superior in the lords of the desert and the air.
Obviously they were wise. Among them were some that knew in advance
the change of the seasons. Others, indifferent to man and independent
of him, migrated over highways known but to them. The senses of all
were keyed to vibrations. They heard the inaudible, saw the invisible,
and, though they had a language of their own, when questioned never
replied. To slaves, clearly they were gods.

Not to the priests, however. They knew better. They but affected
belief in divinities that had perhaps emigrated from the enigmas of
geography and who were polychrome as the skies they had crossed.
Fashioned in stone, these gods were dog-headed or longly beaked. Some,
though, were alive. In temples were saurians on purple carpets, bulls
draped with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmering perches, that little
gold chains detained. Among gods of this character, the Sphinx, in its
role of eternal spectre, must have seemed the ideal. Others were
nearly sublime. Particularly there was Ausar.

Ausar, called commonly Osiris, died for man. In an attempt to preserve
harmony, in a struggle with the real spirit of actual evil which
discord is, Osiris was slain. Being a god he arose from the dead. The
latter thereafter he judged.

The people knew little, if anything, concerning him. They knew little
if anything at all. They had a menagerie and a full consciousness of
their own insignificance. That sufficed. In all of carnal Africa, the
priest alone possessed what then was truth and of which a part is
theology now.

Egypt, in which the evangels began, millennia before they were
written, knew no genesis. Her history, sculptured in hieroglyphics,
was cut on pages of stone. It awoke in the falling of cataracts. It
ended with simoons in sand. The books that tell of it are pyramids,
obelisks, necropoles; constructions colossal and enigmatic; the
granite epitaphs of finite things. To-day, in the shattered temples,
from which all other gods are gone, one divinity still lingers. It is
Silence.

In Iran sorrow was a folly. In Egypt speech was a sin. Apis could
bellow, Anubis bark; man might not even stutter. It was in the
submission of dumb obedience that the palpable eternities of the
pyramids were piled. Yet in that darkness was light, in silence was
the Word. But to behold and to hear was possible only in sanctuaries
reserved to the elect. The gods too had their castes. The lowest only
were fellahin fit