Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

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CHAPTER I

The Jebel es Zubleh is a mountain fifty miles and more in length,
and so narrow that its tracery on the map gives it a likeness to
a caterpillar crawling from the south to the north. Standing on
its red-and-white cliffs, and looking off under the path of the
rising sun, one sees only the Desert of Arabia, where the east
winds, so hateful to vinegrowers of Jericho, have kept their
playgrounds since the beginning. Its feet are well covered by
sands tossed from the Euphrates, there to lie, for the mountain
is a wall to the pasture-lands of Moab and Ammon on the west--lands
which else had been of the desert a part.

The Arab has impressed his language upon everything south and
east of Judea, so, in his tongue, the old Jebel is the parent of
numberless wadies which, intersecting the Roman road--now a dim
suggestion of what once it was, a dusty path for Syrian pilgrims
to and from Mecca--run their furrows, deepening as they go, to
pass the torrents of the rainy season into the Jordan, or their
last receptacle, the Dead Sea. Out of one of these wadies--or,
more particularly, out of that one which rises at the extreme end
of the Jebel, and, extending east of north, becomes at length
the bed of the Jabbok River--a traveller passed, going to the
table-lands of the desert. To this person the attention of the
reader is first besought.

Judged by his appearance, he was quite forty-five years old.
His beard, once of the deepest black, flowing broadly over his
breast, was streaked with white. His face was brown as a parched
coffee-berry, and so hidden by a red kufiyeh (as the kerchief of
the head is at this day called by the children of the desert)
as to be but in part visible. Now and then he raised his eyes,
and they were large and dark. He was clad in the flowing garments
so universal in the East; but their style may not be described
more particularly, for he sat under a miniature tent, and rode
a great white dromedary.

It may be doubted if the people of the West ever overcome the impression
made upon them by the first view of a camel equipped and loaded for
the desert. Custom, so fatal to other novelties, affects this feeling
but little. At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of
residence with the Bedawin, the Western-born, wherever they may be,
will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute. The charm is
not in the figure, which not even love can make beautiful; nor in
the movement, the noiseless stepping, or the broad careen. As is
the kindness of the sea to a ship, so that of the desert to its
creature. It clothes him with all its mysteries; in such manner,
too, that while we are looking at him we are thinking of them:
therein is the wonder. The animal which now came out of the wady
might well have claimed the customary homage. Its color and height;
its breadth of foot; its bulk of body, not fat, but overlaid with
muscle; its long, slender neck, of swanlike curvature; the head,
wide between the eyes, and tapering to a muzzle which a lady's
bracelet might have almost clasped; its motion, step long and elastic,
tread sure and soundless--all certified its Syrian blood, old as the
days of Cyrus, and absolutely priceless. There was the usual bridle,
covering the forehead with scarlet fringe, and garnishing the throat
with pendent brazen chains, each ending with a tinkling silver bell;
but to the bridle there was neither rein for the rider nor strap
for a driver. The furniture perched on the back was an invention
which with any other people than of the East would have made the
inventor renowned. It consisted of two wooden boxes, scarce four
feet in length, balanced so that one hung at each side; the inner
space, softly lined and carpeted, was arranged to allow the master
to sit or lie half reclined; over it all was stretched a green
awning. Broad back and breast straps, and girths, secured with
countless knots and ties, held the device in place. In such manner
the ingenious sons of Cush had contrived to make comfortable the
sunburnt ways of the wilderness, along which lay their duty as
often as their pleasure.

When the dromedary lifted itself out of the last break of the wady,
the traveller had passed the boundary of El Belka, the ancient
Ammon. It was morning-time. Before him was the sun, half curtained
in fleecy mist; before him also spread the desert; not the realm
of drifting sands, which was farther on, but the region where the
herbage began to dwarf; where the surface is strewn with boulders
of granite, and gray and brown stones, interspersed with languishing
acacias and tufts of camel-grass. The oak, bramble, and arbutus
lay behind, as if they had come to a line, looked over into the
well-less waste and crouched with fear.

And now there was an end of path or road. More than ever the camel
seemed insensibly driven; it lengthened and quickened its pace, its
head pointed straight towards the horizon; through the wide nostrils
it drank the wind in great draughts. The litter swayed, and rose
and fell like a boat in the waves. Dried leaves in occasional beds
rustled underfoot. Sometimes a perfume like absinthe sweetened all
the air. Lark and chat and rock-swallow leaped to wing, and white
partridges ran whistling and clucking out of the way. More rarely
a fox or a hyena quickened his gallop, to study the intruders at
a safe distance. Off to the right rose the hills of the Jebel,
the pearl-gray veil resting upon them changing momentarily into
a purple which the sun would make matchless a little later.
Over their highest peaks a vulture sailed on broad wings into
widening circles. But of all these things the tenant under the
green tent saw nothing, or, at least, made no sign of recognition.
His eyes were fixed and dreamy. The going of the man, like that of
the animal, was as one being led.

For two hours the dromedary swung forward, keeping the trot
steadily and the line due east. In that time the traveller never
changed his position, nor looked to the right or left. On the
desert, distance is not measured by miles or leagues, but by the
saat, or hour, and the manzil, or halt: three and a half leagues
fill the former, fifteen or twenty-five the latter; but they are
the rates for the common camel. A carrier of the genuine Syrian
stock can make three leagues easily. At full speed he overtakes
the ordinary winds. As one of the results of the rapid advance,
the face of the landscape underwent a change. The Jebel stretched
along the western horizon, like a pale-blue ribbon. A tell, or hummock
of clay and cemented sand, arose here and there. Now and then basaltic
stones lifted their round crowns, outposts of the mountain against the
forces of the plain; all else, however, was sand, sometimes smooth as
the beaten beach, then heaped in rolling ridges; here chopped waves,
there long swells. So, too, the condition of the atmosphere changed.
The sun, high risen, had drunk his fill of dew and mist, and warmed
the breeze that kissed the wanderer under the awning; far and near
he was tinting the earth with faint milk-whiteness, and shimmering
all the sky.

Two hours more passed without rest or deviation from the course.
Vegetation entirely ceased. The sand, so crusted on the surface
that it broke into rattling flakes at every step, held undisputed
sway. The Jebel was out of view, and there was no landmark visible.
The shadow that before followed had now shifted to the north, and was
keeping even race with the objects which cast it; and as there was
no sign of halting, the conduct of the traveller became each moment
more strange.

No one, be it remembered, seeks the desert for a pleasure-ground.
Life and business traverse it by paths along which the bones of things
dead are strewn as so many blazons. Such are the roads from well to
well, from pasture to pasture. The heart of the most veteran sheik
beats quicker when he finds himself alone in the pathless tracts.
So the man with whom we are dealing could not have been in search
of pleasure; neither was his manner that of a fugitive; not once
did he look behind him. In such situations fear and curiosity are
the most common sensations; he was not moved by them. When men are
lonely, they stoop to any companionship; the dog becomes a comrade,
the horse a friend, and it is no shame to shower them with caresses
and speeches of love. The camel received no such token, not a touch,
not a word.

Exactly at noon the dromedary, of its own will, stopped, and uttered
the cry or moan, peculiarly piteous, by which its kind always protest
against an overload, and sometimes crave attention and rest. The master
thereupon bestirred himself, waking, as it were, from sleep. He threw
the curtains of the houdah up, looked at the sun, surveyed the country
on every side long and carefully, as if to identify an appointed place.
Satisfied with the inspection, he drew a deep breath and nodded,
much as to say, "At last, at last!" A moment after, he crossed
his hands upon his breast, bowed his head, and prayed silently.
The pious duty done, he prepared to dismount. From his throat
proceeded the sound heard doubtless by the favorite camels of
Job--Ikh! ikh!--the signal to kneel. Slowly the animal obeyed,
grunting the while. The rider then put his foot upon the slender
neck, and stepped upon the sand.

CHAPTER II

The man as now revealed was of admirable proportions, not so tall
as powerful. Loosening the silken rope which held the kufiyeh on his
head, he brushed the fringed folds back until his face was bare--a
strong face, almost <DW64> in color; yet the low, broad forehead,
aquiline nose, the outer corners of the eyes turned slightly upward,
the hair profuse, straight, harsh, of metallic lustre, and falling
to the shoulder in many plaits, were signs of origin impossible
to disguise. So looked the Pharaohs and the later Ptolemies; so
looked Mizraim, father of the Egyptian race. He wore the kamis,
a white cotton shirt tight-sleeved, open in front, extending to
the ankles and embroidered down the collar and breast, over which
was thrown a brown woollen cloak, now, as in all probability
it was then, called the aba, an outer garment with long skirt
and short sleeves, lined inside with stuff of mixed cotton and
silk, edged all round with a margin of clouded yellow. His feet
were protected by sandals, attached by thongs of soft leather.
A sash held the kamis to his waist. What was very noticeable,
considering he was alone, and that the desert was the haunt of
leopards and lions, and men quite as wild, he carried no arms,
not even the crooked stick used for guiding camels; wherefore we
may at least infer his errand peaceful, and that he was either
uncommonly bold or under extraordinary protection.

The traveller's limbs were numb, for the ride had been long and
wearisome; so he rubbed his hands and stamped his feet, and walked
round the faithful servant, whose lustrous eyes were closing in calm
content with the cud he had already found. Often, while making the
circuit, he paused, and, shading his eyes with his hands, examined the
desert to the extremest verge of vision; and always, when the survey
was ended, his face clouded with disappointment, slight, but enough
to advise a shrewd spectator that he was there expecting company,
if not by appointment; at the same time, the spectator would have
been conscious of a sharpening of the curiosity to learn what the
business could be that required transaction in a place so far from
civilized abode.

However disappointed, there could be little doubt of the stranger's
confidence in the coming of the expected company. In token thereof,
he went first to the litter, and, from the cot or box opposite
the one he had occupied in coming, produced a sponge and a
small gurglet of water, with which he washed the eyes, face,
and nostrils of the camel; that done, from the same depository he
drew a circular cloth, red-and white-striped, a bundle of rods,
and a stout cane. The latter, after some manipulation, proved to
be a cunning device of lesser joints, one within another, which,
when united together, formed a centre pole higher than his head.
When the pole was planted, and the rods set around it, he spread
the cloth over them, and was literally at home--a home much smaller
than the habitations of emir and sheik, yet their counterpart in
all other respects. From the litter again he brought a carpet or
square rug, and covered the floor of the tent on the side from
the sun. That done, he went out, and once more, and with greater
care and more eager eyes, swept the encircling country. Except a
distant jackal, galloping across the plain, and an eagle flying
towards the Gulf of Akaba, the waste below, like the blue above
it, was lifeless.

He turned to the camel, saying low, and in a tongue strange to the
desert, "We are far from home, O racer with the swiftest winds--we are
far from home, but God is with us. Let us be patient."

Then he took some beans from a pocket in the saddle, and put them
in a bag made to hang below the animal's nose; and when he saw the
relish with which the good servant took to the food, he turned and
again scanned the world of sand, dim with the glow of the vertical
sun.

"They will come," he said, calmly. "He that led me is leading them.
I will make ready."

From the pouches which lined the interior of the cot, and from a
willow basket which was part of its furniture, he brought forth
materials for a meal: platters close-woven of the fibres of
palms; wine in small gurglets of skin; mutton dried and smoked;
stoneless shami, or Syrian pomegranates; dates of El Shelebi,
wondrous rich and grown in the nakhil, or palm orchards, of Central
Arabia; cheese, like David's "slices of milk;" and leavened bread
from the city bakery--all which he carried and set upon the carpet
under the tent. As the final preparation, about the provisions he
laid three pieces of silk cloth, used among refined people of the
East to cover the knees of guests while at table--a circumstance
significant of the number of persons who were to partake of his
entertainment--the number he was awaiting.

All was now ready. He stepped out: lo! in the east a dark speck
on the face of the desert. He stood as if rooted to the ground;
his eyes dilated; his flesh crept chilly, as if touched by
something supernatural. The speck grew; became large as a hand;
at length assumed defined proportions. A little later, full into
view swung a duplication of his own dromedary, tall and white,
and bearing a houdah, the travelling litter of Hindostan. Then the
Egyptian crossed his hands upon his breast, and looked to heaven.

"God only is great!" he exclaimed, his eyes full of tears, his soul
in awe.

The stranger drew nigh--at last stopped. Then he, too, seemed just
waking. He beheld the kneeling camel, the tent, and the man standing
prayerfully at the door. He crossed his hands, bent his head, and
prayed silently; after which, in a little while, he stepped from
his camel's neck to the sand, and advanced towards the Egyptian,
as did the Egyptian towards him. A moment they looked at each other;
then they embraced--that is, each threw his right arm over the
other's shoulder, and the left round the side, placing his chin
first upon the left, then upon the right breast.

"Peace be with thee, O servant of the true God!" the stranger said.

"And to thee, O brother of the true faith!--to thee peace and
welcome," the Egyptian replied, with fervor.

The new-comer was tall and gaunt, with lean face, sunken eyes,
white hair and beard, and a complexion between the hue of cinnamon
and bronze. He, too, was unarmed. His costume was Hindostani;
over the skull-cap a shawl was wound in great folds, forming a
turban; his body garments were in the style of the Egyptian's,
except that the aba was shorter, exposing wide flowing breeches
gathered at the ankles. In place of sandals, his feet were clad
in half-slippers of red leather, pointed at the toes. Save the
slippers, the costume from head to foot was of white linen. The air
of the man was high, stately, severe. Visvamitra, the greatest of
the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect
representative. He might have been called a Life drenched with the
wisdom of Brahma--Devotion Incarnate. Only in his eyes was there
proof of humanity; when he lifted his face from the Egyptian's
breast, they were glistening with tears.

"God only is great!" he exclaimed, when the embrace was finished.

"And blessed are they that serve him!" the Egyptian answered,
wondering at the paraphrase of his own exclamation. "But let us
wait," he added, "let us wait; for see, the other comes yonder!"

They looked to the north, where, already plain to view, a third
camel, of the whiteness of the others, came careening like a ship.
They waited, standing together--waited until the new-comer arrived,
dismounted, and advanced towards them.

"Peace to you, O my brother!" he said, while embracing the Hindoo.

And the Hindoo answered, "God's will be done!"

The last comer was all unlike his friends: his frame was slighter;
his complexion white; a mass of waving light hair was a perfect
crown for his small but beautiful head; the warmth of his dark-blue
eyes certified a delicate mind, and a cordial, brave nature. He was
bareheaded and unarmed. Under the folds of the Tyrian blanket which
he wore with unconscious grace appeared a tunic, short-sleeved and
low-necked, gathered to the waist by a band, and reaching nearly to
the knee; leaving the neck, arms, and legs bare. Sandals guarded
his feet. Fifty years, probably more, had spent themselves upon
him, with no other effect, apparently, than to tinge his demeanor
with gravity and temper his words with forethought. The physical
organization and the brightness of soul were untouched. No need to
tell the student from what kindred he was sprung; if he came not
himself from the groves of Athene', his ancestry did.

When his arms fell from the Egyptian, the latter said, with a
tremulous voice, "The Spirit brought me first; wherefore I know
myself chosen to be the servant of my brethren. The tent is set,
and the bread is ready for the breaking. Let me perform my office."

Taking each by the hand, he led them within, and removed their
sandals and washed their feet, and he poured water upon their
hands, and dried them with napkins.

Then, when he had laved his own hands, he said, "Let us take care
of ourselves, brethren, as our service requires, and eat, that we
may be strong for what remains of the day's duty. While we eat,
we will each learn who the others are, and whence they come,
and how they are called."

He took them to the repast, and seated them so that they faced
each other. Simultaneously their heads bent forward, their hands
crossed upon their breasts, and, speaking together, they said
aloud this simple grace:

"Father of all--God!--what we have here is of thee; take our thanks
and bless us, that we may continue to do thy will."

With the last word they raised their eyes, and looked at each other
in wonder. Each had spoken in a language never before heard by the
others; yet each understood perfectly what was said. Their souls
thrilled with divine emotion; for by the miracle they recognized
the Divine Presence.

CHAPTER III

To speak in the style of the period, the meeting just described took
place in the year of Rome 747. The month was December, and winter
reigned over all the regions east of the Mediterranean. Such as
ride upon the desert in this season go not far until smitten
with a keen appetite. The company under the little tent were not
exceptions to the rule. They were hungry, and ate heartily; and,
after the wine, they talked.

"To a wayfarer in a strange land nothing is so sweet as to hear his
name on the tongue of a friend," said the Egyptian, who assumed to be
president of the repast. "Before us lie many days of companionship.
It is time we knew each other. So, if it be agreeable, he who came
last shall be first to speak."

Then, slowly at first, like one watchful of himself, the Greek
began:

"What I have to tell, my brethren, is so strange that I hardly
know where to begin or what I may with propriety speak. I do not
yet understand myself. The most I am sure of is that I am doing a
Master's will, and that the service is a constant ecstasy. When I
think of the purpose I am sent to fulfil, there is in me a joy so
inexpressible that I know the will is God's."

The good man paused, unable to proceed, while the others, in sympathy
with his feelings, dropped their gaze.

"Far to the west of this," he began again, "there is a land which
may never be forgotten; if only because the world is too much its
debtor, and because the indebtedness is for things that bring to men
their purest pleasures. I will say nothing of the arts, nothing of
philosophy, of eloquence, of poetry, of war: O my brethren, hers is
the glory which must shine forever in perfected letters, by which
He we go to find and proclaim will be made known to all the earth.
The land I speak of is Greece. I am Gaspar, son of Cleanthes the
Athenian.

"My people," he continued, "were given wholly to study, and from them
I derived the same passion. It happens that two of our philosophers,
the very greatest of the many, teach, one the doctrine of a Soul
in every man, and its Immortality; the other the doctrine of One
God, infinitely just. From the multitude of subjects about which
the schools were disputing, I separated them, as alone worth the
labor of solution; for I thought there was a relation between God
and the soul as yet unknown. On this theme the mind can reason to
a point, a dead, impassable wall; arrived there, all that remains
is to stand and cry aloud for help. So I did; but no voice came
to me over the wall. In despair, I tore myself from the cities
and the schools."

At these words a grave smile of approval lighted the gaunt face
of the Hindoo.

"In the northern part of my country--in Thessaly," the Greek
proceeded to say, "there is a mountain famous as the home of the
gods, where Theus, whom my countrymen believe supreme, has his
abode; Olympus is its name. Thither I betook myself. I found a
cave in a hill where the mountain, coming from the west, bends to
the southeast; there I dwelt, giving myself up to meditation--no,
I gave myself up to waiting for what every breath was a prayer--for
revelation. Believing in God, invisible yet supreme, I also believed
it possible so to yearn for him with all my soul that he would take
compassion and give me answer."

"And he did--he did!" exclaimed the Hindoo, lifting his hands from
the silken cloth upon his lap.

"Hear me, brethren," said the Greek, calming himself with an effort.
"The door of my hermitage looks over an arm of the sea, over the
Thermaic Gulf. One day I saw a man flung overboard from a ship
sailing by. He swam ashore. I received and took care of him.
He was a Jew, learned in the history and laws of his people;
and from him I came to know that the God of my prayers did
indeed exist; and had been for ages their lawmaker, ruler,
and king. What was that but the Revelation I dreamed of? My
faith had not been fruitless; God answered me!"

"As he does all who cry to him with such faith," said the Hindoo.

"But, alas!" the Egyptian added, "how few are there wise enough
to know when he answers them!"

"That was not all," the Greek continued. "The man so sent to me
told me more. He said the prophets who, in the ages which followed
the first revelation, walked and talked with God, declared he would
come again. He gave me the names of the prophets, and from the
sacred books quoted their very language. He told me, further,
that the second coming was at hand--was looked for momentarily
in Jerusalem."

The Greek paused, and the brightness of his countenance faded.

"It is true," he said, after a little--"it is true the man told
me that as God and the revelation of which he spoke had been for
the Jews alone, so it would be again. He that was to come should
be King of the Jews. 'Had he nothing for the rest of the world?'
I asked. 'No,' was the answer, given in a proud voice--'No, we are
his chosen people.' The answer did not crush my hope. Why should
such a God limit his love and benefaction to one land, and, as it
were, to one family? I set my heart upon knowing. At last I broke
through the man's pride, and found that his fathers had been
merely chosen servants to keep the Truth alive, that the world
might at last know it and be saved. When the Jew was gone, and I
was alone again, I chastened my soul with a new prayer--that I
might be permitted to see the King when he was come, and worship
him. One night I sat by the door of my cave trying to get nearer
the mysteries of my existence, knowing which is to know God;
suddenly, on the sea below me, or rather in the darkness that
covered its face, I saw a star begin to burn; slowly it arose and
drew nigh, and stood over the hill and above my door, so that its
light shone full upon me. I fell down, and slept, and in my dream
I heard a voice say:

"'O Gaspar! Thy faith hath conquered! Blessed art thou! With two
others, come from the uttermost parts of the earth, thou shalt see
Him that is promised, and be a witness for him, and the occasion of
testimony in his behalf. In the morning arise, and go meet them,
and keep trust in the Spirit that shall guide thee.'

"And in the morning I awoke with the Spirit as a light within me
surpassing that of the sun. I put off my hermit's garb, and dressed
myself as of old. From a hiding-place I took the treasure which I
had brought from the city. A ship went sailing past. I hailed it,
was taken aboard, and landed at Antioch. There I bought the camel
and his furniture. Through the gardens and orchards that enamel
the banks of the Orontes, I journeyed to Emesa, Damascus, Bostra,
and Philadelphia; thence hither. And so, O brethren, you have my
story. Let me now listen to you."

CHAPTER IV

The Egyptian and the Hindoo looked at each other; the former waved
his hand; the latter bowed, and began:

"Our brother has spoken well. May my words be as wise."

He broke off, reflected a moment, then resumed:

"You may know me, brethren, by the name of Melchior. I speak to
you in a language which, if not the oldest in the world, was at
least the soonest to be reduced to letters--I mean the Sanscrit
of India. I am a Hindoo by birth. My people were the first to
walk in the fields of knowledge, first to divide them, first to
make them beautiful. Whatever may hereafter befall, the four
Vedas must live, for they are the primal fountains of religion and
useful intelligence. From them were derived the Upa-Vedas, which,
delivered by Brahma, treat of medicine, archery, architecture,
music, and the four-and-sixty mechanical arts; the Ved-Angas,
revealed by inspired saints, and devoted to astronomy, grammar,
prosody, pronunciation, charms and incantations, religious rites
and ceremonies; the Up-Angas, written by the sage Vyasa, and given
to cosmogony, chronology, and geography; therein also are the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, heroic poems, designed for the
perpetuation of our gods and demi-gods. Such, O brethren, are the
Great Shastras, or books of sacred ordinances. They are dead to me
now; yet through all time they will serve to illustrate the budding
genius of my race. They were promises of quick perfection. Ask you
why the promises failed? Alas! the books themselves closed all
the gates of progress. Under pretext of care for the creature,
their authors imposed the fatal principle that a man must not
address himself to discovery or invention, as Heaven had provided
him all things needful. When that condition became a sacred law,
the lamp of Hindoo genius was let down a well, where ever since
it has lighted narrow walls and bitter waters.

"These allusions, brethren, are not from pride, as you will
understand when I tell you that the Shastras teach a Supreme
God called Brahm; also, that the Puranas, or sacred poems of
the Up-Angas, tell us of Virtue and Good Works, and of the Soul.
So, if my brother will permit the saying"--the speaker bowed
deferentially to the Greek--"ages before his people were known,
the two great ideas, God and the Soul, had absorbed all the forces
of the Hindoo mind. In further explanation let me say that Brahm
is taught, by the same sacred books, as a Triad--Brahma, Vishnu,
and Shiva. Of these, Brahma is said to have been the author of our
race; which, in course of creation, he divided into four castes.
First, he peopled the worlds below and the heavens above; next,
he made the earth ready for terrestrial spirits; then from his
mouth proceeded the Brahman caste, nearest in likeness to himself,
highest and noblest, sole teachers of the Vedas, which at the same time
flowed from his lips in finished state, perfect in all useful knowledge.
From his arms next issued the Kshatriya, or warriors; from his breast,
the seat of life, came the Vaisya, or producers--shepherds, farmers,
merchants; from his foot, in sign of degradation, sprang the Sudra,
or serviles, doomed to menial duties for the other classes--serfs,
domestics, laborers, artisans. Take notice, further, that the law,
so born with them, forbade a man of one caste becoming a member of
another; the Brahman could not enter a lower order; if he violated
the laws of his own grade, he became an outcast, lost to all but
outcasts like himself."

At this point, the imagination of the Greek, flashing forward
upon all the consequences of such a degradation, overcame his
eager attention, and he exclaimed, "In such a state, O brethren,
what mighty need of a loving God!"

"Yes," added the Egyptian, "of a loving God like ours."

The brows of the Hindoo knit painfully; when the emotion was spent,
he proceeded, in a softened voice.

"I was born a Brahman. My life, consequently, was ordered down to
its least act, its last hour. My first draught of nourishment;
the giving me my compound name; taking me out the first time to
see the sun; investing me with the triple thread by which I became
one of the twice-born; my induction into the first order--were all
celebrated with sacred texts and rigid ceremonies. I might not walk,
eat, drink, or sleep without danger of violating a rule. And the
penalty, O brethren, the penalty was to my soul! According to the
degrees of omission, my soul went to one of the heavens--Indra's the
lowest, Brahma's the highest; or it was driven back to become the
life of a worm, a fly, a fish, or a brute. The reward for perfect
observance was Beatitude, or absorption into the being of Brahm,
which was not existence as much as absolute rest."

The Hindoo gave himself a moment's thought; proceeding, he said:
"The part of a Brahman's life called the first order is his student
life. When I was ready to enter the second order--that is to say,
when I was ready to marry and become a householder--I questioned
everything, even Brahm; I was a heretic. From the depths of the well
I had discovered a light above, and yearned to go up and see what
all it shone upon. At last--ah, with what years of toil!--I stood
in the perfect day, and beheld the principle of life, the element
of religion, the link between the soul and God--Love!"

The shrunken face of the good man kindled visibly, and he clasped
his hands with force. A silence ensued, during which the others
looked at him, the Greek through tears. At length he resumed:

"The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is
willing to do for others. I could not rest. Brahm had filled
the world with so much wretchedness. The Sudra appealed to me,
so did the countless devotees and victims. The island of Ganga
Lagor lies where the sacred waters of the Ganges disappear in
the Indian Ocean. Thither I betook myself. In the shade of the
temple built there to the sage Kapila, in a union of prayers
with the disciples whom the sanctified memory of the holy man
keeps around his house, I thought to find rest. But twice every
year came pilgrimages of Hindoos seeking the purification of the
waters. Their misery strengthened my love. Against its impulse to
speak I clenched my jaws; for one word against Brahm or the Triad
or the Shastras would doom me; one act of kindness to the outcast
Brahmans who now and then dragged themselves to die on the burning
sands--a blessing said, a cup of water given--and I became one of them,
lost to family, country, privileges, caste. The love conquered! I
spoke to the disciples in the temple; they drove me out. I spoke
to the pilgrims; they stoned me from the island. On the highways
I attempted to preach; my hearers fled from me, or sought my life.
In all India, finally, there was not a place in which I could find
peace or safety--not even among the outcasts, for, though fallen,
they were still believers in Brahm. In my extremity, I looked for
a solitude in which to hide from all but God. I followed the Ganges
to its source, far up in the Himalayas. When I entered the pass at
Hurdwar, where the river, in unstained purity, leaps to its course
through the muddy lowlands, I prayed for my race, and thought myself
lost to them forever. Through gorges, over cliffs, across glaciers,
by peaks that seemed star-high, I made my way to the Lang Tso, a
lake of marvellous beauty, asleep at the feet of the Tise Gangri,
the Gurla, and the Kailas Parbot, giants which flaunt their crowns
of snow everlastingly

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.


Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett

[System] You are a helpful assistant. You will be given a passage from a book. Read it carefully, then summarize it in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.

[User]
Context:

CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK ONE--HIS VOCATION.

THE LAST OF A SCHOOLBOY.

Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge,
in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport.  In that
neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of
the industrialism of the Five Towns.  To the east rose pitheads,
chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists.  To the
west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and
winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood
Hillport Church, a landmark.  Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by
it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient
Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin
Clayhanger was now walking home.  The fine and ancient Tory borough
provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless
ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district.  A hundred years
earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary
fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in
canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic.  Fifty years
earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the
greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five
miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere
conception of a railway.  And now, people are inquiring why the Five
Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a
perhaps excessive provincialism.  These interesting details have
everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have
everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand
souls in the Five Towns.  Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of
its sublime stupidity.

It was a breezy Friday in July 1872.  The canal, which ran north and
south, reflected a blue and white sky.  Towards the bridge, from the
north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards
the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping.
The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of
rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half.
Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse
floundered its best in the quagmire.  The honest endeavour of one of the
animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who
heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs.  The ragged
and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse's flanks with
the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the
unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge, stared
uninterested at the spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton.
He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his
mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters.  He had left school
that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a
willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the
advance guard of its problems bearing down on him.  Slim, gawky, untidy,
fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders
in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his
bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had
the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks
most boys of sixteen.  It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic,
that this naive, simple creature, with his straightforward and friendly
eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creature immaculate of
worldly experience, must soon be transformed into a man, wary,
incredulous, detracting.  Older eyes might have wept at the simplicity
of those eyes.

This picture of Edwin as a wistful innocent would have made Edwin laugh.
He had been seven years at school, and considered himself a hardened
sort of brute, free of illusions.  And he sometimes thought that he
could judge the world better than most neighbouring mortals.

"Hello!  The Sunday!" he murmured, without turning his eyes.

Another boy, a little younger and shorter, and clothed in a superior
untidiness, had somehow got on to the bridge, and was leaning with his
back against the parapet which supported Edwin's elbows.  His eyes were
franker and simpler even than the eyes of Edwin, and his lips seemed to
be permanently parted in a good-humoured smile.  His name was Charlie
Orgreave, but at school he was invariably called "the Sunday"--not
"Sunday," but "the Sunday"--and nobody could authoritatively explain how
he had come by the nickname.  Its origin was lost in the prehistoric
ages of his childhood.  He and Edwin had been chums for several years.
They had not sworn fearful oaths of loyalty; they did not constitute a
secret society; they had not even pricked forearms and written certain
words in blood; for these rites are only performed at Harrow, and
possibly at the Oldcastle High School, which imitates Harrow.  Their
fellowship meant chiefly that they spent a great deal of time together,
instinctively and unconsciously enjoying each other's mere presence, and
that in public arguments they always reinforced each other, whatever the
degree of intellectual dishonesty thereby necessitated.

"I'll bet you mine gets to the bridge first," said the Sunday.  With an
ingenious movement of the shoulders he arranged himself so that the
parapet should bear the weight of his satchel.

Edwin Clayhanger slowly turned round, and perceived that the object
which the Sunday had appropriated as "his" was the other canal-boat,
advancing from the south.

"Horse or boat?" asked Edwin.

"Boat's nose, of course," said the Sunday.

"Well," said Edwin, having surveyed the unconscious competitors, and
counting on the aid of the whipping child, "I don't mind laying you
five."

"That be damned for a tale!" protested the Sunday.  "We said we'd never
bet less than ten--you know that."

"Yes, but--" Edwin hesitatingly drawled.

"But what?"

"All right.  Ten," Edwin agreed.  "But it's not fair.  You've got a rare
start on me."

"Rats!" said the Sunday, with finality.  In the pronunciation of this
word the difference between his accent and Edwin's came out clear.  The
Sunday's accent was less local; there was a hint of a short "e" sound in
the "a," and a briskness about the consonants, that Edwin could never
have compassed.  The Sunday's accent was as carelessly superior as his
clothes.  Evidently the Sunday had some one at home who had not learnt
the art of speech in the Five Towns.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

He began to outline a scheme, in which perpendicular expectoration
figured, for accurately deciding the winner, and a complicated argument
might have ensued about this, had it not soon become apparent that
Edwin's boat was going to be handsomely beaten, despite the joyous
efforts of the little child.  The horse that would die but would not
give up, was only saved from total subsidence at every step by his
indomitable if aged spirit.  Edwin handed over the ten marbles even
before the other boat had arrived at the bridge.

"Here," he said.  "And you may as well have these, too," adding five
more to the ten, all he possessed.  They were not the paltry marble of
to-day, plaything of infants, but the majestic "rinker," black with
white spots, the king of marbles in an era when whole populations
practised the game.  Edwin looked at them half regretfully as they lay
in the Sunday's hands.  They seemed prodigious wealth in those hands,
and he felt somewhat as a condemned man might feel who bequeaths his
jewels on the scaffold.  Then there was a rattle, and a tumour grew out
larger on the Sunday's thigh.

The winning boat, long preceded by its horse, crawled under the bridge
and passed northwards to the sea, laden with crates of earthenware.  And
then the loser, with the little girl's father and mother and her
brothers and sisters, and her kitchen, drawing-room, and bedroom, and
her smoking chimney and her memories and all that was hers, in the stern
of it, slid beneath the boys' down-turned faces while the whip cracked
away beyond the bridge.  They could see, between the whitened
tarpaulins, that the deep belly of the craft was filled with clay.

"Where does that there clay come from?" asked Edwin.  For not merely was
he honestly struck by a sudden new curiosity, but it was meet for him to
behave like a man now, and to ask manly questions.

"Runcorn," said the Sunday scornfully.  "Can't you see it painted all
over the boat?"

"Why do they bring clay all the way from Runcorn?"

"They don't bring it from Runcorn.  They bring it from Cornwall.  It
comes round by sea--see?"  He laughed.

"Who told you?"  Edwin roughly demanded.

"Anybody knows that!" said the Sunday grandly, but always maintaining
his gay smile.

"Seems devilish funny to me," Edwin murmured, after reflection, "that
they should bring clay all that roundabout way just to make crocks of it
here.  Why should they choose just this place to make crocks in?  I
always understood--"

"Oh!  Come on!" the Sunday cut him short.  "It's blessed well one
o'clock and after!"

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

They climbed the long bank from the canal up to the Manor Farm, at which
high point their roads diverged, one path leading direct to Bleakridge
where Orgreave lived, and the other zigzagging down through neglected
pasturage into Bursley proper.  Usually they parted here without a word,
taking pride in such Spartan taciturnity, and they would doubtless have
done the same this morning also, though it were fifty-fold their last
walk together as two schoolboys.  But an incident intervened.

"Hold on!" cried the Sunday.

To the south of them, a mile and a half off, in the wreathing mist of
the Cauldon Bar Ironworks, there was a yellow gleam that even the
capricious sunlight could not kill, and then two rivers of fire sprang
from the gleam and ran in a thousand delicate and lovely hues down the
side of a mountain of refuse.  They were emptying a few tons of molten
slag at the Cauldon Bar Ironworks.  The two rivers hung slowly dying in
the mists of smoke.  They reddened and faded, and you thought they had
vanished, and you could see them yet, and then they escaped the baffled
eye, unless a cloud aided them for a moment against the sun; and their
ephemeral but enchanting beauty had expired for ever.

"Now!" said Edwin sharply.

"One minute ten seconds," said the Sunday, who had snatched out his
watch, an inestimable contrivance with a centre-seconds hand.  "By Jove!
That was a good 'un."

A moment later two smaller boys, both laden with satchels, appeared over
the brow from the canal.

"Let's wait a jiff," said the Sunday to Edwin, and as the smaller boys
showed no hurry he bawled out to them across the intervening
cinder-waste: "Run!"  They ran.  They were his younger brothers, Johnnie
and Jimmie.  "Take this and hook it!" he commanded, passing the strap of
his satchel over his head as they came up.  In fatalistic silence they
obeyed the smiling tyrant.

"What are you going to do?"  Edwin asked.

"I'm coming down your way a bit."

"But I thought you said you were peckish."

"I shall eat three slices of beef instead of my usual brace," said the
Sunday carelessly.

Edwin was touched.  And the Sunday was touched, because he knew he had
touched Edwin.  After all, this was a solemn occasion.  But neither
would overtly admit that its solemnity had affected him.  Hence, first
one and then the other began to skim stones with vicious force over the
surface of the largest of the three ponds that gave interest to the
Manor Farm.  When they had thus proved to themselves that the day
differed in no manner from any other breaking-up day, they went forward.

On their left were two pitheads whose double wheels revolved rapidly in
smooth silence, and the puffing engine-house and all the trucks and gear
of a large ironstone mine.  On their right was the astonishing farm,
with barns and ricks and cornfields complete, seemingly quite unaware of
its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture.  In front, on a
little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red
architecture of Bursley--tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the
new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of
the evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexions, and
the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber
chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the
whole.  The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all
netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the
chill blues of the chequered sky.  Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.

The boys descended without a word through the brick-strewn pastures,
where a horse or two cropped the short grass.  At the railway bridge,
which carried a branch mineral line over the path, they exchanged a
brief volley of words with the working-lads who always played
pitch-and-toss there in the dinner-hour; and the Sunday added to the
collection of shawds and stones lodged on the under ledges of the low
iron girders.  A strange boy, he had sworn to put ten thousand stones on
those ledges before he died, or perish in the attempt.  Hence Edwin
sometimes called him "Old Perish-in-the-attempt."  A little farther on
the open gates of a manufactory disclosed six men playing the noble game
of rinkers on a smooth patch of ground near the weighing machine.  These
six men were Messieurs Ford, Carter, and Udall, the three partners
owning the works, and three of their employees.  They were celebrated
marble-players, and the boys stayed to watch them as, bending with one
knee almost touching the earth, they shot the rinkers from their stubby
thumbs with a canon-like force and precision that no boy could ever hope
to equal.  "By gum!" mumbled Edwin involuntarily, when an impossible
shot was accomplished; and the bearded shooter, pleased by this tribute
from youth, twisted his white apron into a still narrower ring round his
waist.  Yet Edwin was not thinking about the game.  He was thinking
about a battle that lay before him, and how he would be weakened in the
fight by the fact that in the last school examination, Charlie Orgreave,
younger than himself by a year, had ousted him from the second place in
the school.  The report in his pocket said: "Position in class next
term: third;" whereas he had been second since the beginning of the
year.  There would of course be no "next term" for him, but the report
remained.  A youth who has come to grips with that powerful enemy, his
father, cannot afford to be handicapped by even such a trifle as a
report entirely irrelevant to the struggle.

Suddenly Charlie Orgreave gave a curt nod, and departed, in nonchalant
good-humour, doubtless considering that to accompany his chum any
farther would be to be guilty of girlish sentimentality.  And Edwin
nodded with equal curtness and made off slowly into the maze of Bursley.
The thought in his heart was: "I'm on my own, now.  I've got to face it
now, by myself."  And he felt that not merely his father, but the
leagued universe, was against him.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TWO.

THE FLAME.

The various agencies which society has placed at the disposal of a
parent had been at work on Edwin in one way or another for at least a
decade, in order to equip him for just this very day when he should step
into the world.  The moment must therefore be regarded as dramatic, the
first crucial moment of an experiment long and elaborately prepared.
Knowledge was admittedly the armour and the weapon of one about to try
conclusions with the world, and many people for many years had been
engaged in providing Edwin with knowledge.  He had received, in fact, "a
good education"--or even, as some said, "a thoroughly sound education;"
assuredly as complete an equipment of knowledge as could be obtained in
the county, for the curriculum of the Oldcastle High School was less in
accord with common sense than that of the Middle School.

He knew, however, nothing of natural history, and in particular of
himself, of the mechanism of the body and mind, through which his soul
had to express and fulfil itself.  Not one word of information about
either physiology or psychology had ever been breathed to him, nor had
it ever occurred to any one around him that such information was
needful.  And as no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries which
he carried about with him inside that fair skin of his, so no one had
tried to explain to him the mysteries by which he was hemmed in, either
mystically through religion, or rationally through philosophy.  Never in
chapel or at Sunday school had a difficulty been genuinely faced.  And
as for philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant.
He imagined that a philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job,
and he had never heard the word used in any other sense.  He had great
potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought to stimulate it
by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been
trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries.  Of
physical science he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion
to the effect that gravity was a force which drew things towards the
centre of the earth.  In the matter of chemistry it had been practically
demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this
grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium may be relied upon to fizz
flamingly about on a surface of water.  Of geology he was perfectly
ignorant, though he lived in a district whose whole livelihood depended
on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though the existence
of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth's crust which
geologists call a "fault."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Geography had been one of his strong points.  He was aware of the rivers
of Asia in their order, and of the principal products of Uruguay; and he
could name the capitals of nearly all the United States.  But he had
never been instructed for five minutes in the geography of his native
county, of which he knew neither the boundaries nor the rivers nor the
terrene characteristics.  He could have drawn a map of the Orinoco, but
he could not have found the Trent in a day's march; he did not even know
where his drinking-water came from.  That geographical considerations
are the cause of all history had never been hinted to him, nor that
history bears immediately upon modern life and bore on his own life.
For him history hung unsupported and unsupporting in the air.  In the
course of his school career he had several times approached the
nineteenth century, but it seemed to him that for administrative reasons
he was always being dragged back again to the Middle Ages.  Once his
form had "got" as far as the infancy of his own father, and concerning
this period he had learnt that "great dissatisfaction prevailed among
the labouring classes, who were led to believe by mischievous
demagogues," etcetera.  But the next term he was recoiling round Henry
the Eighth, who "was a skilful warrior and politician," but "unfortunate
in his domestic relations;" and so to Elizabeth, than whom "few
sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character comes out
unscathed after the closest examination."  History indeed resolved
itself into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily
grouped under the names of persons who had to be identified with the
assistance of numbers.  Neither of the development of national life, nor
of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not
inessential and anecdotic.  He could not remember the clauses of Magna
Charta, but he knew eternally that it was signed at a place amusingly
called Runnymede.  And the one fact engraved on his memory about the
battle of Waterloo was that it was fought on a Sunday.

And as he had acquired absolutely nothing about political economy or
about logic, and was therefore at the mercy of the first agreeable
sophistry that might take his fancy by storm, his unfitness to commence
the business of being a citizen almost reached perfection.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

For his personal enjoyment of the earth and air and sun and stars, and
of society and solitude, no preparation had been made, or dreamt of.
The sentiment of nature had never been encouraged in him, or even
mentioned.  He knew not how to look at a landscape nor at a sky.  Of
plants and trees he was as exquisitely ignorant as of astronomy.  It had
not occurred to him to wonder why the days are longer in summer, and he
vaguely supposed that the cold of winter was due to an increased
distance of the earth from the sun.  Still, he had learnt that Saturn
had a ring, and sometimes he unconsciously looked for it in the
firmament, as for a tea-tray.

Of art, and the arts, he had been taught nothing.  He had never seen a
great picture or statue, nor heard great orchestral or solo music; and
he had no idea that architecture was an art and emotional, though it
moved him in a very peculiar fashion.  Of the art of English literature,
or of any other literature, he had likewise been taught nothing.  But he
knew the meaning of a few obsolete words in a few plays of Shakespeare.
He had not learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but
through hard drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and
syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most
magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine.  This skill,
together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of
numbers and geometrical figures, was the most brilliant achievement of
his long apprenticeship.

And now his education was finished.  It had cost his father twenty-eight
shillings a term, or four guineas a year, and no trouble.  In younger
days his father had spent more money and far more personal attention on
the upbringing of a dog.  His father had enjoyed success with dogs
through treating them as individuals.  But it had not happened to him,
nor to anybody in authority, to treat Edwin as an individual.
Nevertheless it must not be assumed that Edwin's father was a callous
and conscienceless brute, and Edwin a martyr of neglect.  Old Clayhanger
was, on the contrary, an average upright and respectable parent who had
given his son a thoroughly sound education, and Edwin had had the good
fortune to receive that thoroughly sound education, as a preliminary to
entering the world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

He was very far from realising the imperfections of his equipment for
the grand entry; but still he was not without uneasiness.  In particular
the conversation incident to the canal-boat wager was disturbing him.
It amazed him, as he reflected, that he should have remained, to such an
advanced age, in a state of ignorance concerning the origin of the clay
from which the crocks of his native district were manufactured.  That
the Sunday should have been able to inform him did not cause him any
shame, for he guessed from the peculiar eager tone of voice in which the
facts had been delivered, that the Sunday was merely retailing some
knowledge recently acquired by chance.  He knew all the Sunday's tones
of voice; and he also was well aware that the Sunday's brain was not on
the whole better stored than his own.  Further, the Sunday was satisfied
with his bit of accidental knowledge.  Edwin was not.  Edwin wanted to
know why, if the clay for making earthenware was not got in the Five
Towns, the Five Towns had become the great seat of the manufacture.  Why
were not pots made in the South, where the clay came from?  He could not
think of any answer to this enigma, nor of any means of arriving by
himself at an answer.  The feeling was that he ought to have been able
to arrive at the answer as at the answer to an equation.

He did not definitely blame his education; he did not think clearly
about the thing at all.  But, as a woman with a vague discomfort dimly
fears cancer, so he dimly feared that there might be something
fundamentally unsound in this sound education of his.  And he had
remorse for all the shirking that he had been guilty of during all his
years at school.  He shook his head solemnly at the immense and nearly
universal shirking that continually went on.  He could only acquit three
or four boys, among the hundreds he had known, of the shameful sin.  And
all that he could say in favour of himself was that there were many
worse than Edwin Clayhanger.  Not merely the boys, but the masters, were
sinners.  Only two masters could he unreservedly respect as having acted
conscientiously up to their pretensions, and one of these was an
unpleasant brute.  All the cleverness, the ingenuities, the fakes, the
insincerities, the incapacitaties, the vanities, and the dishonesties of
the rest stood revealed to him, and he judged them by the mere essential
force of character alone.  A schoolmaster might as well attempt to
deceive God as a boy who is watching him every day with the inhuman eye
of youth.

"All this must end now!" he said to himself, meaning all that could be
included in the word "shirk."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

He was splendidly serious.  He was as splendidly serious as a reformer.
By a single urgent act of thought he would have made himself a man, and
changed imperfection into perfection.  He desired--and there was real
passion in his desire--to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his
best, in living according to his conscience.  He did not know of what he
was capable, nor what he could achieve.  Achievement was not the matter
of his desire; but endeavour, honest and terrific endeavour.  He
admitted to himself his shortcomings, and he did not under-estimate the
difficulties that lay before him; but he said, thinking of his father:
"Surely he'll see I mean business!  Surely he's bound to give in when he
sees how much in earnest I am!"  He was convinced, almost, that
passionate faith could move mountainous fathers.

"I'll show 'em!" he muttered.

And he meant that he would show the world...  He was honouring the
world; he was paying the finest homage to it.  In that head of his a
flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful
phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful
over the whole earth.  Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame?  After
years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and
the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden,
unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon.  It bursts forth
out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not
possibly have fed it.  There is little to encourage it.  The very
architecture of the streets shows that environment has done naught for
it: ragged brickwork, walls finished anyhow with saggars and slag;
narrow uneven alleys leading to higgledy-piggledy workshops and kilns;
cottages transformed into factories and factories into cottages,
clumsily, hastily, because nothing matters so long as "it will do;"
everywhere something forced to fulfil, badly, the function of something
else; in brief, the reign of the slovenly makeshift, shameless, filthy,
and picturesque.  Edwin himself seemed no tabernacle for that singular
flame.  He was not merely untidy and dirty--at his age such defects
might have excited in a sane observer uneasiness by their absence; but
his gestures and his gait were untidy.  He did not mind how he walked.
All his sprawling limbs were saying: "What does it matter, so long as we
get there?"  The angle of the slatternly bag across his shoulders was an
insult to the flame.  And yet the flame burned with serene and terrible
pureness.

It was surprising that no one saw it passing along the mean, black,
smoke-palled streets that huddle about Saint Luke's Church.  Sundry
experienced and fat old women were standing or sitting at their cottage
doors, one or two smoking cutties.  But even they, who in child-bed and
at gravesides had been at the very core of life for long years, they,
who saw more than most, could only see a fresh lad passing along, with
fair hair and a clear complexion, and gawky knees and elbows, a fierce,
rapt expression on his straightforward, good-natured face.  Some knew
that it was "Clayhanger's lad," a nice-behaved young gentleman, and the
spitten image of his poor mother.  They all knew what a lad is--the feel
of his young skin under his "duds," the capricious freedom of his
movements, his sudden madnesses and shoutings and tendernesses, and the
exceeding power of his unconscious wistful charm.  They could divine all
that in a glance.  But they could not see the mysterious and holy flame
of the desire for self-perfection blazing within that tousled head.  And
if Edwin had suspected that anybody could indeed perceive it, he would
have whipped it out for shame, though the repudiation had meant
everlasting death.  Such is youth in the Five Towns, if not elsewhere.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER THREE.

ENTRY INTO THE WORLD.

Edwin came steeply out of the cinder-strewn back streets by Woodisun
Bank [hill] into Duck Square, nearly at the junction of Trafalgar Road
and Wedgwood Street.  A few yards down Woodisun Bank, cocks and hens
were scurrying, with necks horizontal, from all quarters, and were even
flying, to the call of a little old woman who threw grain from the top
step of her porch.  On the level of the narrow pavement stood an immense
constable, clad in white trousers, with a gun under his arm for the
killing of mad dogs; he was talking to the woman, and their two heads
were exactly at the same height.  On a pair of small double gates near
the old woman's cottage were painted the words, "Steam Printing Works.
No admittance except on business."  And from as far as Duck Square could
be heard the puff-puff which proved the use of steam in this works to
which idlers and mere pleasure-seekers were forbidden access.

Duck Square was one of the oldest, if the least imposing, of all the
public places in Bursley.  It had no traffic across it, being only a
sloping rectangle, like a vacant lot, with Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood
Street for its exterior sides, and no outlet on its inner sides.  The
buildings on those inner sides were low and humble and, as it were,
withdrawn from the world, the chief of them being the ancient Duck Inn,
where the hand-bell ringers used to meet.  But Duck Square looked out
upon the very birth of Trafalgar Road, that wide, straight thoroughfare,
whose name dates it, which had been invented, in the lifetime of a few
then living, to unite Bursley with Hanbridge.  It also looked out upon
the birth of several old pack-horse roads which Trafalgar Road had
supplanted.  One of these was Woodisun Bank, that wound slowly up hill
and down dale, apparently always choosing the longest and hardest route,
to Hanbridge; and another was Aboukir Street, formerly known as Warm
Lane, that reached Hanbridge in a manner equally difficult and
unhurried.  At the junction of Trafalgar Road and Aboukir Street stood
the Dragon Hotel, once the great posting-house of the town, from which
all roads started.  Duck Square had watched coaches and waggons stop at
and start from the Dragon Hotel for hundreds of years.  It had seen the
Dragon rebuilt in brick and stone, with fine bay windows on each storey,
in early Georgian times, and it had seen even the new structure become
old and assume the dignity of age.  Duck Square could remember strings
of pack-mules driven by women, `trapesing' in zigzags down Woodisun Bank
and Warm Lane, and occasionally falling, with awful smashes of the
crockery they carried, in the deep, slippery, scarce passable mire of
the first slants into the valley.  Duck Square had witnessed the slow
declension of these roads into mere streets, and slum streets at that,
and the death of all mules, and the disappearance of all coaches and all
neighing and prancing and whipcracking romance; while Trafalgar Road,
simply because it was straight and broad and easily graded, flourished
with toll-bars and a couple of pair-horsed trams that ran on lines.  And
many people were proud of those cushioned trams; but perhaps they had
never known that coach-drivers used to tell each other about the state
of the turn at the bottom of Warm Lane (since absurdly renamed in honour
of an Egyptian battle), and that Woodisun Bank (now unnoticed save by
doubtful characters, policemen, and schoolboys) was once regularly
`taken' by four horses at a canter.  The history of human manners is
crunched and embedded in the very macadam of that part of the borough,
and the burgesses unheedingly tread it down every day and talk gloomily
about the ugly smoky prose of industrial manufacture.  And yet the
Dragon Hotel, safely surviving all revolutions by the mighty virtue and
attraction of ale, stands before them to remind them of the
interestingness of existence.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

At the southern corner of Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street, with Duck
Square facing it, the Dragon Hotel and Warm Lane to its right, and
Woodisun Bank creeping inconspicuously down to its left, stood a
three-storey building consisting of house and shop, the frontage being
in Wedgwood Street.  Over the double-windowed shop was a discreet
signboard in gilt letters, "D.  Clayhanger, Printer and Stationer," but
above the first floor was a later and much larger sign, with the single
word, "Steam-printing."  All the brickwork of the facade was painted
yellow, and had obviously been painted yellow many times; the woodwork
of the plate-glass windows was a very dark green approaching black.  The
upper windows were stumpy, almost square, some dirty and some clean and
curtained, with prominent sills and architraves.  The line of the
projecting spouting at the base of the roof was slightly curved through
subsidence; at either end of the roof-ridge rose twin chimneys each with
three salmon- chimney-pots.  The gigantic word `Steam-printing'
could be seen from the windows of the Dragon, from the porch of the big
Wesleyan chapel higher up the <DW72>, from the Conservative Club and the
playground at the top of the <DW72>; and as for Duck Square itself, it
could see little else.  The left-hand shop window was alluringly set out
with the lighter apparatus of writing and reading, and showed
incidentally several rosy pictures of ideal English maidens; that to the
right

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.