THE TKIUMPH OF LIFE 



But what is this that suddenly appears in the 

 first glow of the sun? A glittering silver canal 

 travels across the desert. Palms wave upon its 

 edges. It is man who, with his tools, has di- 

 rected this canal from ocean to ocean. His 

 bright colored ships pass through it and as the 

 eye wanders there arises behind it a wondrous 

 picture. Columned halls, pyramids, giant stone 

 pictures made by human hands ? They are built 

 upon the very edge of the desert. Ah, then man 

 has gone into the desert. What no animal be- 

 neath him, and no plant has dared he has done, 

 even in far distant ages. It was just the desert 

 which enlarged and developed to a higher de- 

 gree mentally, that wild mammoth hunter. In 

 its mysterious loneliness before which life has 

 bowed down in fear through so many millions 

 of years he struck his tent. Drinking out of 

 his leathern bottle as he had once done in his 

 cave in the ice age he thought. 



But in his thoughts here, there arose some- 

 thing incomparably more powerful than in the 

 ice cave. His view no longer shut in behind a 

 low cave wall on which the red flames danced, 

 went up and up into the stiU night and above 

 him there burned in cloudless clearness the stars. 

 The measureless majesty of the cosmos beyond 

 the earth with its silver world dust lay before 

 him. 



What a distance from the noctiluca which it- 

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