"Flora! Dea maxima! Solis filia! Give us joy; give us joy!"
The trail of roses had been broken off. Flora had been found.
But another roar went up, here and there from the great body there were cries of protest and disappointment: the voice of looters and brawlers that had been deprived of sacrificial blood. There were hisses, shouts of derision and cries to the populace to press on.
But the flamens stopped; the great concourse halted by rank and rank until the slackening and final cessation of movement imprisoned the dissenters that were resolved to go on. The main body continued its greetings to the goddess, above the cry of the dissatisfied.
At the far side of the open was a tiny squat temple, hardly more than a shrine, to Rannu, the Egyptian goddess of the harvests. On the top of the cornice with the blush lights of the City of Love upon her, stood a girl. Thus lifted into the night sky, her features could not be distinguished, and Marsyas believed that she was mummied, face and figure, in wrappings.
He continued to press forward. The small figure on the summit of the Temple stirred, turned half about and slowly raised her arms with a motion that seemed half-command, half-salute to the great expectant crowd below.
Then wing-like mists, taking into themselves the sunset flush of the fires of the City of Love, rose up and fluttered about her. Long, flaming, melon-colored tongues licked in and out of the illusion: distended convolutions of tissue tinged with rose floated and drifted above her, beside her, before her; shivering streamers of silver reached up and failed and dissolved; jagged streaks and reduplications of fiery jets stood out and up and all about her. When the clouds of pearly vapor lifted and eddied about her head, girdled her with circles or framed her with rosy wheels, the center of all this motion was distinguishable only as a snow-white spindle that whirled with dizzy rapidity. And presently it was noted that the shape was losing the mummy form, that more and more the outlines of a beautiful body were blossoming out of the impearled mists: that petaline wings opened out, fold on fold, as a rose-bud would blow, and each successive disclosure gave the entranced vision a clearer image of the dancer at the heart. Ever the motion seemed slow and stately as do all great and graceful things maintaining splendid speed; ever the crimson light from the City of Love lent its illimitable range of shade to the motion of the mists.
Below the great multitude, with its face lifted to the midnight sky, passed from uproar into silence and from silence into thunders of applause. The immense voice was the voice of admiration, for the cooling hand of wonder pressed back the crowd's passion for a let to its reason. They forgot their disappointment, their bloodthirst, their hate of the Nazarenes, and stood to marvel that the goddess burned but was not consumed.
But Marsyas, patiently working his way forward, pressed by a tall black man who was saying over and over to himself in Hindu:
"It is the bayadere dance, for the glory of Brahma! A sacrilege!"