While the Shadows Play
Listen! I shall tell you the story of this age — it is the story of two Quixotes each in their separate caves. [Both caves are awash with firelight and fury. Long shadows cast themselves across the walls of these caves and enact a shadow play which draws in all onlookers.]
The cave dwellers of the West rise every day and set to work to see the shadows play. Their daily pattern begins with toil, as dark gods loom and threaten to spoil
— all their hard won freedoms, all their cherished toys and precious prizes.
Their world is a world of shadows and when for their masters they have laboured hard, they sit before the altar to watch the drama of the looming figures on the wall. By turns they rise and fall, but the darkest of them always grows tall and by stealth threatens to engulf them all.
The cave dwellers know who this is. It is the bogeyman: the monster, the personification of all their woes — if only this terrible shadow could be vanquished. If only this ghost would go. Then all the miseries of their caveman life would depart and the flavours of their cherished liberties they would know at last.
This turbaned shadow grows fierce and ferocious still, for countless years and centuries still, despite the hero gods of the cavemen still, despite Charles Martel, and Lion Heart, despite all the West’s greatest might, and the legendary likes of El Cid.
Woe this turbaned shadow what gods can rid us of this ill?
And when in the West it is night, behold the East is cast in splendid light. But in this age light quickly dims and so in darkness another pattern begins. The cave dwellers rise everyday and set to work to see the shadows play. Their world is a world of tyrant kings, and explosive deaths brought by foreign djinn. But the tale-spinners of their time enchant them
— with magic rhymes of days gone by and past glories. They down their sorrows on the draught of idle tales and ancient stories.
All the while bodies and the putrid stench of death fill their lives. In the dim distance their neighbours cry as winged creatures hover above and cast long shadows where their children lie.
