also!"

_The Buddha_--"Having vanquished the demon. I passed twelve years in
nourishing myself exclusively on perfumes,--and, as I had acquired the
five virtues, the five faculties, the ten forces, the eighteen
substances and penetrated into the four spheres of the invisible world,
the Intelligence was mine, and I became the Buddha!"

All the gods bow down, those who have many heads lower them all at the
same time. He raises his hand on high in the air, and resumes:

"In view of the deliverance of beings, I have made hundreds of thousands
of sacrifices; I have given to the poor robes of silk, beds, chariots,
houses, heaps of gold and diamonds. I have given my hands to the
one-handed, my legs to the lame, my eyes to the blind; I have cut off my
head for the decapitated. At the time when I was king, I distributed the
provinces; at the time when I was Brakhman, I despised nobody. When I
was a solitary I spoke words of tenderness to the thief who tried to cut
my throat. When I was a tiger, I let myself die of hunger. And in this
final stage of existence, having preached the law, I have nothing more
to do. The great period is accomplished. The men, the animals, the gods,
the bamboos, the oceans, the mountains, the grains of sand of the
Ganges, with the myriads of myriads of stars, everything, must perish;
and, until the new births, a flame will dance on the ruins of a world's
overthrow."

Then a vertigo seizes the gods. They stagger, fall into convulsions, and
vomit forth their existences. Their crowns break to pieces; their
standards fly away. They get rid of their attributes and their sexes,
fling over their shoulders the cups from which they drink immortality,
strangle themselves with their serpents, and vanish in smoke; and, when
they have all disappeared:

_Hilarion_, slowly--"You have just seen the creed of many hundreds of
millions of men!"

Antony is on the earth, his face in his hands. Standing close to him,
and turning his back to the cross, Hilarion watches him.

A rather lengthened period elapses.

Then a singular being appears, with the head of a man and the body of a
fish. He advances straight through the air, tossing the sand with his
tail; and his patriarchal face and his little arms make Antony laugh.

_Oannes_, in a plaintive voice--"Treat me with respect! I am the
contemporary of the beginning of things.

"I have dwelt in the shapeless world, where slumbered hermaphrodite
animals, under the we