the hourglass of time, one day in
the lost record of our earth, of its sisters the planets and its father
the sun, to say nothing of the universes beyond?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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