Gold they were indeed, and the metal delivered a note less rasping and shattering than the ordinary brass. The men and women of the band were dressed in closer fitting garments, their legs were naked, but over each of the women’s knees was strapped a glittering gold cap and their hair was braided with sinuous gold serpents. They burnished the dark outline of the marchers like gleams of light or fireflies in a summer gloaming. It was really very pretty, and Hopkins nearly lost his self control by starting our applause. The impulse was momentary, for in a trice our eyes were ensnared in the sight of the astonishing crowd of little people that followed them.
They were perhaps larger than the strange little men we had met on the Deer Fels, and their heads did not fall forward with that irksome sense of heaviness which afflicted those diminutive philosophers. But they formed a diverting and animated picture. They were in all sorts of order, and rather prevalently without any order at all. In threes and fours, in strings and lines, in gravely marching little bands, and then in dancing disorder, all wearing tunics and trousers of various colors or plaids, but with the belt and the hieroglyphic buckle. Every now and then as they surged along they sang, a midget song, quavering and odd, musical in a way, but a rather poor way, and, like the shrilling cymbals and the tom-tom drums, sing-songy and monotonous. We became spell-bound at the weird spectacle. They also wore broad brimmed straw hats, but pushed back on their heads, as if to offset that ludicrous tilt of their funny big heads.
And then came a host of the Eskimo girls beating the cymbals again, but there were no drums or men.
“Well, I must say,” softly spoke Hopkins, “the popular chorus girl hasn’t anything on these peacherinas, has she?”
But what was this amazing company that followed—bizarre, fascinating, crudely savage, and yet enigmatically enthralling? A chariot or a flat platform car on low, solid wooden wheels, drawn by goats whose horns were tipped with gold snails, bore a group of diminutive figures which we all recognized as being the very little men whose aeronautics had so astonished us. They and more like them sat back to back on this equipage of gold, as in an Irish jaunting car, and one chariot succeeded another, all loaded down with the Areopagus of councilors and governors, for such they certainly seemed to be. But they were sumptuously dressed in violet cassocks, girt with gold; gold chains encircled their necks, and pendent to these was the serpent symbol. On their heads they wore the flat broad brimmed hat bedizened with gold trappings. These hats now lay in their laps, their long-fingered, waxy hands folded over them, and their eyes were protected by the absurd goggles.
They too were singing or praying, the chant rising to us with the undulatory emphasis of a Hebrew cantor, and—so it seemed to me—the words were indeed a Hebrew jargon. But around them, before them, behind them, stalked an ordered regiment of the slimmer, taller Eskimos; all men, and they each raised on their left shoulders, held stationary by the bent left arm and the right arm extended across the breast, a pole of gold, on which was entrained a living snake. The creatures were imprisoned, for their necks were caught in locks at the apexes of the poles. These snakes were black, a glossy black, and on the glossy, glittering poles they formed a strange caduceus. It was in a way a horrible assemblage, and then again, against the background of all of our incredible experiences, it assumed a bewildering charm, as if it were a dream half turned into a nightmare, or a nightmare checked in its course by a remembered dream. On, on, they swayed and moved, and amid these ophidian pages, groups of drummers kept up a ceaseless dull, stupid drubbing.
Then something stranger followed. An empty chair on a gold wagon, a chair itself of gold, but shaped like the stump of a tree with two branches sprouting from it, and between these as they were projected above the stump, the spread figure—in heraldry displayed—of the Crocodilo-Python, also in gold. The hideous animal enormity was all there, its anaconda-like tail winding about the tree stump, its stilted hind feet grasping the lower ends of the branches, its shorter webbed forefeet dragging their curved ends towards its twisted neck, and the saurian jaws in a horrid rictus, imminent above that empty throne whose occupant perchance might be some aboriginal Apollo or a grinning and revolting savage sibyl.
MEETING THE RADIUMOPOLITES
Well, Mr. Link, the spectacle, with this climax, made us dizzy; some reminiscent weakness from my swooning attacked me, but I would have been safe enough. I stuck fast to the trunk of the tree, when Goritz turning backward stepped on my support. It cracked, it broke. Hopkins seized Goritz’s arm, the Professor Hopkins’ coat tail—what there was of it—and ingloriously, with crash and whisking flight from branch to branch, we four hopeless Argonauts slumped from the top of the lofty pine, with arresting scramblings and maniacal clutchings, to the bottom, and were spilled to the roadway; four voiceless, bedraggled, ragged, bushy-haired, wild eyed, grimy men, more savage in our destitution than the savages we had fallen amongst. As we banged to the ground, a jolt stopped the empty throne, with its golden splendors of the distended image of the saurian, directly opposite our jumbled, prostrate bodies.