The strange procession circled about my cage. Of them that marched, some bore shields and swords; some carried wands of office; others swung open silver cups laden with sweet-scented spices consumed to the honor of the gods. Some bore wreaths of many-colored flowers. All were in spotless white, and all kept step with order and rhythm to the cadenced measures of that horrible hymn of praise.
But now an awed murmur rose from the waiting throng. Some fell on their faces, and some, and these were women, rushed forward in a kind of frenzied joy of welcome. The men drew aside with reverent haste to let them pass, and the object of their devotion came in sight.
I saw a canopied litter swung aloft; I saw fan-bearers and all the jewelled trappings of royalty. And again my pulse beat thick with joy, for a veiled figure sat within the litter, and for one fleeting moment I believed that Lah had come to claim me, prisoner. Another instant pricked the bubble of my hope.
One woman and another from out the throng fell, face downward, on the wayside, in the path of her who rode thus immovable, in state, herself, no woman truly, but Edba, the Moon Goddess, come to behold her fallen enemy.
The priests marched steadily along over the prostrate bodies in the dust, nor turned aside for any self-devoted victim. Only when the silver statue reached the centre of the cleared space before my cage, was a halt called. Then with much speech-making, and many strange observances, was I once more committed to my doom.
Surely had I no need to complain of lack of ceremony about my end, save only the incivility with which these pious persons received my own attempt at answer.
But of a truth they may have feared, and rightly, the effect of Christian eloquence. For though I be but a plain man, and one more of deed than of word, I was roused in that hour to a flow of language, a subtlety of wit, and a power of rebuke, that would, I think, have shamed the boldest into silence, and carried me perchance a conqueror, victor not victim, from that place of torment.
But it was not so to be. The beat of drums drowned my voice; at a sign, the bearers of the litter resumed their march.
Edba, too, had gone; another hour had sped. I was still caged, still fettered, still a prisoner.
Some of the people, my former tormentors, had gone on with the Moon Goddess and her train. Others stayed to bear away the victims left behind her in the market-place. Of these some groaned mournfully, others rent the air with cries, and one, a tall woman of some beauty, rose, swayed for a moment, and then fell heavily, and lay motionless, but with a strange smile on her parted lips.