“Methinks the sun grows hot,” said Media, retreating deeper under the canopy. “Ho! Vee-Vee; have you no cooling beverage? none of that golden wine distilled from torrid grapes, and then sent northward to be cellared in an iceberg? That wine was placed among our stores. Search, search the crypt, little Vee-Vee! Ha, I see it!—that yellow gourd!—Come: drag it forth, my boy. Let’s have the amber cups: so: pass them round;—fill all! Taji! my demi-god, up heart! Old Mohi, my babe, may you live ten thousand centuries! Ah! this way you mortals have of dying out at three score years and ten, is but a craven habit. So, Babbalanja! may you never die. Yoomy! my sweet poet, may you live to sing to me in Paradise. Ha, ha! would that we floated in this glorious stuff, instead of this pestilent brine.—Hark ye! were I to make a Mardi now, I’d have every continent a huge haunch of venison; every ocean a wine-vat! I’d stock every cavern with choice old spirits, and make three surplus suns to ripen the grapes all the year round. Let’s drink to that!—Brimmers! So: may the next Mardi that’s made, be one entire grape; and mine the squeezing!”
“Look, look! my lord,” cried Yoomy, “what a glorious shore we pass.”
Sallying out into the high golden noon, with golden-beaming goblets suspended, we gazed.
“This must be Kolumbo of the south,” said Mohi.
It was a long, hazy reach of land; piled up in terraces, traced here and there with rushing streams, that worked up gold dust alluvian, and seemed to flash over pebbled diamonds. Heliotropes, sun-flowers, marigolds gemmed, or starred the violet meads, and vassal-like, still sunward bowed their heads. The rocks were pierced with grottoes, blazing with crystals, many-tinted.
It was a land of mints and mines; its east a ruby; west a topaz. Inland, the woodlands stretched an ocean, bottomless with foliage; its green surges bursting through cable-vines; like Xerxes’ brittle chains which vainly sought to bind the Hellespont. Hence flowed a tide of forest sounds; of parrots, paroquets, macaws; blent with the howl of jaguars, hissing of anacondas, chattering of apes, and herons screaming.
Out from those depths up rose a stream.
The land lay basking in the world’s round torrid brisket, hot with solar fire.
“No need here to land,” cried Yoomy, “Yillah lurks not here.”
“Heat breeds life, and sloth, and rage,” said Babbalanja. “Here live bastard tribes and mongrel nations; wrangling and murdering to prove their freedom.—Refill, my lord.”