Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [70]
This time, when he reached where I stood, he turned and looked in at the court—but it is too big to be called a court—where tiny people hurried away from the great building. He must have seen what I was seeing, because he said: “There are buildings as large as that one which have flights of steps to them in scale with their size.”
I didn’t understand.
“There’s a building in Peru for instance. It has stairways which could not be used by our size of human being. Imagine that building there with steps up to it in scale—steps the height of a man. The reason why that building dwarfs us so, is because of the proportions of the steps and the building itself. It is in the proportions.”
“But it would be a building for giants,” I said.
He quoted, laughing: “But there were giants in those days.”
I was getting very cold by now, and I was late for a visit I was making. As I thought this, he said, “Well, I expect we’ll run into each other again.”
I had already said good-bye and turned away when I had to return. It was like a panic, a warning, a sense of possibilities being lost, of vanishing opportunities. Into my mind had come the memory of your talking on that dreary platform. Frederick had also turned back after having walked away a few steps.
He said: “I spent last summer working on a site in Turkey. About half an acre of a city has been exposed. It must have been some miles across. It looks as if under the top level are many other levels. Human beings have lived on that site for many thousands of years. Probably the climate has changed in that time, changing everything, vegetation, animals, people. Based on a summer’s work and that exposed half acre we know everything about that civilisation—its beliefs, its rituals, its habits, its agriculture. Learned papers are being written by the dozen. I’ve written three myself. Yesterday I did not feel very well and I stayed at home and watched television between the hours of four and seven. Based on that experience I am prepared to conclude the following about civilisation in Britain in 1969. First of all, the most outstanding characteristic of an extraordinary civilisation: all events are equally important, whether war, a game, the weather, the craft of plant-growing, a fashion show, a police hunt.
“Another, to us incredible trait, is their ability to accommodate such a wide variety of incompatible beliefs. They are a highly developed technical society, but they also believe in witches, fairies, supermen, magic of all kinds, and they take pains to inculcate these beliefs in their children side by side with scientific techniques.
“At the same time they have a deity, superior to the subsidiary gods, but this deity is more backward than they, and less powerful—for the second-rate gods, like Superman, in fact use modern techniques like levitation and space travel. The superior deity is placated or invoked by being sung to, or at, in front of priests who wear highly decorated garments, as part of an elaborate ceremonial that takes place in elaborately decorated but backward and archaic buildings. These priests, probably as part of magical ritual, use sound in all kinds of ways, chanting, intoning, droning, and so on.
“Their use of sound is altogether challenging and enigmatic. While they communicate with each other entirely verbally, usually by means of lectures—a man or woman talking at length on some isolated subject—they have little belief in the effectiveness of words by themselves, because these talks, or lectures, are introduced by, accompanied by, interrupted by, concluded by, a variety of sounds, usually musical. It is my belief that their use of music in this way, if we could understand