Now again they go up, and they NEVER COME DOWN!”
Whatever the legend meant it intimated that someone had discovered this peculiar power in the radium mineral, and the knowledge had been carefully guarded, though, as Goritz said, “Of what use was the knowledge when gold was needed by no one?”
But the power itself, its physical or chemical postulates, the method, the material! Later we learned something, but not much, and I trust it may be reserved for Science, with the material at my command (which exerts this miraculous power) to solve the problem of the ages.
Ziliah told me something of the origins of her people and this curious civilization of theirs, but it was vague and inconclusive. The small people were an intensive people, whose unresisted control of a physically stronger and bolder race resembles some of the ethnic phenomena of Asia and Africa. Their literature was practically little else than long genealogies, the traditions transmitted by word of mouth of former rulers, councils, the doings of a few notables, and a cosmology which very singularly resembled the story recently deciphered on a Sumerian relic by Professor Arno Poebel of the University of Pennsylvania.
In fact these Radiumopolites had lived uneventful lives and the incidents of history were controlled exclusively by the incidents of weather, the atmospheric and terrestrial perturbations involved in their unique environment. When had they reached this extraordinary polar depression? Were they autochthonous? Was it not more likely that the Eskimo people had assimilated with them, and had been absorbed rather than, as in Ziliah’s account, the reverse? These were unanswered questions. To propose them only covered Ziliah’s face with the shroud of an unhappy perplexity.
Their social economic life was very simple. As far as Ziliah could tell me they had always been governed by a patrician class, constituted of two orders, one the Eminences of the Capitol, to which Javan, Ziliah’s father, belonged, and who numbered some twenty-four, presided over by a President, and all of whose families, retainers, etc., were for the most part domiciled in the great Capitol building; and the Magistrates of the city, who ruled over wards or bailiwicks, living in superior structures, whose roofs were also distinguished by gold plates, and which throughout the city blazed picturesquely among the lowlier red buildings.
The religion in primitive communities, always a controlling and oftentimes the most distinctive feature of their culture, was in the Krocker Land people a monotheistic faith which, however, secured the satisfaction of visualization in a deeply rooted and superstitious Tree and Serpent worship. Yet THERE WERE NO PRIESTS. And this anomalous condition was explained partially by Ziliah, who told me that it had years before been instituted as a Law of the People that only a King could be their Priest. Whether they had ever had Kings she did not know but there was some prophecy made by one of the wise old men of the Council, a hundred or more years ago that a King would fall out of the clouds to them, that he would look like a poor man, that he would not know their language, that he would bring them a new wisdom. It was some time before I could make out the meaning of this. It dawned on me at last. Its full meaning received a startling explanation later. The services of the religion were controlled by the Council (the Areopagus, as the Professor styled it) of little Wise Men, and one prominent feature was this periodic peregrination through the great Pine Forest when the selected shrines were visited, the votive tablets nailed to the sacred trees, and the black snakes left to protect them. When I told Hopkins about all this he shook his head gloomily;
“Yes, and how about Goritz’s loot? I guess the God of Krocker Land won’t stand for that. Erickson we’ll get it in the neck yet. The Professor is our trump card.”
“Oh, yes,” I replied. “How about yourself? The fair Ziliah pulls well with her father, I guess, and you pull well with her!”
Hopkins gave me a derisive glance. “Oh of course. We’ll do the Captain Reece stunt—you remember?