He flung the diamonds more evenly over the dirt floor and they showered rich sparks, collaborating with him. He went over the floor and trampled the stones just deep enough for them to be faintly visible, as though they were set delicately in the prongs of a thousand rings. A baleful, icy glare bathed the cave. He sat on the chest, lit a cigarette, frowned, and shook his head. Maybe anything’s right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, too. Any action a man took to satisfy himself—theft or murder or torture—was right. To banish such thoughts, he turned on the radio. A melancholy piece of music rose. Brooding over the diamonds on the floor was like looking up into a sky full of stars; the illusion melted into its opposite: He was high up in the air looking down at the twinkling lights of a sprawling city. The music ended and a man recited news events. In the same attitude in which he had contemplated the city, so now, as he heard the cultivated tone, he looked down upon the land and the sea as men fought, as cities were razed, as armies marched or planes scattered bombs upon open towns, as long lines of trenches wavered and broke. He heard the names of generals and the names of towns and the names of rivers and the names and numbers of divisions that were reported in action on different fronts. He saw black smoke billowing from the stacks of warships that neared each other over wastes of water and he heard them speak the language of death as flame belched from their huge guns and red-hot shells screamed across the surface of the night seas. He saw hundreds of planes whirling and droning in the air and heard the clatter of machine-guns as they battled each other and he saw planes blazing and smoking as they fell. He saw steel tanks rumbling across fields of ripe wheat to meet other tanks and there was a loud clang of steel against steel as numberless tanks collided. He saw troops with fixed bayonets charging in waves against other troops who held fixed bayonets and men groaned as steel ripped into their bodies and they went down to die. . . . The voice of the radio died and he was looking down at the diamonds that twinkled on the floor before him.

When the spell left him he found that he was standing on his feet, staring in horror. His hovering in midair and looking down upon the reasonlessness of human life made him understand that no compassion of which the human heart was capable could ever respond adequately to that awful sight. Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.