THE GOLD THAT GLITTERS.

There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, amongst the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.

He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the people, as they hewed stone, or brought water, said amongst themselves, “Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits of all lands are called for him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he will.”

But the people were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.

His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended on him as wolves from the hills in their hunger, and he had been long plagued with heavy wars and with bad harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, on which his heart was set. So he, being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury, with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved; and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich as this king now became in the short space of a single summer day.

But it was bought with a price.

When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love-words across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of metal. When he was athirst and called to his cupbearer for drink, the red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo! at eventide, when he sought the silent chambers of his home, saying, “Here at least I shall find rest,” and bent his steps to the couch whereon his beloved was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold was all that met his own.

That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this agony; since all around him was desolation, even though all around him was wealth.

Now the world is like that king, and in its greed of gold will barter its life away.

Look you—this thing is certain—I say that the world will perish even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its own fulfilled desire.

The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to men. He has made them rich, and their riches shall kill them.

When all green places have been destroyed in the builder’s lust of gain; when all the lands are but mountains of bricks, and piles of wood and iron; when there is no moisture anywhere, and no rain ever falls; when the sky is a vault of smoke, and all the rivers reek with poison; when forest and stream, the moor and meadow, and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten; when every gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit; when the earth is one vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and know no music but the roar of the furnace; when the old sweet silence of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of no man; then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere; gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly; gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, and holiness and beauty; gold that is one vast grave.

Ouida.