# Drome/Chapter 27

Chapter 27
The Monster
Rhodes made no response. Still he stood there, peering toward the end of the chamber. Then of a sudden, to my inexpressible surprize and horror, he began moving forward—moving toward that monstrous thing which reared itself up out of the gloom and the shadows, up and up, almost to the very roof itself.
"What are you doing?" I cried. "I tell you, I saw it move!"
Rhodes paused, but he did not look back.
"It didn't move," he said. "How could it move? It must have been only the shadows that you saw, Bill."
"Shadows!"
"Just so—shadows."
He moved his light slowly back and forth.
"See that? A certain way you look at it, that thing up there seems to be moving instead of the shadows."
"But what on earth can it be?" I asked, slowly advancing to his side. "And what is that white which, though so faint, yet gleams so horribly? It looks like teeth."
"It is teeth," said Milton, whose eyes were better than mine. "But the thing, of course, is not animate, even though you did think that you saw it move. It is simply a carven monster, like the great Sphinx of the Pyramids or the Colossi of Thebes."
We were moving toward it now.
"And look at all those horrors along the walls," I said, "dragons, serpents, horrors never seen on land, in air or in the sea. And look there. There is a demon—I mean a sculptured demon. And that's what the colossus itself is—a monstrous ape-bat."
"Not so, Bill. See, it is becoming plainer, and it is unequivocally a dragon."
Yes; it was a dragon. And a monster more horrible than this thing before us never had been fashioned by even the wildest imagination of artist or madman.
The dragon (not carven from the rock but made of bronze) crouched ​upon a high rock, its wings outspread. At the base of this rock—upon which base rested the hind claws of the monster—was a platform some twenty feet square and raised five or six feet above the floor of the cavern. In the front and on either side of this platform there were steps, and, in the center of it, a stone of curious shape—a stone that sent a shudder through me.
And up above rose the colossal dragon itself, its scaly fore claws gripping the edge of the rock, twenty-five feet or so above the platform. The neck curved forward and down. The head hung over the platform, forty feet or more up in the air—the great jaws wide open, the forked tongue protruding hungrily, the huge teeth and the huge eyes sending back the rays from our lights in demoniacal, indescribably horrible gleams.
"Talk about Gorgons, Chimeras and Hydras dire!" I exclaimed, and it was as though unseen things, phantom beings, so eery were the echoes, repeated the words in mockery and in gloating. "Why should men create such a Gorgonic nightmare? And worship it—worship the monster of their own creating? Look at that stone there in the center of the platform. Ugh! The things that must have taken place in that spot—the thought makes the flesh creep and the blood itself turn cold in one's veins!"
"What a dark and fearsome cavern, after all, is the skull of man," said Milton Rhodes, "a place where bats flit and blind shapes creep and crawl!"
I turned toward him with a look of surprize.
"That from the man whom I have so often heard sing the Song of the Mind; that from a scientist, one who reveres Hipparchus, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton and Darwin; from one who so often has said that the only wonderful tiling about man is his mind and that that mind, in its possibilities, is simply godlike."
"And so say I again, and so shall I always say. In its possibilities, remember! But man is a sort of dual creature, a creature that achieves the impossible by being in two places at the same time: his body is in this the Twentieth Century, his mind is still back there in the Pleistocene, with cave-bears, hyenas and saber-toothed tigers."
I uttered a vehement dissent.
"But 'tis so, Bill," said Rhodes, "or at least back there beyond the year 1492. The world knows but one Newton, one Archimedes, one Galileo, one Darwin, one Edison; but heaven has sent the world thousands."
"I don't believe it. There are no mute, inglorious—Shakespeares."
"No; there are no mute, inglorious Shakespeares, no mute, inglorious Newtons: the world, this glorious mind that we hear so much about destroyed them."
"Or," said I, "they destroyed themselves."
"You are not making the mind's case any the brighter, Bill, by putting it that way. Yes, the mind, the glorious human mind destroyed them and turned forthwith to grovel in the dust before monsters like this one before us—before Prejudice, Ignorance, superstition and worse."
"What a horrible piece of work, then, is man!"
"Take the average of the human mind," went on Milton Rhodes, "not the exceptions, so brilliant and so wonderful, but the average of all the human minds in all the world today, from our Newtons—if we have any now—to your savage groveling in the dust before some fetish or idol made of mud; do that, and the skull of man is found to be just what I said—a dark and fearsome cavern, a habitat for bats and ghostly nameless things."
​"What a strange, a horrible idea!" I exclaimed.
"The world is proud of its Newtons now," said Rhodes. "But was it proud of them when they came? Whenever I see a man going into ecstasy over the wonders of the beauties and the glories of the human mind, I think of these words, written by the Philosopher of Ferney: 'When we reflect that Newton,! Locke, Clarke and Leibnitz would have been persecuted in France, imprisoned at Rome, and burned at Lisbon, what are we to think of human reason?'"
"Alas, poor, poor humans," said I, "you are only vile Yahoos!"
Milton Rhodes smiled wanly.
"Don't misunderstand me, Bill. The mind of man is a fearful thing, but it is wonderful too, as wonderful as it is dreadful—and the more wonderful, perhaps, than it intrinsically is because of the very grossness and sordidness that it has to conquer. We are prone, some of us, to think the record of the intellect a shabby one; but, after all, the record is not, all things considered, so bad as it may seem at a first glance. It might have been better; but we should rejoice that it is not worse, that the mind, the hope of the world, has made even the slight advance that it has. Mind is on his way at last! And, with Science on his right hand and Invention on his left, he can not fail to conquer the ape and the tiger—to win to a future brighter even than the most beautiful of our brightest dreams."
"Well," said I, turning and seating myself on one of the steps, up which steps perhaps many victims had been dragged to sacrifice, "this is a fine time truly and a fine place indeed in which to discuss man and the glorious destiny that may await him, in view of the fact that some spot in these cursed caverns may soon be our tomb.
"And," I added, "there come the Dromans."
Never shall I forget that look of awe and horror upon their white faces when at last they stood there in a huddled group before, almost under, the great dragon. Rhodes had seated himself beside me, and it was obvious that this temerity on our part was a source of astonishment to the Dromans. What dread powers they feared the monster might possess, I can only conjecture; but I do know that we could never have induced even Drorathusa herself to thus, on the very steps of his altar, hazard the wrath of an offended deity.