Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 30
XXX.
As the evening sun was poised above the crest of the mountain in the west like a great red globe, I descended to a meadow that teemed with human forms. They looked like men, and yet I knew not if I could call them by this name. At first sight the scene appeared as if a carnival were taking place; afterwards I fancied that I found myself in the walled enclosure of a madhouse. One wanted a sleeve to his coat, another had only one leg to his trousers. The one whose head was as big as an elephant had a toy cap, whilst his neighbour, on whose body nature had clapped a pin head, stalked about with a headgear of gigantic dimensions. There were coats so long that they reached to the knee, and trousers so short that they finished there. Goliath-like feet limped about in dancing pumps, and wading boots slopped about children's tiny feet. But all moved about, they never stood still a moment, the whole meadow was like a single teeming ant-heap. They all seemed to be seeking, as if they had lost something, or as if they knew not themselves for what they were searching; every head was bent forward, every body bowed, eagerness glistened in every eye, and their faces surrounded me like embodied groans. Yet not a sound was to be heard, not one of their steps; it seemed to me as if all these monsters were in such a desperate hurry that they could not even pause to breathe, or as if they were holding their breaths as a person frightened at the dark.
In the meantime I had crossed right over the plain. The sun had gone down behind the mountain, and the coolness of night was falling. On a stone near the wall, at some distance from the rest of the crowd, an old man sat alone. His clothes were one mass of rags, and as I came in sight he made a violent effort to wrap them better round him, for his elbows and knee-bones stuck out through the holes as the pointed twigs of a tree.
I halted and asked:—
"Tell me, old man, who are these crowds in the plain, and why have they clothed themselves like unto lunatics? And why do you sit here now when the night dews are falling?"
And the old man bared his bald head, and lifted his hollowed and sightless eye up to me, and said:—
"They are mankind looking for their lives. There are as many kinds of lives as there are people, and every life is a scourge that is unique of its kind, as every man is a being that is sole of his kind. Everything is awry, no one has got the scourge he ought to have, everyone is looking for one to suit him.
"You ask why I sit here now that the cool of night is falling. Therefore, young man, that I have jumped about as the others are jumping, until my legs gave way, and the hair fell off my head, and my eyes lost their sight. I desired my proper life, I too; but what I got, it was never other than these rags."
Then terror seized me, and I continued my way up amongst the mountains. And the darkness gathered closely over the plain, but although I could scarcely hear or see, I was conscious through other inner secret senses of the death-dance in search of life that was footing it restlessly under me; and when morning came, and the sun ran up above the sea, my soul was filled with the desire for strength to walk through life as the man of antiquity in his toga.