Well, the Professor, after his accession, expressed the strongest desire to see the Gold Makers and their country, and said that we all must accompany him. For the Professor had acquired a little knowledge of the language, and with me as interpreter he got on famously, and told the Council of wise men that he was writing a book about them, and after they had mastered the idea, for among their other trivialities they had no books, no writings of any sort, they took to it immensely. This appeal to their vanity—megalomania literally and figuratively—was a great stroke. Bjornsen will find out all their knowledge before he abdicates.
So it very soon materialized that we should be shown the Gold Makers. (This was some time before Goritz’s death.) It was a picturesque trip. I shall never forget it, and for good reasons. It started me on my way home.
The Professor, Goritz, Hopkins, myself, and the chief men of the Senate, Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg and Hadad, made up the party with the guard, drivers and a few attendants. We went in their odd wooden-wheeled jaunting cars, pulled by the very lively and entertaining rams.
It would form an appealing and pleasant study for me to describe the Junta of Radiumopolis—those thirty humorous little figures, with the sedate, old, and variously featured faces, a galaxy of physiognomies that embraced good nature, cunning, sullenness, querulous self importance, feebleness, gravity, benevolence (more in the seeming than in the reality, I take it) spitefulness, apathy, fussiness, dullness, alertness, sympathy, cruelty, perhaps sternness, and above all a mannerism of profundity unspeakably amusing. Their physique is hopeless, for they have pin bodies and have pin heads, as Hopkins described them, and their off-the-center look with their top-heavy heads and bowed shoulders make a mannikin effect, ludicrous and grotesque. All are dark.
But while we are on our way to the Gold Makers, through the open flowering meads and broad pastures and arable acres of the Rasselas Valley, I will try very briefly—in staccato—to put before you Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg and Hadad.
Javan, the father of Ziliah, was by far the best looking, and generally the best formed. His face was really handsome, and his beard made no false claim to being one. It was full and flowing. His eyes were large, glowing and passionate. He smiled too much, and a “few crowns and bridges made from home material would have benefited his mouth organ,” said Hopkins. His cheeks were hollow and pale, but the positive beauty of the broad white brow seemed to compensate for all other defects.
Put was a rather tall man, under the restricted sense of long and short as applied to these gentlemen, and nearly bald. His nose was a more modest creation that those of most of his colleagues, but his mouth, in so small a face, was portentous. Nature by some ineptitude had almost omitted his ears, and his eyes had a glassy and fixed stare (when not concealed by the official goggles), but the forlorn remnant of some forgotten smile had become fastened in his face, which actually helped the artificial effect of his eyes to the point of making you almost believe he was of wood or plaster, and not of flesh and blood. Hopkins quoted the Bab Ballad verse, which runs,
“‘The imp with yell unearthly-wild,
Threw off his dark enclosure:
His dauntless victim looked and smiled