Connie’s Reviews > The Lost Steps > Status Update

“There are diseases here, scourges, poisonous reptiles, insects, wild beasts that devour the livestock; days of floods and hunger, and days of helplessness before a gangrenous arm. But man's atavism has made him to overcome such evils. And when he succumbs, he does so in the primordial struggle that is among the truest laws of the game of existence. "Gold," the Pathfinder says, "is for people who go back there." And this back there echoes with contempt—as if the preoccupations and commitments of the people from back there were a mark of inferiority. Nature here is implacable, terrible, despite its beauty. But for those who live among it, it is less horrible, easier to endure, than the anxieties and fears, the cold cruelties, the constant threats of the world back there. Insects, suffering, natural dangers are accepted here as a matter of course, part of an Order innately severe. Creation is not an entertainment, and they all know this instinctively, accepting the roles assigned them in the vast tragedy of generation. But it is a tragedy with unity of time, action, and place, with known aggressors as the instruments of death, sheathed in venom, scales, fire, miasmas, with thunder and lightning still employed here by the resident gods on their days of rage. By sunlight or the glow of the hearth, man lives out his destiny here, content with simple things, jubilant if the morning is warm or the catch abundant, or if rain falls after a drought, with collective bliss, singing and drumming—and even something as simple as our arrival is a cause for joy. This is how life must have been in the city of Enoch, I think…”