Ziliah returned the answer of the Conventicle. They would not see us just now, later, perhaps in fourteen settas, which meant, in our time, about a week. Oh ho! That was the limit of our sufferance. In a week they would meet us on their own terms. The crisis had come.
It was not half an hour later that Goritz, Hopkins, the Professor and myself, as faultlessly attired as our wardrobe and toilet facilities permitted, marched from our abode in the city, down the great highway. Our guns were in our arms, clasped tightly to our chests, and all the ammunition we possessed was loaded in our cartridge belts and pockets. We were instantly noticed and numerously attended. We entered the serpent pasture, at the eastern end, and walked to the eastern terrace of steps, and up these to the courtyard above. We were seen. Men and women, girls and boys, in a desultory manner at first, then in hastening groups, emerged from the Capitol and, among them a few of the little rulers. The rumor of attack spread.
From the houses of the city, its looms and barns, the workshops and bakeries, its gardens, the cloth manufactories, the metal shops, the curious small people gathered, and with them the larger race from near and far, while the idle and loafing contingent, always large and drifting instinctively towards every new incident, hastened in mirthful or expectant groups, pouring along behind us. Each fresh accession stimulated a wider circle of attention, until it almost seemed as if the populace were following us en masse. They overflowed the road, they dispersed over the meadow land appropriated to snakes, they clambered up on the dilapidated cutches, where the snakes congregated and clustered, in gaping crews, on the steps of the terrace. Their humor seemed propitious. The peculiar gaiety that characterized them when we were brought to Radiumopolis, dampened or made a little grave by wonder, again affected them that day, but it was freer and more hospitable, and I think they already appreciated the situation. Goritz and I had been rather industrious disseminators of mischief—“Semeurs d’emeute” Antoine said.
When we came to the last step of the terrace we separated. The Professor took a central position, and the light luckily turned his splendid coiffure into a garnet glory that must have transported the audience around us. Goritz and Hopkins flanked him, I stood somewhat to one side. We all held our guns—magazine rifles—but the Professor, it was agreed, should remain statuesque and motionless, only succoring us at any critical juncture. I have a splendid voice, I proposed to use it.
By this time the throng in the doorway of the Capitol almost blocked it. The dignitaries were coming out quickly and the magistrates from the wards of the city were arriving, but all somewhat en deshabille. Their court robes were forgotten, or too hastily deserted, and their appearance assumed an absurdly shrunken manner and tenuity. We very certainly outclassed them. The Professor, par excellence, was magnificent. The people measured the spectacular effect and, I guess, shrewdly preferred our “make-up.”
I began my demand. I spoke for the SON of THUNDER, and I spoke of the prophecy which described his coming to rule his people, and then, it was a master stroke which almost unnerved my friends, knocked the Directory plumb off its feet, and thunderstruck the people, I showed the golden tablet (Ziliah’s stroke), and read it. By this time I had acquired fairly well the Hebrew dialect of these people, and they understood me. I pointed to the Professor who, responding to some histrionic impulse, which none of us had even suspected in him, raised his hands as if invoking the heavens, and then bowed to me, to Goritz, to Hopkins, and in unimpeachable—English, said in a loud domineering tone,
“REVEAL MY POWER—FIRE!”
Now this was absolutely an improvisation. We had not planned the affair exactly in that way, but we were on the qui vive (Johnnies-on-the-spot, averred Hopkins), and off went the whole magazine of guns in a glorious unison. It was really immense, coming as it did upon the heels of the prediction, that—he kills with his thunder. Only we hadn’t killed anything. And then the Professor by another sublime intuition filled the required bill. It was nearing spring time and the reinforcement of the light and heat from the diurnal sun was beginning to be felt. Some straggling Arctic gulls crossed the sky. The Professor was a fair shot. The accentuation of a supreme moment nerved his arm, brightened his eye, and put the force of precision in his aim. He fired—a gull fluttered to the ground almost at our feet—another shot, and a second bird flopped actually upon the heads of the dismayed councillors, who were now in a fine frenzy of agitation.
The mercurial disposition of semi-civilized people and that contagion of admiration which, as Le Bon has shown, infects a mob, as with the sharp upward rush of a fire fanned by high winds, had an invincible illustration then and there. At first there was a silence; as if shocked into dumbness by the inexplicable occurrence, or bewildered by a confusion of responses they could not define, they for a moment awaited direction. It came. Oogalah, in the very first rank of the attendant crowds, shouted with hoarse exultation:
“PEEUK—PEEUK—PEEUK.”