4i3 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Christian Era, when the Iranic Society had been split by an explosive
recrudescence of Shi'ism, and when the ensuing struggle between the
two fractions of this fissured body social had led an Ottoman Sunni
Iranic Muslim Power to conquer the sister Arabic Muslim Society. On
this showing, the Western Civilization in the twentieth century of the
Christian Era was apparently in the singular position of being the only
one among all the known representatives of the species, extinct or extant,
whose present state and future prospects might still be open questions.
While all the others were either certainly dead or almost certainly in
articulo mortis, the Western Society alone was possibly still in its growth-
phase.1

This uncanny uniqueness of the contemporary situation of the West
first struck the writer when he was putting on paper his original notes
for the last portion of this Study in the early months of A.D. 1929; and
the subject and title of the present Part were then immediately conjured
up in his mind by a sudden reminiscence of a passage in The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner. In his mind's eye he saw the picture of the stricken
ship becalmed on the boundless expanse of the South Seas, with the
crew prostrated by the torments of thirst; he saw the spectre bark shoot-
ing towards him from the horizon, on which the ribs of its skeleton hull
had shown up sinisterly black against the blood-red disk of a setting sun;
and, as the dreadful apparition drew near, he descried, on board, two
demonic figures, one of which was Death, while the other was still more
ghastly than her grim companion.

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks men's blood with cold.2

He saw Life-in-Death winning the throw of the dice in her game with
Death for the prize of the ship's crew; and his recollection of the poem
ran on to bring before his eyes a vision of the dying sailors giving up
the ghost one by one, till, on board the spellbound ship, the Ancient
Mariner is left alone alive with his dead companions lying around him.

The many men so beautiful!

And they all dead did He:

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on: and so did I.3

When these words in which Life-in-Death's legendary victim de-
scribes his thoughts and feelings were ringing in the present writer's ears
in A.D. 1929, he was conscious of a weird contrast between the Ancient
Mariner's agony in his loneliness and the complacency of a post-Modern
Western World whose own singular situation had evoked in the writer's
mind these echoes of Coleridge's poetry. At that date the prospects of
the Western Civilization appeared, on the whole, to be favourable. After

i See IV. iv. 38-39-

a Coleridge, S. T.: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part III, Stanza xi.

3 Ibid., Part IV, Stanza iv.