But I was making remarkable progress in acquiring the tongue of the upper classes. My excellent knowledge of Hebrew made this practicable, and in a short time, before the return of the Councilors, Priests or Governors from their peripatetic religious pilgrimage made it supremely helpful, I could actually converse intelligibly, and from carefully enunciated addresses understand my interlocutor. I was most lucky in hitting on a very sympathetic teacher. It was no less a one than Ziliah, the daughter of Javan, the president of the Council and Ruler of the Capitol. He was the benignant and expostulating little gentleman we had encountered when our mishap precipitated us from the pine tree top. She, his daughter, was certainly the fairest of the children of Radiumopolis, and her wandering and liquid eyes had never been more satisfied than they were now with the sweet boyish beauty of Spruce Hopkins, the Yankee.
Ziliah Lamech—if I may adopt the Gentile practices of nomenclature—was one of the larger women, and exhibited a different and piquant skill in dress. Her trousers were rather baggy, her skirts looped on the sides, so that her pretty feet in embroidered goatskin sandals were delightfully visible. The belt of gold plates and the wonderful buckle of gold clasped her waist, constricting the blowsy upper tunic, which was a delicate blue, and enriched by interwoven threads of gold. It was loosened at her neck and the dark, smooth skin bared at her finely shaped neck, was decorated by a series of delicate gold chains in a composite flat necklace. Her abundant hair, as with the women we had met in the pine forest, was made up in compact rolls, that were held in place by the gold serpent pins, and from her small ears hung tiny bells of gold.
Her face, as I carefully studied it, was distinctly Jewish. The features were really perfect, and the mingled softness and intelligence of her expression, the half denoted charm of extreme sensibility in her eyes, the mobility and loveliness of her mouth, a swaying grace in her motions, an indefinable distinction too in the carriage of her head, and the enticing fullness of her bared arms—the sleeves of her upper garment were caught up to her shoulders by broad loops of ornamented gold—combined to make of her a captivating and most novel picture. She it was, whose heart the errant little god Cupid had now sadly transfixed with his stinging arrows, and her heart was beating wildly under the loosened folds of her jacket with love for the blond American.
It was my opportunity. Love is a quick teacher, and makes quick confidences, especially with naive and unsophisticated natures, as now, in this little princess of the north. She met us frequently in the courtyard surrounding the huge glittering Capitol where we were constantly strolling, and I recall the extraordinary picture she made, when one of the black lustrous snakes rose from the parapet on the edge of the hill as she was passing. She bowed to us, seized the reptile, wound it around her body, and lifted, above her own, its big wedge-shaped head, with one hand, holding with the other its scaly loops at her waist. The effort brought color to her cheeks, excitement to her eyes, and though neither Hopkins nor myself admired the combination, her beauty won from the fantastic, or repellent, contrast a most singular thrall.
There was a maidenly coquetry with her, as became her degree, for she retired after disengaging the creature, throwing it back down the hillside, whence it sped to the immense preserve below reserved for these unpleasing guests. The ophidian impress everywhere was to me almost unbearable. These snakes traveled from their enclosures, more or less frequently, in all directions; they were numerous in the city, though, and, after their secretive habits, were discovered most unalluringly in corners, eaves, holes, roofs, hanging from trees, or nestled on clothes. In the Capitol or Palace they were not so common, and probably were never found above the first floor.
Hopkins of course realized his conquest, but Hopkins decidedly abhorred snakes. When the beautiful Ziliah vanished, he said with a most comical grimace:
“A married life with a snake lady wouldn’t be much better than a lifelong companionship with a gin mill,” an ungallant commentary which I denounced.
Ziliah and I loitered long together until under her adroit tutelage I became almost proficient in this unquestionably deteriorated Hebrew tongue. And then, when we fairly understood each other—how the questions flew! She exulted in telling me all she knew about her people, and the exchange on my part, in telling her of our origin and home, with welcome dilations on the talent and prowess of the adorable Spruce, only too well repaid her efforts. I told all these things to my friends, and for long hours we would discuss and rehearse them with increasing amazement. In conjunction with all that I learned later, the picture to be presented of Radiumopolis, the Radiumopolites, and their country—KROCKER LAND—is mainly as follows:
The Valley of Rasselas lies to the southwest of the Krocker Land terrain, and the city of Radiumopolis to the southwestern corner of the valley itself. They are eccentrically related to the vast domain of encircling mountains, and to the stupendous gorge of the Perpetual Nimbus, which seems throughout its extent to penetrate to uncooled or igneous wombs of the earth. But at one point westward there is a superimposed gorge that actually cuts the first encircling monstrous crack, and through this secondary gorge, cutting the first to immense depths, pours the deluge of the waters of the river that empties the Saurian Sea into the Canon of Promise. (See Chapter VI.) This great river enters the Valley of Rasselas towards the northwest, and after a short, peaceful transit, as a brimming flood through wide savannahs, it turns abruptly westward in an entrenched conduit and resumes its terrible course through the canon I named the Canon of Escape. Through this awful defile and on the surging flood of that river I made my own exit from Krocker Land, reached Beaufort Sea, Behring Straits, and finally San Francisco. Goritz’s appellation for the gorge beyond the Saurian Sea is, however, justified because of the river’s final, though brief, passage across one extremity of the blissful Valley of Rasselas.
Immediately southward, west of Radiumopolis, are hot springs, a sort of geyser basin, whence hot waters are constantly derived for the baths of the city—and we found the latter to be numerous. Beyond these again, in the same direction, the continental rift of the Perpetual Nimbus almost closes, and the horrible crack becomes a crevice easily crossed. But beyond it again, in a crustal split that defies computation to measure, or science to explain, or experience to equal, lies, probably a radium (?) mass fifty or more miles in linear extent, with a width of three or four miles, and from which constantly pours an almost cosmic immensity of heat and light—emanation-niton. Its environs are withered, blasted deserts of rock. No one has ever approached it. Its emanation strikes a bare mountain face beyond it—a part of the Krocker Land Rim—and the incalculable volume of rays (Cathode Rays) reflected into the upper atmosphere over Krocker Land and immediately superior to the Valley of Rasselas, are somehow arrested in a nebulous ganglion which forms the Stationary Sun of this utterly fabulous region. This sun is really not stationary, nor is it in any sense equable, as hints in my narrative have already indicated. It moves, drifts north and south, east and west, undergoes perturbations, dies out, flares up, and would, to a properly equipped meteorological corps, stationed at Radiumopolis, furnish, I believe, an object of study absolutely unrivaled in terrestrial science.