"With you, my brother, and with Zitu it rests, then," Croft said, and the two men struck palms as once on the day of their first meeting they had struck in friendship's pledge.
CHAPTER VIII
SCARLET BLOSSOMS
All Zitra was en fête. All morning men and women in gala attire, rich and poor and middle class, even the blue men and women of Mazzerian extraction, the serving class of Tamarizia where their parents had been slaves, had been thronging into that immense central square of the island city, whose pavement was a tessellated expanse of rock crystal white and gold.
Always Croft had marveled at the beauty of the imperial capitol since first he saw it. Himyra—the red-walled queen of Aphur, brooding on the banks of the yellow Na, he had thought a dream of Babylonian splendor when first he came to Palos. Himyra he would always love, because it was there he had first seen Naia outside its gates. But Zitra surpassed it in the point of artistic magnificence. Himyra was a city of red and white, of palaces, parks and terraces along the river, studded with shrubs and trees. Zitra was a city of white and silver and crystal and gold—a thing undreamable unless once seen—and even so more like the city of a dream.
About the square, where, on the morning of the third day after Croft had awakened from what he considered his final trip to earth, a huge platform had risen overnight, the populace ranged themselves, close packed. The scene was brilliant in a degree. From the tops of the structures facing the square, built mainly of the predominating white stone used in constructing the city, and even its walls, canopies and streamers of azure blue and scarlet had been stretched as a protection against the sun and its midday heat. They made of the square a temporary auditorium of enormous size, into which the people jostled with a babel of voices, a soft yet vast shuffling of feet. Only at one point was an opening in the billowing covering of the canopies left. There at high noon a ray of the sun would strike through and lie on the platform in the center of the square.
Soldiers of the Imperial Guard, in metal greaves, short-skirted tunics, and breast-plates, armed as in former days, not with rifles, but with short swords, spears, and shields, since this was a formal occasion, were stationed at the end of each street which entered the square, and admitted the crowds in orderly fashion, assigning each arriving group to their proper place in the vast temporary enclosure according to their caste.
By degrees the audience came to seem a thing divided into particolored segments, each composed of the caste for which it had been set aside. There were the blue packed masses of the Mazzerians, with their almost indigo skins scantily covered, a jostling sea of swarming, whispering flesh. There were the laborers in their tawny smocks, their hair cinctured by a golden or copper band, supporting the draped cloth which protected their necks in labor from the sun. And beyond them were the tradesmen with their women, taking on a still more brilliant appearance according to the dictates of taste which had clad them in various shades and colors.
And again, nearest the dais was a rippling band of color marking the noble caste—men and women of station and wealth. And here gorgeous might describe the play of colors, the flash and glint of jewels and costly metals, the stately waving of plumes, the flicker of stalwart limbs, of white arms and snowy breasts and shoulders, the iridescent shimmer of diaphanous gauze scarfs. These were the select of the Zitran population. Each gnuppa-drawn carriage that whirled up to the end of the streets disgorged its recumbent passengers from the couchlike seats on which they reclined as they rode, and then retired.