Nothing could be more astonishing. Instinctively we came to a full stop and gazed. And our companions, familiar with the spectacle, were arrested by the sudden apocalyptic flashing of light from the burnished building, as “of summer lightning on a dark night suddenly exposing unsuspected realms of fantastic and poetical suggestion.” (A line, Mr. Link, I found last night in a book by George Saintsbury.) But the suggestions here were overwhelmingly fantastic.
Imagine a swelling mound tapering to a narrow platform, itself created by the leveling art of the engineers, surmounted by a curiously heaped up succession of stories, which were buttressed below by extensions and porticoes, and frescoed or incrusted throughout by rude and hieratic ornamentation—an ornamentation that certainly had more lucidity than the confused medley of symbol and ideograph at Copán, but which had not yet freed itself from a mixture of extravagance and realism. Then finally imagine this executed in what seemed to be pure gold, and all glittering in a quick concentration of light. It was refulgent and it was unearthly. Below it spread the dull tawniness of an outreaching terracotta city.
“What have we come to?” faltered Goritz, who was transfixed by this new wonder.
“It might be called,” said Hopkins, “the Desire of All Nations; at least it would look that way to a thoroughbred anywhere inside of Christendom. I wonder how long that pile would stand on the principal street of the capitals of the world! The army, with fixed bayonets, shot guns, and dynamite bombs, couldn’t keep the gentlemen of America or the spend-thrifts of Europe from getting their hooks in somewhere. I think it must be the Casino; nothing short of Policy or Poker could keep up an establishment like that. Gold must be very cheap hereabouts, or else the people need a little free schooling as to the particular and pleasant uses it can be put to. Looks that way.”
“Ah,” spoke up the Professor. “Barter, primal conditions, prevail here, where a medium of exchange is hardly needed. Gold to these people is a color, an ornament. With it they have no more than without it, for every desire is satisfied, and the pride of possession or the sentiment of avarice is unknown. All are equally happy, and all are equally rich or poor. Gold has an interest to them because it pleases the eye, and it is here dedicated to personal or religious distinctions, but as wealth, in our sense, it has no value. These flocks, these acres of grain and fruits, mean subsistence, but GOLD is something to look at—simply. Its name here has probably no meaning of commercial utility.”
“Pretty good for the eyes though, Professor,” was Hopkins’ rejoinder, “and as for the name I don’t recall anything
Which acts so direct, and with so much effect
On the human sensorium, or makes one erect
One’s ears so, as soon as the sound we detect,
unless perhaps—it might be—BEER—in a drought.”