There is a rustle of the little creatures back of the deputation. And in the circle before the angel the dog is wagging his tail, and the horse throwing up his head. But silence.
"I take it there is something on all your minds, so! Well, let you speak up, now, and let me hear what it is. It isn't the weather: that's elegant. And it can't be the crops. I was talking to the Angel of the Crops last night, and devil a better season has he seen since the night of the big wind."
He gets no answer.
"It's queer and shy you 've got all of a sudden. And why should you be shy with me? Sure there 's never anything come between us since I was put over you. And have n't I always been your friend? Let one of you speak up, now. How about yourself?" He turns to the lion. "The king of beasts, they call you. Let you be speaking, now, for the crowd."
All around us now is the occult night of Egypt. Live sand and the little wind among the hillocks, and back of us the antique Nile. Here first was magic. And here first the half-gods were worshiped under the guise of beasts; of the cat and of the crocodile, and of others. And here is the monument of the half-god, the Sphinx, that is woman and animal, beauty and terror.
And as we listen, the beasts speak, and to our human mechanics the deep vibrations are translated into human sounds, and the voice of the lion is as the voice of some great one of our race speaking in anger. And in the deep rumble we can hear thunder:
"In the place where I live by the great lake there is lately come a man." So the lion! "He is a trading man. His legs are bandy. He is rarely shaven. In the morning his eyes are bleary. He blinks at the green light of dawn.
"And in the green glade where he is come he has builded a house. He has littered the ground with mangled boughs of trees, with papers, with tin cans which are emptied of his food. And the winds cannot clean that place, nor the rains wash the obscenity away.
"And all day long this man sits behind his counter in the little shop and barters with the black man, giving knives and beads and cloth for the skins of the animals whom it is allotted to the black man to kill. And giving him white man's liquor.
"And the white man drinks his own liquor, and when his heart is high with it, he takes his rifle and comes to seek me—for he has to seek me; I and all the clean things of the land avoid him, so little kin is he to us.