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same degree of perfection those things that I can achieve. Development of the
brain should not be the sum total of human endeavor. The richest and happiest
peoples will be those who attain closest to well-balanced perfection of both mind
and body, and even these must always be short of perfection. In absolute and
general perfection lies stifling monotony and death. Nature must have contrasts;
she must have shadows as well as highlights; sorrow with happiness; both wrong
and right; and sin as well as virtue."
"Always have I been taught differently," replied Ghek; "but since I have known
this woman and you, of another race, I have come to believe that there may be
other standards fully as high and desirable as those of the kaldanes. At least I
have had a glimpse of the thing you call happiness and I realize that it may be
good even though I have no means of expressing it. I cannot laugh nor smile, and
yet within me is a sense of contentment when this woman sings--a sense that
seems to open before me wondrous vistas of beauty and unguessed pleasure that
far transcend the cold joys of a perfectly functioning brain. I would that I had
been born of thy race."
Caught by a gentle current of air the flier was drifting slowly toward the northeast
across the valley of Bantoom. Below them lay the cultivated fields, and one after
another they passed over the strange towers of Moak and Nolach and the other
kings of the swarms that inhabited this weird and terrible land. Within each
enclosure surrounding the towers grovelled the rykors, repellent, headless things,
beautiful yet hideous.
"A lesson, those," remarked Gahan, indicating the rykors in an enclosure above
which they were drifting at the time, "to that fortunately small minority of our
race which worships the flesh and makes a god of appetite. You know them, Tara
of Helium; they can tell you exactly what they had at the midday meal two weeks
ago, and how the loin of the thoat should be prepared, and what drink should be
served with the rump of the zitidar."
Tara of Helium laughed. "But not one of them could tell you the name of the man
whose painting took the Jeddak's Award in The Temple of Beauty this year," she
said. "Like the rykors, their development has not been balanced."
"Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little good and a little
bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own callings, a capacity for
love and a capacity for hate, for such as these can look with tolerance upon all,
unbiased by the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all his
brains run to that point."
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