The Dark Star
Page 3Not the dark companion of Sirius, brightest of all stars--not our own
chill and spectral planet rushing toward Vega in the constellation of
Lyra--presided at the birth of millions born to corroborate a bloody
horoscope.
But a Dark Star, speeding unseen through space, known to the ancients,
by them called Erlik, after the Prince of Darkness, ruled at the birth
of those myriad souls destined to be engulfed in the earthquake of the
ages, or flung by it out of the ordered pathway of their lives into
strange byways, stranger highways--into deeps and deserts never
dreamed of.
Also one of the dozen odd temporary stars on record blazed up on that
day, flared for a month or two, dwindled to a cinder, and went out.
But the Dark Star Erlik, terribly immortal, sped on through space to
anew an immemorial journey by the will of the Most High.
What spectroscope is to horoscope, destiny is to chance. The black
star Erlik rushed through interstellar darkness unseen; those born
under its violent augury squalled in their cradles, or, thumb in
mouth, slumbered the dreamless slumber of the newly born.
One of these, a tiny girl baby, fussed and fidgeted in her mother's
arms, tortured by prickly heat when the hot winds blew through
Trebizond.
Overhead vultures circled; a stein-adler, cleaving the blue, looked
down where the surf made a thin white line along the coast, then set
his lofty course for China.
Thousands of miles to the westward, a little boy of eight gazed out
wondered whether the ocean might not look that way.
And, wondering, with the salt sea effervescence working in his
inland-born body, he fitted a cork to his fishing line and flung the
baited hook far out across the ripples. Then he seated himself on the
parapet of the stone bridge and waited for monsters of the deep to
come.
* * * * *
And again, off Seraglio Point, men were rowing in a boat; and a corded
sack lay in the stern, horridly and limply heavy.
There was also a box lying in the boat, oddly bound and clamped with
metal which glistened like silver under the Eastern stars when the
waves of the Bosporus dashed high, and the flying scud rained down on
* * * * *
In Petrograd a little girl of twelve was learning to eat other things
than sour milk and cheese; learning to ride otherwise than like a
demon on a Cossack saddle; learning deportment, too, and languages,
and social graces and the fine arts. And, most thoroughly of all, the
little girl was learning how deathless should be her hatred for the
Turkish Empire and all its works; and how only less perfect than our
Lord in Paradise was the Czar on his throne amid that earthly paradise
known as "All the Russias."