On from orb to orb of night,
Shedding our creative light;
Whilst our mortal worshippers
Watch from world to universe.
Free my spirit from afar,
Thou my love’s own avatar!
I was bewildered by the strange medley of love and religion and mysticism. Sneekape saw the perplexity in my eyes, and with a gross laugh tore the kite of love to pieces and flung them into the sea. He expressed the greatest contempt for such feeble mystifications of the delights of the senses. I confessed that I had not much sympathy or admiration for such performances; they were, like buffoonery and wit, a mere trick of the mind; it was generally lame thought that needed such rhyme and verses as crutches; learn the hobbling gait early enough, and you could go on to infinity. It was not at his contempt, then, that I felt disgusted; it was perhaps at the petty sneer that accompanied its expression.
In order to cast out the loathing, I began to wonder whence the missive came. I looked back, and right above us loomed a great hill crowned with a massive building, and up to the gigantic porch climbed innumerable flights of steps cut into the living rock. Scattered over the balustrades and niches and recesses that ornamented the upward course of the stair stood or sat many beings fantastically dressed and looking up either to the sky or to the edifice that broke the azure. Some were floating what seemed paper kites; others were watching their flight, as they rushed before the wind or fell like falling stars into the sea or behind the hill, or vanished into the blue distance. I knew then whence had come the amatory lyric that had butterflied into our canoe.
It was the marvellous ascension of the steps that struck me most. They seemed to dwarf by their broad spacing and their number the enormous building that crowned the height up which they clambered. How puny seemed the men and women that moved about their upper flights. I could see that they were human beings; but that was all. Even half-way up it seemed a lark’s flight into the blue. It wearied the imagination to count the gradings between; still more to think of the ascent, or the long years that must have passed in chiselling out this daring work of ambition.
The lowest flight had its knees in the ocean, and as we approached we could see the verdant sea-hair float and fall across the rising wave or shimmer in the ripple. For a hundred steps or more the sea in its tides or its passions claimed dominance and left the record of its conquests. We moored our canoe between two pillars cut in the rock, and attempted to ascend. But it was a work of extreme difficulty and danger. Each step had been smoothed into a slope by the feet of ages of climbers and by the action of the waters; and the lubricant green, wherewith the waves velveted them, made footing almost impossible. We slid and tumbled back into the sea a dozen times, and each time we made effort to scale the flight it became harder from the growing burden of water in our clothes. At last one of the native climbers farther up indicated the sides of the steps, where they were but roughly cut out of the rock. Swimming along to the right side, we found there was almost the sierraed roughness of nature. We could just catch some of the sharp points, and, by means of these, and at first almost prostrate, we hauled ourselves over the sleek garden of the tide. Then, finding the weed less silken and the rock less jagged, we crept on our knees up many steps; and when we looked back we saw traces of our own blood upon them. Then we looked into the notched rock before us and saw the dark bloodmark of generations that had gone before us stained deep into its texture. This lower portion of the marvellous staircase was indeed hieroglyphed and pictured with human lifeblood.