The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician

by Edwin Lester Arnold

When that silvery dawn came it brought no relief or respite, for the laws of the Druids, which enjoined slow and deliberate judgments, forbade the altering of a sentence once pronounced. It was as fine a day as could be wished for their infernal ceremonial, with the mellow autumn mist lying wide and flat along the endless vistas of oak and hazel that then hid almost all the valleys, and over the mist the golden rays of the sun spread far and near, kissing with crimson radiance the green knobs of upland that shone above that pearly ocean, and shining on the bare summits of the lonely grass hills around us, and gleaming in rosy brilliancy upon the sea that flashed and sparkled in gray and gold between the downs to the southward. Here in this fairy realm, while the thickets were still beaded with the million jewels of the morning, and the earth breathed of repose and peace, they carried out that detestable orgie of which I was the center.

My memory is a little hazy. Perhaps, at the time, I was thinking of other things—a red-haired girl, for instance, playing with her little ones outside her porch in a distant glen; my shekels of brass and tin and silver; my kine, my dogs, and my horses, mayhap; such things will be—and thus I know little of how it came. But presently I was on the fatal spot.

A wide circle of green grass, kept short and close, in the heart of a dense thicket of oak. Round this circle a ring of great stone columns, crowned by mighty slabs of the same kind, and hung, to-day, with all the skins and robes and weapons of the assembled tribesmen; so that the mighty enclosure was a rude amphitheater, walled by the wealth of the spectators, and in the center an oblong rock, some eight feet long, with a gutter down it for the blood to run into a pit at its feet. This was the fatal slip from which the Druids launched that poor vessel, the soul, upon the endless ocean of eternity.

All round the great circle, when its presence and significance suddenly burst upon me, were the British, to the number of many hundreds, squatting on the ground in the front rows, or standing behind against the gray pillars, an uncouth ring of motley barbarians, shaggy with wolf and bear skins, gleaming in brass and golden links that glistened in the morning light against the naked limbs and shoulders, traced and pictured in blue woad with a hundred designs of war and woodcraft.

They forced me and two other miserable wretches to the altar, and then, while our guards stood by us, and the mounted men clustered among the monoliths behind, a deadly silence fell upon the assembly. It was so still we could hear the beat of our own hearts, and so intolerable that one of us three fell forward in a swoon ere it had lasted many minutes. The din of battle was like the murmur of a pleasant brook before that expectant hush; and when the white procession of executioners came chanting up the farther avenue of stones, into the arena, I breathed again, as though it was a nuptial procession, and they were bringing me a bride less grim than the golden adze which shone at their head.

They sang round the circle their mystic song, and then halted before the rude stone altar. Mixing up religion and justice, as was their wont, the chief Druid recited the crimes of the two culprits beside me, with their punishment, and immediately the first one, tightly bound, was pitched upon the stone altar; and while the Druids chanted their hymns to Baal the assembled multitude joined in, and, clanging their shields in an infernal tumult which effectually drowned his yells for mercy, the sacred adze fell, and first his head, and then his body, rolled into the hollow, while twenty little streams of crimson blood trickled down the sides of the altar stone. The next one was treated in the same way, and tumbled off into the hollow below, and I was hoisted up to that reeking slab.

While they arranged me, that black priest stole up and hissed in my ear: “Is it of Blodwen you think when you shut your eyes? Take this, then, for your final comfort,” he said, with a malicious leer—“I, even I, the despised and thwarted, will see to Blodwen, and answer for her happiness. Ah!—you writhe—I thought that would interest you. Let your last thought, accursed stranger, be I and she: let your last conception be my near revenge! Villain! I spit upon and deride you!” And he was as good as his word, glowering down upon me, helpless, with insatiate rage and hatred in his eyes, and then, stepping back, signed to the executioner.

I heard the wild hymn to their savage gods go ringing up again through the green leaves of the oaks; I heard the clatter of the weapons upon the round, brass-bound targets, the voices of the priests, and the cry of a startled kite circling in the pleasant autumn mist overhead. I saw the great crescent of the sacred golden adze swing into the sky, and then, while it was just checking to the fall which should extinguish me, there came a hush upon the people, followed by a wild shout of fear and anger, and I turned my head half over as I lay, bound, upon the stone.

I saw the British multitude seethe in confusion, and then burst and fly, like the foam strands before the wind, as, out of the green thickets, at the run, their cold, brave faces all emotionless over their long brass shields, came rank upon rank of Roman legionaries. I saw Sempronius, on his white charger, at their head, glittering in brass and scarlet, and, finding my tongue in my extremity, “Sempronius!” I yelled, “Sempronius to the rescue!” But too late!

With a wavering, aimless fall, the adze descended between my neck and my shoulder, the black curtain of dissolution fell over the painted picture of the world, there was a noise of a thousand rivers tumbling into a bottomless cavern, and I expired.