XXV
“I Am That I Am.”
From that day onwards Heraclius was filled with tremendous pride. In the same way that the Messiah sprang from God the Father, so he had sprung from Pythagoras—or rather he himself was Pythagoras, for in the past he had lived in the body of that philosopher. Thus his genealogy could challenge that of the most ancient families of the nobility. He looked with supreme contempt on all the great men in the history of the race and their highest achievements seemed as nothing beside his. He installed himself in sublime isolation among his worlds and his animals: he was metempsychosis itself and his house was its temple.
He had forbidden both his servant and his gardener to kill noxious animals. Caterpillars and snails multiplied in his garden, and in the guise of enormous spiders with hairy legs onetime mortals paraded their loathsome transformation on the walls of his study—a fact which made the offensive Warden say that if all cadgers, each changed according to his kind, were to settle on the too sensitive minded Doctor’s skull, he would still take good care not to wage war on the poor degraded parasites. Only one thing troubled Heraclius in this superb flowering of his hopes: this was the continual spectacle of animals devouring each other—spiders lying in wait for flies, birds carrying off the spiders, cats gobbling up the birds, and his own dog Pythagoras joyfully mangling any cat which came within reach of his teeth.
From morning till night he followed the slow progressive march of metempsychosis at every degree in the animal scale. He received sudden revelations when he watched sparrows pecking in the gutter: and ants, those ceaseless farseeing workers, thrilled him intensely. In them he saw all the work-dodging, useless people who, as an expiation for their past idleness and nonchalance, had been condemned to persistent labour. He remained for hours at a time with his nose on the grass watching them and was amazed at what he saw. Then, like Nebuchadnezzar, he would crawl on all fours, rolling in the dust with his dog, living with his animals, even grovelling with them. For him, Man gradually disappeared from creation, and soon he was only conscious of animals. When he thought of them he felt that he was their brother; he spoke to no one but them, and when by chance he was forced to talk to men, he found himself as helpless as though he was among foreigners, and was shocked at the stupidity of his fellow creatures.