THE SHE-ANCIENT.  Yes:  this body is the last doll to be discarded.  When I was a child, Ecrasia, I, too, was an artist, like your sculptor friends there, striving to create perfection in things outside myself.  I made statues:  I painted pictures:  I tried to worship them.

THE HE-ANCIENT.  I had no such skill; but I, like Acis, sought perfection in friends, in lovers, in nature, in things outside myself.  Alas!  I could not create if.  I could only imagine it.

THE SHE-ANCIENT.  I, like Arjillax, found out that my statues of bodily beauty were no longer even beautiful to me; and I pressed on and made statues and pictures of men and women of genius, like those in the old fable of Michael Angelo.  Like Martellus, I smashed them when I saw that there was no life in them:  that they were so dead that they would not even dissolve as a dead body does.

THE HE-ANCIENT.  And I, like Acis, ceased to walk over the mountains with my friends, and walked alone; for I found that I had creative power over myself but none over my friends.  And then I ceased to walk on the mountains; for I saw that the mountains were dead.

ACIS [protesting vehemently] No.  I grant you about the friends perhaps; but the mountains are still the mountains, each with its name, its individuality, its upstanding strength and majesty, its beauty—­

ECRASIA.  What!  Acis among the rhapsodists!

THE HE-ANCIENT.  Mere metaphor, my poor boy:  the mountains are corpses.

ALL THE YOUNG [repelled] Oh!

THE HE-ANCIENT.  Yes.  In the hardpressed heart of the earth, where the inconceivable heat of the sun still glows, the stone lives in fierce atomic convulsion, as we live in our slower way.  When it is cast out to the surface it dies like deep-sea fish:  what you see is only its cold dead body.  We have tapped that central heat as prehistoric man tapped water springs; but nothing has come up alive from those flaming depths:  your landscapes, your mountains, are only the world’s cast skins and decaying teeth on which we live like microbes.

ECRASIA.  Ancient:  you blaspheme against Nature and against Man.

THE SHE-ANCIENT.  Child, child, how much enthusiasm will you have for man when you have endured eight centuries of him, as I have, and seen him perish by an empty mischance that is yet a certainty?  When I discarded my dolls as he discarded his friends and his mountains, it was to myself I turned as to the final reality.  Here, and here alone, I could shape and create.  When my arm was weak and I willed it to be strong, I could create a roll of muscle on it; and when I understood that, I understood that I could without any greater miracle give myself ten arms and three heads.

THE HE-ANCIENT.  I also came to understand such miracles.  For fifty years
I sat contemplating this power in myself and concentrating my will.

THE SHE-ANCIENT.  So did I; and for five more years I made myself into all sorts of fantastic monsters.  I walked upon a dozen legs:  I worked with twenty hands and a hundred fingers:  I looked to the four quarters of the compass with eight eyes out of four heads.  Children fled in amazement from me until I had to hide myself from them; and the ancients, who had forgotten how to laugh, smiled grimly when they passed.