May 29th, 1928
THE Day of Doom has come, and I feel proud to belong to the human race, which, as far as I can see, is going about its trivial businesses as usual, though within a few hours some cosmic cataclysm is to overwhelm it. We have had eloquent lecturers here who have spoken to crowded audiences about what is so soon to happen, and we have gone home afterwards feeling terribly unsettled, but now, when the clock has already emitted that tearing whirr which precedes the catastrophic hour, we are behaving with a laudable tranquillity. Habit asserts itself : we have breakfasted as usual, and I sit out in my garden, so soon to be scorched to a cinder or drowned below the fathomless wave of the sea, and watch, in the intervals of composition, my tawny cat vainly endeavouring to catch a starling. If the starling only knew what these gentlemen have assured us must happen in an hour or two, it would probably let itself be caught and be done with the bitterness of death, and, if my cat only knew, it would not think it worth while to hide in the strawberry bed. But ignorance is bliss, and both cat and starling seem to be enjoying the ultimate hour.
The beginning of things, as we all know, was when the Great Pyramid was a-building. Whenever that was (pundits differ in the matter of half a dozen centuries), there was nothing nebulous about the prophetic insight of the builders. They were aware (so I have learned from these lecturers) that on May nth, nineteen hundred and twenty-eight years after the commencement of the Christian Era still centuries ahead, a cosmic disaster would occur, and with devilish ingenuity they recorded their prescience by making the base of the Great Pyramid exactly so many inches long. They had then done all that -could possibly be expected of them, and were gathered to their fathers knowing that, after the lapse of an inconceivable number of centuries, certain learned Egyptologists would measure the base of the Great Pyramid, and instantly perceive that the builders had made it x inches long (not x+1 inches, or x -1 inches) in order to show that the world would practically come to an end this morning. What could be plainer ? True, there was some slight inaccuracy in the first measurements of these clairvoyant Egyptologists, on which the prophecy was based, but that was easily remedied by the discovery that the builders had worked in pyramidal inches, one thousand pyramidal inches being equivalent to one thousand and one English inches, and thus the date was
correct. Also the discovery of the existence of pyramidal inches was surely very interesting.
So far all these interpreters of pyraMidal prophecy were agreed, but at this point slight divergences of view occurred as to what the disaster (now imminent) was to be. The Great Pyramid, as we all know, has something to do with the fact that the Anglo-Saxon races are the Lost Tribes, and therefore the prophecies of the Book of Daniel closely concern them. Daniel's remarks therefore about a time and times and half a time, together with the more accurate enumeration of a thousand two hundred and ninety days (Daniel xii. 11), clearly refer to the same date as that disclosed by the length of the Great Pyramid, and both point to the Battle of Armageddon. Sometime to-day therefore we may expect news that the Battle of Aimageddon is in progress. As usual, the War Office, which. I have just rung up, knows nothing about it ; we have evidently learned nothing from our experiences in August, 1914. . . . Or, again, even if Armageddon fails to appear at the post, the Great Pyramid builders will be amply justified by the enormous tidal wave which will shortly overwhelm the whole of the South of England. Again, many thoughtful citizens in the United States of America believe that before evening there will be a huge rising of all the Jews in the world, and that the builder of the Great Pyramid prophesied just this with no uncertain voice.
So one way or another the Doom is upon us. And yet are even the most fervent among those gentlemen who have been warning us so solemnly, and have produced such crystal-clear statistics to prove their case, absolutely co– nvinced that it is all up ? One was here. a few days ago ; his discourse overwhelmed me with regrets at the thought of all the time I had wasted, and all the work that I had contemplated and must now leave undone, and all the pleasures which I had hoped to enjoy. But afterwards I crawled out from under the harrow, and we talked calmly, and even cheerfully, about a hundred little interests, which even under the shadow of the impending Doom had still a faint sparkle. After dinner (we made a feint of dining) he told me that he was off to Norway in July for a month's fishing.. .
E. F. BENSON.
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