“And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made a universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?”
There was no Tiber, to be sure, but there were the people, and the shout, albeit rather more shrill and piercing than thunderous. The air seemed at moments and in places thick with the rising hats that were tossed with splendid nerve, in acclamation of the advancing procession.
On it came, hardly visible at first, save as an oscillating shimmer and movement, and accompanying the incessant rumpus of the shattering cymbals and the thumping drums. The musicians evinced a pardonable pride and extracted as much noise as vigor and appreciation could extort from their very willing instruments. It was exciting enough. As the first companies of the Eskimos approached and the cataract of sound poured over us we sought some higher outlook. A narrow ledge like a water-table separated the second from the first story of rooms in the communal palace. We could, by boosting and climbing on each other, reach this, and once there the coup d’oeil would be complete. Goritz bent forward. With the lightness of a deer Hopkins sprang up, straightened himself, and touched the coping. He swung onto it, and—I half dreaded it would give way—it held. Then we maneuvered the Professor up. I followed and with a long pull we jerked Goritz off his feet and hauled him to us, and thus rather absurdly and flagrantly placed, we awaited the event. Our feet dangled over the crowd below and, as we were in full view of the terrace of steps and the road, the first thing the returning “doctors” would behold, would be our desecrating presence on the walls of the palace. But we were oblivious to consequences just then.
Gazing down immediately underneath our perch we saw the ladies of the Capitol bunched in a many colored knot at the head of the steps. Crushing upon them were the servants, attendants, guards, and an indiscriminate crowd of citizens, and down these steps, kept inviolately clean, on either side, was a line of the taller Eskimos, a man to every step, with a black snake coiled round his waist, but with its neck and head held outward in an inclined position, so that a view from our seat crossed a profile of extended snakes’ heads and necks, somewhat symmetrically displayed in two series. It was a most peculiar bizarre picture.
Already the first regiment of men in the procession had halted, fallen irregularly backward along the side of the road, and then massed beyond these was the tireless band, men and women in their tight bodices and sacks, their naked legs, and the picturesque gold knee-caps. Almost instantly appeared the bright gold poles, around which, when we met them in the pine forest, had been coiled the imprisoned snakes. The snakes were no longer on them. The companies holding these advanced, strode up the steps, and stalwartly, with a martial erectness absent from everyone else, lined themselves with the snake holders. The diversified and variegated cohorts of the little people which we had noticed in the forest, had evidently dispersed, lost here and there along the route, for they doubtless were adventitious accretions, followers from custom or for amusement, and with them too had vanished the very considerable commissariat.
There remained only the jaunting cars, with their odd but impressive little occupants, and that jolting, shivering, monstrous gold throne, bearing the shocking effigy of the Crocodilo-Python. Yes, and here they were! The tugging rams with snail tipped horns, and the council in violet gowns bedizened with gold braid and chains, utterly insignificant lilliputian creatures, with their beetle heads. True, but the deadly power lurking in those metal tubes—What was that?—not to be gainsaid, not to be denied. The thought of it gave me a shuddering sense of impotence, before these caricatures of men.