His soul was shrivelled like those _fuorusciti_ who, thrown
from the walls of the cruel city, gaze at it from without with
faithless eyes. It was no longer the sad vision of the first night of
his trials, when his bleeding wounds still linked him with other men;
all ties were now broken, as with open eyes his spirit sank down
whirling into the abyss; the slow descent into hell, from circle to
circle, alone in the silence.
"I see you, you myriads of herded peoples, hugging together perforce
in shoals to spawn and to think! Each group of you, like the bees, has
a special sacred odour of its own. The stench of the queen-bee makes
the unity of the hive and gives joy to the labour of the bees. As with
the ants, whosoever does not stink like me, I kill! O you bee-hives of
men! each of you has its own peculiar smell of race, religion, morals
and approved tradition; it impregnates your bodies, your wax, the
brood-comb of your hives; it permeates your entire lives from birth to
death; and woe to him who would wash himself clean of it.
"He who would sense the mustiness of this swarm-thinking, the
night-sweat of a hallucinated people, should look back at the rites
and beliefs of ancient history. Let him ask the quizzical Herodotus
to unroll for him the film of human wanderings, the long panorama of
social customs, sometimes ignoble or ridiculous, but always venerated;
of the Scythians, the Gatae, the Issedones, the Gindares, the
Nasamones, the Sauromates, the Lydians, the Lybians, and the
Egyptians; bipeds of all colours, from East to West and from North to
South.
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