And a bo’s’n tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain’s gig.’”
Long after we had regained the highway, and were on our solitary way to the city we could hear the smashing cymbals, the thudding drums, and the dolorous salutation of the—Well WHAT? Worshippers. Ugh! But we did meet Oogalah and he was in dreadfully low spirits, with a face full of misery, wringing his hands in distress. When he saw the Professor he ran up to him and stood before him in a woe-begone way, quite incapable of explaining his grief. Goritz could make him out fairly well and he asked him “What is the matter? Sick?”
“No! No! Oogalah not sick, but the Big Men have thrown his dead mother to the Serpent!”
Of course we were interested, and Goritz extorted from our friend an astonishing story. Briefly, it was this. Every year at the winter solstice (for later we found that these people possessed a calendar) a ceremony of sacrifice was celebrated at the Pool of Oblation—so I named it. Formerly, many, many decades before this, live men and women had been thrown to the carnivorous saurians, but that had been altered (“by the Progressives,” Hopkins suggested), and now the dead only, and not more than a dozen or so, were thrown to them; a reduction in numbers because the beasts sometimes refused some of them, and the bodies corrupted the pool.
Every five years the great lustration of the Forest Temples took place. That was the festival whose beginning and termination we had seen. At these times the whole woodland where the chosen trees are cleared—the Tree Temples—would be traversed, and at each Tree Temple chants would be sung, a black snake left, and some gold offering attached to the tree itself. Shorter pilgrimages occurred four times each year. The snake pasture was kept up as a nursery for the supply of the wood temples, for the snakes did not long survive in the pine forest. This year the Great Lustration had been unaccountably delayed—Oogalah did not know why, but he had heard that the “Big Men” (“A decided catachresis,” said the Professor, “for they literally are pygmies”), were very angry about something (my heart jumped with a sudden fear when Goritz told us this).
Oogalah’s mother died while we were away with him in the radium country, and the Magistrates of the city, who saw to the gathering of the yearly hecatomb, had attached her. Deaths were not numerous, it appeared; the supply of corpses—adequate, that is, for a satisfactory oblation—was not always secured, and a few sheep or goats made up the deficiency, their saurian majesties being at the same time importuned not to resent the substitution. “A Radiumopolite,” commented Hopkins, “may be a sweet morsel, but, under the circumstances, I surely would prefer mutton.”)
Oogalah could not tell us much about the “Serpent” (our Crocodilo-Python), or his worship. He said it had always been so, and that the “big ponds” toward the south were full of them. He had traversed these once on a raft, and apparently had got the scare of his life, for the beasts wobbled about him and, except for an inconvenient satiety at the moment, might have picked him and his companions off like crumbs from a plate. He said too that it was in the savannahs, morasses and meadows of the “southland” that the food for the black snakes in the “serpent pasture” was foraged. “A typical surviving remnant, doubtless,” said the Professor, “of Cretaceo-Juro-Triassic scenery.”)
Oogalah’s communications quite restored his peace of mind, and the gift of a pocket knife from Goritz put him into such blissful acceptance of his domestic bereavement, that the theft of two or three dead mothers would have been thankfully condoned for a similar exchange in the case of each.
We had again reached the city but in darkness. The clouds had thickened in an impenetrable curtain over the Stationary Sun, and the deepest gloom had settled over everything. Forebodings filled my mind. Superstitiously watching every symptom of nature I dreaded the effect of this eclipse on the people, and their cunning little governors, who might at any moment change their deferential behavior into a ruthless malignancy. After their rite of propitiation this darkening of the sun might indicate to them a yet unappeased deity, for, as the Professor had put it, the “Serpent and the Sun had a consentaneous meaning in many old mythologies.” Why then was he unappeased? The Strangers and their profanation of the Shrines. I always returned to this suspicion with dread. A few moments later my worst fears were confirmed.