Gladiator by Philip Wylie (recommended reading .txt) 📕

father had written the second secret of life. He crammed them into his pocket and broke through the jungle. When he was beyond sight and sound, he dropped his machete and made his way as none but he could do. With his body he cut a swath toward the mountains and emerged from the green veil on to the bare rocks, panting and hot. Upward he climbed until he had gained the summit. To the west were strewn the frozen billows of the range. To the east a limitless sea of verdure. At his feet the ruins in neat miniature, like a model. Above, scalding sun and blue sky. Around him a wind, strangely chill. And silence.

He sat with his head on his hands until his thoughts were disturbed. A humid breath had risen sluggishly from the jungle floor. The sun was dull. Looking toward the horizon, he could see a black cloud. For an instant he was frightened, the transformation had been so gigantic and so soundless. He knew a sudden, urgent impulse to go back to the valley. He disobeyed it and watched the coming of the storm. The first rapier of lightning through the bowels of the approaching cloud warned him again. Staunchly he stood. He had come there to think.

“I must go back and begin this work,” he told himself. “I have found a friend!” The cloud was descending. Thunder ruminated in heaven’s garret. “It is folly,” he repeated, “folly, folly, folly in the face of God.” Now the sun went out like an extinguished lamp, and the horizon crept closer. A curtain of torrential rain was lowered in the north. “They will make the earth beautiful,” he said, and ever and again: “This thing is not beautiful. It is wrong.” His agitation increased rapidly. The cloud was closing on the mountain like a huge hand. The muscles in his legs quivered.

“If there were only a God,” he whispered, “what a prayer I would make!” Then the wind came like a visible thing, pushing its fingers over the vegetation below, and whirling up the mountain, laden with dust. After the wind, the rain⁠—heavy, roaring rain that fell, not in separate drops, but in thick streams. The lightning was incessant. It illuminated remote, white-topped peaks, which, in the fury of the storm, appeared to be swaying. It split clouds apart, and the hurricane healed the rents. All light went out. The world was wrapped in darkness.

Hugo clutched his precious books in the remnants of his clothing and braced himself on the bare rock. His voice roared back into the storm the sounds it gave. He flung one hand upward.

“Now⁠—God⁠—oh, God⁠—if there be a God⁠—tell me! Can I defy You? Can I defy Your world? Is this Your will? Or are You, like all mankind, impotent? Oh, God!” He put his hand to his mouth and called God like a name into the tumult above. Madness was upon him and the bitter irony with which his blood ran black was within him.

A bolt of lightning stabbed earthward. It struck Hugo, outlining him in fire. His hand slipped away from his mouth. His voice was quenched. He fell to the ground.

After three days of frantic searching, Daniel Hardin came upon the incredible passage through the jungle and followed it to the mountain top. There he found the blackened body of Hugo Danner, lying face down. His clothing was burned to ashes, and an accumulation of cinders was all that remained of the notebooks. After discovering that, Professor Hardin could not forbear to glance aloft at the sun and sky. His face was saddened and perplexed.

“We will carry him yonder to Uctotol and bury him,” he said at last; “then⁠—the work will go on.”

Colophon

Gladiator
was published in 1930 by
Philip Wylie.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Nicholas Brown,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2013 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.

The cover page is adapted from
The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes),
a painting completed in 1875 by
Adolph Menzel.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
March 16, 2021, 11:07 p.m.
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