Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 21
XXI.
The battle was ended and the object attained. I had served my five years for Rachel, and the twelve tasks were fulfilled. I looked at everything I had done and found it good. So then I consecrated the seventh day to be a day of rest. Rachel sat at my feet, and my kingdom lay around me, basking quietly in the mid-day sun.
The three wise men from the East entered and laid at my feet gold, frankincense, and myrrh; the second presented me with elephants' tusks, the third with Polar bear skins; whilst Arabian houris danced in my halls.
But outside my doors I perceived a long line of men clad in fair white silken garments, and their faces were hushed in silence. And under his left arm each man of them bore a silver casket. And each man was so like unto the next as one white hair resembleth the other, and the caskets seemed to me to be one and the same casket, reduplicated as through the facets of a crystal.
"Who are ye?" I inquired of the nearest of the white-clad men, he who stood in the doorway.
"We are the coming days, right to the end of your life, that stand waiting to be admitted one after the other into your halls," he replied, bending himself almost to the ground, whereupon all those that stood behind him, even as far as the horizon, bent in the same manner, as if someone had pulled an invisible thread that ran through all of them.
"And what do you hide in your caskets?" I queried again.
"That is the score of the hymn that your serving spirits play every morning in your honour," added the white-clad man, and again he bowed to the earth, and again all the other white men followed his example. With that I was seized with a fit of yawning so tremendous and so long that the white men trembled as mists before the blast, and the walls of my chamber flickered as the wings in a theatre. And I jumped up off my throne, seized my staff and my field-glass and my wallet, and—woke out of my dream.