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I can conceive may God avert the omen! centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires a world- spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web; and smiting from thence everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II. were but clumsy and impotent.
Such a pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for a Grecian city; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the planet became known. Yes; but if not of the earth, yet of mortality; for earth's tenant, Jerusalem, had now become the omphalos and absolute centre. Yet how?
Let those who would cling to the idea of an individual man, born in a city called "Bethlehem" as the saviour of the world, remember that even so, the city derived its name from the word, "bethel," meaning a pure white stone, rounded at the top, in exact imitation of the omphalos of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi.
In the end we shall find that the whole world organizes about its centre of Faith. Thus, under three different religious systems, Jerusalem, Delphi, and Mecca were held to be each in its turn the omphalos or navel of the world. It follows inevitably that the main movement of the world must always be joyous and hopeful.
Cornelia saw half-naked Numidian footmen thrusting back the crowd that bustled in the Omphalos the great square where the two highroads met. Behind them pushed a squadron of light cavalry in silvered armour and splendid purple and scarlet uniforms.
A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms. To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos. Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at night. Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I'm quite frank with you. What have you against me now?
Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one. Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin. Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten.
For instance, Adam would certainly possess hair and teeth and bones in a condition which it must have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was created full-grown yesterday. He would certainly though Sir Thomas Browne denied it display an 'omphalos', yet no umbilical cord had ever attached him to a mother.
The workmen were still finishing the outside when we arrived, and in that connection I recall a little incident which exhibits my Father's morbid delicacy of conscience. He was accustomed in his brighter moments and this was before the publication of his 'Omphalos' occasionally to sing loud Dorsetshire songs of his early days, in a strange, broad Wessex lingo that I loved.
From which omphalos or hub of the universe he will direct his shining team even to the far Hesperides of Richmond or of Windsor. Both iron road and level highway are shunned by the rural Pan, who chooses rather to foot it along the sheep track on the limitless downs or the thwart-leading footpath through copse and spinney, not without pleasant fellowship with feather and fir.
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