Julie thought of these strange rumors as she looked about her. The walls were hung with a great many rich embroideries, brilliant silks blooming with the unfamiliar flowers of far kingdoms. It was like walking in a garden of Cathay. The room appeared to Julie like a chamber of an Eastern palace in a rich pagodaed city: there was furniture of teak-wood black as a Nubian, brought from distant jungles by toiling elephants, all marvelously carved into scaled monsters; there were ivory gods with sleeping faces; curtains strewn with gold, hanging in dim recesses; rugs—that generations of men in almost mythical retreats of the Himalayas had been a century or two in weaving—lying like islands on the shining dark lacquered floor, in which the shadows of the passer-by drowned to endless depths; a pair of sentinel vases higher than a man—made a thousand years ago for an emperor who had become a god—out of their tops a thin ribbon of green smoke curling from hidden incense; and in one corner, hung with flowers, a queer altar to whatever gods Isabel believed in.
Toward this niche Julie bent curious footsteps. The altar was in the shape of a temple, a gilded fantastic thing, wrought in what country it would have been impossible to say. A Green God, like the monstrous genie of a lake, sat cross-legged in the nave of the shrine staring at rows of grotesque faces carved in the walls. The artist had exercised the art of a Leonardo da Vinci; in the face of the little idol there was neither the dead marooned calm of the great Diabutz nor the cruel evil of Mongolian gods. He was just a quiet little deity, green as the far spaces of the skies, sitting thinking in his temple; but there was in his oblivious, impersonal reflection something that clutched at the heart.
Julie glanced up depressed, to find Isabel regarding her.
“What a terrible god!” exclaimed the girl with a shiver. “Is he yours?”
Isabel smiled. “He is the god who is ‘on the job,’ as you Americans say it. The Great One is too great, the philosophers tell us, to have anything to do with us. He has abstract names, and is too isolated by infinity to be prayed to. But this little god, he knows, he knows!”
“Has he a name?” asked Julie, much puzzled by this blatant paganism. The Islands were undoubtedly a very strange place.
“In different lands, we call him different things.”
Julie turned from the niche, “I am going to the island of Nahal,” she announced. “I have come to see what you can tell me about it.”
Isabel’s blue eyes widened. “It is far, very far! We shall never hear of you again. It takes weeks to reach there, because no boats run regularly. You can get to Solano in three or four days, if you are lucky enough to catch a boat—from there once in a while a boat goes down to Nahal. It is a small island; the people are Visayans. I really do not know so much about it, you see. It is turbulent, I believe. Is there a military garrison?”
Julie was not sure. A volunteer force had recently been withdrawn from it; Mr. Calixter was trying to discover whether other troops had replaced the volunteers.