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CHAPTER I

THE FOREST¹

Trees and trees and trees—a world of trees! Little size and middle size and giant size, short and tall, slender and thick, broad-leafed, narrow-leafed, rough-barked, smooth-barked, dark green, bright green, one solid hue, or spangled or variegated with many-coloured flowers, trees that bore nuts, trees that bore fruit, and trees starkly idle and useless to a frugivorous² folk! Trees and trees and trees—trees leaning their heads against one another, trees pressing side to side, trees tied together by the endless vines going looping through the world; trees and trees and trees! Overhead, through the network, showed small pieces of sky; big pieces of sky were seen only when you came to streams. Sunlight struck down in flakes or darts, never as brightness formless and unconfined. At night, looking up from the nestlike arrangements of sticks and forest débris heaped between the forks of trees, three or four stars might be seen at once. The host of stars was rarely seen. The big animals, going down to the wider streams to drink, might see the heavens, but, as a general thing, the tree-folk saw only the forest. As a general thing. Occasionally, in their lives, the horizon inexplicably widened or the zenith went up higher. The big animals stood and walked so that their eyes were not of much use when it came to things on top. The tree-folk had learned how to get about differently, and they had hands, and they stood more or less uprightly, and they used their eyes so that they saw things on top as well as things around them, and they were beginning to think, and they had great curiosity.lean up text

She swung herself down from bough to bough until she touched the black loam and the trampled plants beneath the tree. She had a young one clinging to her neck. The tree was a bad tree. It had rocked and shaken and made a noise all night. She was so angry with it that she turned and struck it with her hands and feet. Then she settled the young one upon her shoulder and went off to a thicket where grew very good fruit.

But the day had begun wrong. A lot of other folk were there, too, and they tried to push her away, and though she got her breakfast it was a poor one, and the crowd was a quarrelsome, scolding crowd. She went off and sat down under a tree and looked at them. A thing happened that, in her individual experience, had never happened before. She experienced a distinct feeling of being outside of it all—not outside with a sense of injury, but quite calmly outside. She criticized the tree-folk.

The young one drummed against her breast with its feet. She pulled it down from her shoulder, and it lay upon her knees, and she smiled at it, and it smiled at her. She was very fond of it. All the tree-folk smiled with a kind of grimacing smile, using only the lips. But now this morning a second thing happened. She smiled with her eyes. It gave her a very singular feeling, a feeling that linked itself with the earlier one.

This tree was thin-topped. Looking up, she saw quite unusual pieces of sky. Across the largest a white cloudlet went sailing. The folk in the fruit thicket fell into a tremendous quarrel, yelling at one another. She scrambled to her feet and made the sound that meant, “Get on my back and hold tight! We are going to travel.” The young one obeyed and the two set forth.

Trees, trees, trees, trees! fighting for breathing space, shouldering away their fellows, sucking each its hardest from the earth, striving each its hardest, out with its arms, up with its head, up to the light! and all tied together, tied together with endlessly looping ropes, green and brown and grey, cupped and starred and fringed with purple and orange and white and scarlet! Over all and from all the creepers stretched and dangled. Trees and trees and trees! helplessly many, chained each to the other. Sometimes she and the young one travelled in the trees and over the stretched brown ropes, and sometimes she made her way through the cane and fern and wild and varied growths that overspread the fat black earth out of which had burst the trees. The coloured birds whistled and shrieked, and now and again, in the green gloom, she heard tree-folk calling and answering. But she avoided the tree-folk. She was still critical.

It grew dark in the universal forest. The red and green and orange birds ceased whistling, and the insect people whirring and chirping. The butterflies went to their bark homes.

“Uuugh!” she said,—which meant, “Lightning will flash and thunder will roll, trees will snap, water will come down, and the air will grow cold!”

It all happened, just in that order. She and the young one found an overhanging rock with a rock floor beneath. They crept into the opening that was like the jaws of a monster, and cowered, their faces down. Ugh! the light in sheets and the noise! There was not, this time, much water. She hated water when it came like this, cold and stinging, just as she loved it when it presented itself in pools when one was thirsty and hot with racing through trees. She had not as yet worked it out that it was lovely or hateful according to the angle from which it was approached, that the water apparently did not plan what it should do nor how it should come, and that it was you yourself who accomplished that partition into qualities. If she reasoned at all, it was to the effect that the water very actively cared, now hating and now helping. The young one whimpered and whimpered, and it irritated her, and she beat it. Yelling, it rolled away from her to the other end of the rock floor. And then the bright light and the horrible noise stopped, and the water ceased to dash against her like cold, wet leaves, and the sun came out sudden and strong, and a snake crept over the rock, coiled and darted its head above the young one that was lying sobbing to itself. She saw the snake and she screeched with terror, then she leaped and caught it with both hands just below the head that was flat and pointed like a leaf and dragged it away from the young one. It writhed and lashed about and struck at her, but she held it tighter and tighter, and trampled it with her feet, and choked it until it was dead. Then she flung it from her, over the rock, and shivered with her shoulders, and then she gathered up the young one, and the two travelled on.

They travelled nearly all day, seeing nothing but trees and the plants that hid the soil from sight, and the inhabitants of trees and the folk whose feet had always to be upon the earth. The world was anything but unpopulous. There were beings who flew and beings who climbed and beings who crept or glided, and beings who walked four-footed, and the tree-folk who both walked and climbed. When she came to the hot, still, narrow streams which she crossed by means of the festooned creepers, she saw beings who swam.

It grew late. Where was any space for the shadow of a tree to fall, it fell. Always the world was quiet in the great heat of the middle day. Evening was the time when all the world began to talk at once—all, that is, but the big animals. They waited for full night, and then they roared—they roared! The tree-folk were afraid of the big animals, dreadfully afraid.

The young one was hungry. She pulled it across her shoulder to her breast and gave it milk, and at the next fruit tree they came to she stopped and got her own supper. By the time this was done it was almost night. Before her there showed an opening where grass grew. It sloped to a stream and it supported two or three tall, creeper-clad trees. Through the bushes about the supper tree came a curious, dancing light. Observing this, she followed the instinct of all tree-folk and crept forward to see what might be seen.

One of the trees had been struck by lightning, and it had fallen upon the earth. It lay there all its length, and it was afire. She and the young one sat beneath the bushes and watched it with awed interest. In their history, tree-folk had met with this phenomenon often enough to learn that you must not touch, that you must not even go very close. When you did so, it was worse than all kinds of big animals!

The flame flickered in and out among the branches and ran along the trunk. A light smoke curled up, and she could hear the tree talking. It made a crackling talk. The burning mass warmed and lit the dusk. She and the young one were so interested that they went closer and closer. It occurred to her to find out how close you could go. So she went cautiously, cautiously, very close indeed. Up to a certain point that was pleasant enough, but one step farther on it began to sting. She jerked back, frightened, but fascinated. Now again it was pleasant. It seemed that it was angry only when you came too close. Keep a little away and it was the best of friends! She and the young one sat on the ground and thought about it. A long, broken bough, slender and bare as a bamboo, happened to lie there, one end touching the fiery tree, the other close to her hand. Her hand chanced to close upon it, as it might have closed upon creeper or young bough in the trees. Something more happened. She lifted this stick with the fire at one end like a pennant, lifted it and moved it to and fro, the fire making lines and circles in the air.

Her brain worked. The stick gave her a long arm, an arm much longer than anybody else’s, with active, bright fingers at the end of it. If you could take it with you—No one had ever thought of carrying the bright, stinging thing…. The flame blew down the stick toward her and she was horribly frightened. Dropping the bough she picked up the young one and fled.

Footnotes

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CHAPTER II

THE CAVE

The rocks rose in tiers to a stark height above the dark and tangled wood. From their feet sloped away to the floor of mould a runway of stones great and small. Long ago, long, long ago, water had honeycombed the cliff.

A great stone, shaped like a fir-cone, masked half the cave mouth. A gnarled, rock-clinging tree helped with the other half. When the cave woman had found food and would bring it home, she looked first for the tree and then for the stone.

Sometimes, for a long while, food was easy to get—that is to say, comparatively easy. Then, for a long time, food might be hard to get. There were times when food-getting took strength and cunning and patience in excess. Such was this time, and it had lasted long. So long had it lasted that everything in the world seemed to be hungry.

The cone-shaped stone and the ragged tree kept full sunshine from the cave, but a fair amount entered in shafts and splashes. Four children played in the light and shadow. Naked, with sticks and stones and a snare made from the red fibre of a vine, they played at being hunters. They jumped and dodged and screamed; they hid behind outcropping folds of rock; now one was the quarry and now another. When they tired of that, they sat down and tossed and caught round, shining pebbles, brought to them by the mother from a stream she had crossed. After a time they grew hungry and easily angered. One struck another and they fought. That over, a common void and weakness drew them again together. The sun was getting low, the orange light going away from the littered cavern floor. They felt cold. Back in the cave was heaped dry wood from the floor of the forest, and to one side, guarded by a circle of flat stones, a little fire was burning. Never were the children to burn too great a fire, and never were they to let what was there go out! Now they sat around it whimpering. The oldest crawled into the dimness of the cavern and, bringing back an armful of small sticks, put two crosswise in the flame. Warmth was good, and the flickering light did for sunbeams. Three sat hunched around the fire, while the littlest one lay and sucked its thumb for lack of other food, and went at last to sleep. The next to the littlest nodded, nodded, and then it, too, slept, close to the littlest for warmth. The eldest was a girl and the next a boy. Shag-haired, naked, lean, they watched and fed the fire, and with growing hunger watched the entrance. Daylight grew colder and thinner. They got up and went to the cave mouth. The tree and the cone-shaped rock blocked vision. The lawgiver had forbidden the four to show themselves on the farther side of the tree and the rock. If they did, all the ill of the world would fall upon them. At least, they knew that the lawgiver’s hand would fall upon them.

Footnoes

Here’s a simple footnote,¹ and here’s a longer one.²

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CHAPTER III

BIG TROUBLE

Rudely constructed, shed-like, or nondescript, the long communal houses lay like dark beads in a landscape of green, in a warm, temperate clime. In front stretched a fen, and beyond the fen flowed a river. To right and left and in the background waked and slumbered the forest, chief possessor yet of the earth. Before the houses that were large enough and long enough to lodge, when they chose to stay indoors, several hundred women, men, and children, ran a strip of naked, sun-baked earth. Here the children played, and here went on industrial processes, and here were held, beneath one huge tree, the general councils, pow-wows, folk-meets.

The people of the long houses ate fish which they caught by means of weirs and with harpoons and hooks fashioned from bone. They ate in their season fruits and nuts, and they were acquainted with certain mealy roots and seeds of grasses. They ate those animal denizens of forest or plain that they could kill with club and spear or take in pit and snare. In times of scarcity they ate flesh food of a low order. In times of huge scarcity, when it was that or the wasting away of the group and its passage into the land of death, they might slay and eat the aged of their own kind.

In the matter of weapons the people of the long houses yet depended upon the spear, but were upon the threshold of the bow and arrow. In the heat of summer they wore brief garments of woven grass; in the colder weather they garbed themselves in skins sewed with a bone needle and a fibre thread. Year by year, life by life, they were moulding a flexible, strong, not unmusical language. They could count beyond ten. Simple calculations were coming into the scope of most. Here and there finer brains undertook calculations not quite so simple. They used a ceremonial burial of the dead, and they placed beside the body weapons and other objects which might be useful in some vague other world. They observed the moon and the larger stars, and to every single thing under heaven they attributed a will to save or to damn. They had a body of customs, not yet stiffened into law. Women, the makers and possessors of children, the original devisers of houses and clothes and such things, the earliest lawgivers and gatherers of people into societies, were yet, through the greater range of matters, the authoritative sex. They were the mothers, the instinctively turned to even after childhood, the dimly deified. But men were powerful encroachers, and they encroached.

To the two alike had once fallen the fierce, the incessant warfare against their old kindred the beasts. Now, the women abetting, the men had almost taken over that department of living. Men were the manufacturers of spear and spearhead, the experimenters with stone axe and stone knife. They were the steady feelers toward bow and arrow, the chief hunters now of dangerous beasts, strengthening in muscle, gaining in height, careless of inflicted pain, watchers of flowing blood, quarrellers with chance—met other hunting bands from other long houses, adventurous, bold, standing by wide rivers, meditating a raft, a boat, or from hill-tops watching the climbing stars, roaming afar from the houses and returning. Wilder than his mate was the male and more violent, as became one who had nothing to do with children. Nor he, nor she, believed that he had anything to do with children—nor with the making of them, nor with the owning them after they were made.

A cluster of women came down to the bank of one of the ribbon-like water-courses winding through the fen. Here was a bed of clay. The women carried a number of uncertainly shaped vessels of plaited rush and osier. These they laid upon the earth, and sitting down by the stream, fell to dashing water over the clay, and, when the latter was sufficiently softened, to gathering it up and kneading it with the hands. When the mass was very smooth and plastic, each woman took one of the osier shapes, set it between her knees, and began to daub it within and without with clay. They wet their hands and worked with palm and fingers and thumb, and also with a spatula-like piece of wood, bringing the clay into one surface, smoothing and finishing it off. When bowl and jar were dried in the sun, then water might be carried without grave loss and meat might be cooked without the osiers burning in the fire. An idea came to one of the women. She took a mound of wet clay and with her hands and the spatula she worked until she had a bowl of the clay itself without any osier inner walls. “Ha!” she cried. “Look!” Setting the bowl aside in the sun, she took more clay and made a jar-like shape. The other women suspended work to watch her. They leaned forward, interest in their eyes. An old woman, sitting by, watching not working,—old Aneka the Wise Woman,—made a sound of approval. “Good!” said Aneka. “It is good to think and to put one thing and another thing together! Now you can make pots without braiding reeds.”

Back on the sun-hardened strip before the houses a fire was burning. At a fair distance from this rose a young tree and to the tree was tied a creature with his wolf descent written plain. A woman came from the nearest house, in her hands a piece of raw meat. When the wild dog saw the meat he made a bound and strained fiercely at the thongs which held him. The woman laid the meat upon the ground, not far from the fire. Then she took a billet of wood and, passing before the tied creature, showed it to him not once but many times. This done, she placed the piece of wood upon the ground as far from him in the one direction as was the piece of meat in the other. Next in order, she took a long, stout stick, seasoned and sharpened, and striking one end into the embers, watched it until it was aflame. All this time the half-dog, half-wolf, was making a noise. Woman, dog, meat, stick, and fire had for observers a number of naked children. Now she turned upon these and ordered them within the house, and when they protested and went reluctantly, she threatened them with voice and stick. The ground clear, the woman, the burning stick in her hand, went and untied the creature to be tamed. He sprang at her, but she lunged as fiercely with the brand, and he gave back and cowered. She spoke in a voice of command, pointed out the billet of wood, and spoke again. The creature gathered himself together and made a leap—toward the piece of meat. She was there before him, squarely between him and it, the burning wood sending forth sparks. Again he gave back and hung uncertain, growling deeply. She gestured for the twentieth time toward the bit of wood. “Bring me that! Then you shall eat.” He would have liked to tear her into pieces, but after many minutes of this work,—rushes toward the meat, beatings-back with stick and voice and eye,—he brought her the billet of wood. “Good! Now, go eat!”

East of the long houses spread a space of earth firmer than the neighbouring fen, more open than the neighbouring forest. Three women were here. They had wooden staves, and at the end of each was bound at right angles a large, rudely sharpened flint. With these the women were loosening the fat, black earth. Beside them lay a heap of roots and plants taken from the forest.

Beneath a tree sat a lean man watching. In weather such as this, and with no ceremonial toward, the men of the long houses went all but nude. But the lean man dressed every day, and that with punctiliousness and ornamentation. He had this morning, beside other apparel, a string of small, dried gourds passing over one shoulder and under the other. They rattled when he moved.

“Ha!” chanted the hoeing women—

“We are going to see
That which we shall see!
We are going to put
Yuba in the earth!
If she rots there, bad!
If she grows there, good!
Yuba! grow big!
Yuba! make children!
Then shall we eat
Without going to seek.
Then shall we have
Yuba to our hand!
Yuba and her children,
Sweet to the tooth!
Then none will hunger,
Though the fish go away!
Then none will hunger,
Though the men kill no meat!
Then those who laugh,
Saying, ‘What do you do,
Scratching there in the earth?’
They will come to us begging.
They will cry, ‘Give us Yuba!’”

The man with the gourds chose the attitude of contempt before an infant industry. He spoke in a guttural voice. “You are like fish and have no sense! I go into the forest and when I am hungry, I look around me, and I sing, ‘Yuba! Yuba!’ ‘Here I am!’ says Yuba plant. ‘Dig me up!’—But you say, ‘Let us tie Yuba to the houses!’” He shook the gourds. “You are more foolish than the fish. They do not go about to make the river angry. But you go about to make Yuba angry!”

The women leaned upon their hoes and regarded with apprehension the heap of Yuba roots. The sun lay golden all around. “She does not look angry! We think she likes to come near the houses.”

But the man with the gourds remained indignant. “Ha! No, she does not! All kinds of things are coming to be angry with you women!” He shook the rattling string. “What will you give me if I go to the forest and sing and dance for you before Yuba?”

“We are going to dance before her here,” said the farmers. “We are going to make a great Yuba dance!—Why don’t you go hunting? All the men are hunting.”

The sitter under the tree shook from a gourd a number of long and sharp thorns. “Yes, they are hunting! They are hunting Big Trouble. But I, too, hunt Big Trouble, and I hunt better than they.” He spoke with growing unction. “Yesterday I went into the forest. I did not go with others—I went by myself. I found Big Trouble’s footprints. I found where he had broken the canes and laid down. I stuck long thorns in his footprints.” He talked with gestures no less than with words. “I put thorns in the earth where he rolled. So to-day Big Trouble is going like this—” He got up and limped painfully about, then sat down and with his long nail drew a mark across the ground before him. “I did so before his footprints. Now, wherever he goes, the pit is before him! Now they will hunt Big Trouble easily. Now he will go straight to the pit they have made and fall in it.” He fell himself, doubled-up, upon the ground to show the manner of it, then retook his first posture and shook the gourds. “They think they are hunting Big Trouble. But Haki and One Other hunted him first! Now I sit still and wait for the men to come home. They will give me so much meat.” He measured with his arms. “I will burn a part of it for One Other.”

The awe he meant to evoke was faintly apparent. The farmers laughed uneasily, with a catch of the breath. “Don’t put thorns in our footprints!” said one; and another, “Rub out the pit you’ve made before us there!” He smeared it over with the palm of his hand, then shook the gourds and looked sidelong and slily at the working women. “Will you give me Yuba if she stays here and grows for you?”

“Oh, we’ll give you plenty!” answered the farmers. They laughed as they said it, but they laughed uneasily. However, they went on singing, using the first hoes.

“Then none will hunger,
Though the fish go away!
Then none will hunger,
Though the men kill no meat!
Then those who laugh,
Saying, ‘What do you do,
Scratching there in the earth?’
They will creep to us softly,
They will cry, ‘Give us Yuba!’”

Far off, in the deep woods, the men of the long houses were hunting Big Trouble, hunting him far and wide. Big Trouble had chosen to make such a path to the river as brought him into close quarters with the houses. Moreover, on more occasions than one, he had strayed aside from the path; he had come brushing and trampling and ruining against the place itself, all in the dead of night, waking and terrifying! So now Big Trouble was to be killed. To that end, for many days, they had been digging a pit in the wood, deepening and widening the mouth of a gully near to old haunts of Big Trouble. When it was deep enough and sharply shelving enough, they set at the bottom pointed stakes and then they covered all with a net of vines, artfully made to look like the very floor of the forest; strong enough, too, not to give beneath the weight of any slight forest creature. But let Big Trouble try it—! For days, also, they had been talking and training, exercising their muscles, trying their spears and clubs, asking help of the Great Turtle who was mysteriously their especial friend—the Great Turtle at the mouth of the great river, who came from the water and laid her eggs upon the sand. Now they were all in the deep wood, driving Big Trouble, disturbing him with flung club and spear, getting him to go toward the pit. Big Trouble was so big, and covered with such a fell of shaggy, red-brown hair that a flung club or spear troubled him little, and on the whole he was good-natured, and since he did not eat flesh, would not hurt them in turn—not unless they mightily angered him. Then, indeed, he would hunt with a vengeance, filling the air with trumpetings, tearing down the forest, shaking the earth, seizing the unlucky with his trunk and trampling them into an awful pulp! To hunt Big Trouble was to hunt in peril and excitement and with a fearful joy—a hunting that needed beforehand rites and ceremonies, and when it was accomplished, rites and ceremonies.

Women as well as men hunted Big Trouble, though not anything like so many women as men. But when a woman wished to hunt, she hunted; hunted for food now as long since, hunted for joy in activity, danger, and excitement. It was a dwindling custom, but they hunted yet. Half a dozen now stalked Big Trouble with the men and threw their spears against him.

By the time the sun was high, Big Trouble had rolled his bulk very near the hidden pit. He was growing angry. The hunters had now to act with extreme wariness. Just before he reached the pit, he turned. He would go no farther. He stood trumpeting and all the hunters got behind thick trees and crouched trembling. Big Trouble glared with his small, red eyes. Shaggy, with red-brown hair, with hugely long, curving tusks, vast and dusky, the mammoth stood swaying from side to side, growing angrier and angrier, searching with those now vicious, deep-sunk, red eyes. The hunters shrank to be smaller and smaller behind the trees. Their hearts grew small within them. Big Trouble did not mean to go on, had stopped definitely short of the snare! He would stay there for hours, watching, and if any one moved he would make his fearful, trampling rush…. Time passed, much time. The sun that had been up in the plains of the sky began to travel down the sky, down and down the sky. Big Trouble kept as he was; only now and then he trumpeted.

A young man and woman left the screen of a wide-girthed tree. They darted into the open. Big Trouble saw them out of the red corner of his eye. He swung his bulk about and, trumpeting, charged. Immediately the two were behind a greater tree than the first. Big Trouble passed, trumpeting, and the wind of him shook the leaves. Baffled, he stopped and stood swaying, angrier than before, angrier every moment. The two left the second tree and fled before him. He followed, darkness and weight arush through the forest. The man and woman gained the third tree. Big Trouble passed, then he turned. The two left their tree and raced before him, racing straight now to the pit. Big Trouble came after them, and he shook the earth and air. The two took life in their hands, made themselves light, bounded upon and across the roof of vine and leaf. It gave a little beneath their feet, but only a little. As near skimming as might be, they won to the farther side, and with a long cry of triumph rushed to shelter. On, after them, thundered and trumpeted Big Trouble. His forefeet came down upon the roof of the pit; he felt it break beneath him, but could not stop himself. Over and down he plunged, down with a frightful noise. The stakes caught him, the steep sides wedged him in. Big Trouble was not going any more to trouble the long houses.

The two who had toled Big Trouble into the pit marched in triumph back to the houses, at the head of the hunters. The two were big and strong, young, and according to the notions of their people, well-favoured. Back they and all the hunters came, shouting and chanting, through the leafy world with the red sun sinking behind them, and borne along, slung over a pole, the seven-feet-long curved, ivory tusks of Big Trouble. Out to meet them came the too old to hunt and the too young, came the man with the thorns and the gourds, came the women, all who had not hunted. Singing and shouting, the two tides met in the red sunset, beneath the black trees.

“Big Trouble is dead!
He will plague us no more!”

The sun was going down—the hunters were tired, tired! They ate what was given them, fell upon the earth and went to sleep. But the next day the long houses made a feast of commemoration—Big Trouble being gone forever.

Gata, who had hunted Big Trouble and raced over the roof of his pit, left the feasting ring about the council tree. The sun hung low, the river flowed, a crooked brightness. Most of the folk of the long houses were hoarse with singing and shouting, and drowsy with food and drunk with dancing and with a brew that they made out of forest fruits. Many were asleep, others noisy with no reason, others grunting and dull-eyed. Gata had danced, but she had not eaten and drunken to disorder and heaviness. Now she rose and left the feast, for she was tired of it. She expected one to follow. She had been watching Amru where he sat under the tree. Neither had he eaten and drunken and danced to stupidity.

Here and there in the fen were higher places, islands as it were, covered with a short grass. She took a path that led to such a spot. On either hand the reeds stood up, and they waved and sighed in the evening wind. The long houses disappeared from sight. Looking back she saw Amru upon the path.

Here, where it lifted from the fen, the earth rested warm. The sun moved red through a zone of mist. The tall reeds made a wall for the grassy island. Gata and Amru sat facing each other on the round earth, round like a shield, above the fen. A last ray from the sun brightened Gata’s hair that was darkly red. With the flat fen about them, and behind the low forest, they looked larger than life. They leaned toward each other, they pressed their hands together, their bodies together. Lifted by the lifting earth, they looked one piece.

The sun touched the rim of earth and coloured the river through the fen. Gata and Amru lay embraced.

Almost as soon as the sun sank, the moon rose. It came up round and golden—only the people of the long houses did not know gold. Still the folk slept, tumbled like acorns beneath the council tree. A few old people did not sleep, but sat nodding, nodding, and women who had young children did not sleep. But all the strong men slept, some lying like fallen trees, and others snoring and grunting. The man with the gourds, who had watched the farmers, did not sleep. He had a mind and a conscience that often kept him awake. Now, as the moon came up, he wandered forth from the littered strip before the houses. “One Other” often commanded his presence by night. Now he walked by the fen and regarded the moon. The night was hot, but the lean man felt a wildness and exaltation that kept him above the heat. He wore skirt and baldric and headdress of grass and mussel shells and coloured feathers, and he moved at tension through the hot, moist air.

Going so, he overtook another who had left those who gorged upon mammoth meat—Aneka the Wise Woman. He shook his coloured headdress; jealousy stung him. “Ha, Aneka! It is Haki who walks here by night and talks with One Other!—Why do you not stay and watch children so that they do not eat that-which-poisons?”

Aneka, wrinkled and brown, gazed at him and then over the fen to the golden moon. “There is much spite in you, Haki! I am older than you and I walked here first.”

They turned into the path through the fen. Haki waved his arms. “You and all the people cry to the Great Turtle. I cry to One Other!”

“One Other?” asked Aneka. “Where is she?”

Haki looked at her aslant. His voice sank. “Hush! He has gone into the ground for the night. He lives in the sun.”

The long houses used feminine pronouns when they spoke of the supernatural. Aneka stared at Haki. “He?” she said. “How bold are you, O Haki!”

But Haki, having plucked a feather from the future, came back to the present and its so solid seeming realities. A thrill of fear and awe of the Great Turtle ran through him, with thought of what vengeance she might take. “I call to the Great Turtle too!” he said hastily. “One Other and the Great Turtle are friends.”

“Can One Other make children?” asked Aneka.

It was the wall that towered before the male’s assertion of equality. Nothing with the masculine pronoun could do that! The people of the long houses knew all about mating. They had words in plenty for that. But they had no word like “father.” Haki uttered a guttural sound, half despair, half anger. He walked in silence while the moon climbed the sky. Then revolt again raised its head. “One Other will find out how!”

Aneka knew plants that poisoned and plants that healed. Stooping, she gathered a plant that used one way was poisonous and used another was healthful. Aneka was old and knew much. Throughout life she had had a watchful eye and comparing mind. But it was not her way to tell all that she knew…. She gathered stalk and leaf and moved with Haki in silence.

They were now somewhat deep in the fen. Presently, the path curving like a tusk of Big Trouble, they came to the shield-like, lifted place. The moon bathed it white. Clothed in that silver Gata and Amru lay asleep.

The old Wise Woman and the early Medicine Man stood and gazed. The moon looked very large, the fen very wide. The two interlaced figures seemed large with the rest of the world. Aneka and Haki watched awhile, then turned aside without waking the sleepers. Their path, bending, led them again to the edge of the fen, to the quarter whence they had come. Haki walked perhaps cogitating the pair, perhaps cogitating One Other who had gone into the ground for the night, One Other and his possibly developing powers. But Aneka looked over her shoulder at the full, bright moon.

That moon waned and other moons waxed and waned, and Gata and Amru remained companions and most fond of each other. That was not so usual among the people of the long houses. Only at great intervals arose among them some example of enduring attachment between woman and man. So novel was it that when it markedly happened the group paid attention. It was a social phenomenon of the first importance, and though they gave it no such sounding name, and indeed no name at all, they noted it.

For many days after the slaying of Big Trouble, Gata and Amru hunted in company. The forest received them in the morning; they returned at eve, bearing game or wearing trophies to show that certain four-footed enemies of the long houses were enemies no more. The people praised them. Children were told, “Grow up to be like Gata and Amru!”

Moons brightened, moons darkened. At last it was seen that Gata was making a child. After that, as the custom had grown to be, she hunted no more…. Amru was jealous of the child that Gata was making. He felt a fierceness toward it as though it were a man fighting with him for Gata’s favour. From that he passed to anger with Gata herself. Gata could not like Amru as much as Amru liked Gata. She would be showing superiorities! Savage pride was hurt. Amru and Gata had a loud quarrel, after which they parted as companions.

Gata went to the forest and walked there alone. Amru and other men were making a boat. Boats were a mystery belonging to men. Men had had that notion, had experimented with it, and then had declined to share knowledge and honours. Men went ostentatiously apart when they would make a boat. They kept a thicket screen between them and the long houses, and they stationed watchers. The women heard the thud of the falling tree, and they smelled the smoke when began the hollowing process—but for the rest it was a mystery. When the boat was made, it was held to belong to men.

Amru was strong and skilful and many of the folk had a liking for him, and he tended to become a leader. Now with other young men he was making a boat…. Gata walked alone by the edge of the forest. She could see, between her and the river, the curling smoke where the men worked. She carried a spear, and felt no especial terror of the forest. The forest and its creatures composed an old, familiar pattern in her brain. Within her was aglow another ancient pattern….

She sat down between the outcropping roots of a tree. A play of emotions filled her, kept her in a manner of iridescent dream. Around spread the forest floor of perished leaves, multitudinous, layer after layer of perished leaves. Overhead were the green leaves, quivering and thrilling. The savage woman sat and felt, and as best she could thought…. Imagination waked in her. Somewhere or other, she distinctly saw herself, moving beneath the trees, holding against her shoulder the child that would be born. She knew with certainty that she would be fond of it…. After this, she thought of Amru. She sat quite still, her spear beside her, her dark red hair shadowing her face. She felt at once old and young—as though she had lived long, and as though sky and earth were new….

Near the tree grew flowering bushes, and in the branchy mass of one was set a bird’s nest, filled with callow young. Gata fell to watching the nest and the bird that perched beside it. Hunter’s experience, savage experience, gave at wish an immobility of body, a mimicry of rooted life. Gata seemed as unmoving as the trunk of the tree. The nestlings opened their mouths and stirred their unfeathered bodies. The bird spread its wings and went farther into the flowery thicket. When it returned it had food in its beak. It fed its young. In a moment came, too, the male bird—it also bore food and fed the young. The mother bird perched once more beside the nest. The he-bird perched upon a second branch and sang. “Sweet! So sweet!” was its song, and the she-bird and the young birds seemed, liking it, to listen. Gata listened likewise.

The human group by the forest and the fen, as human groups everywhere upon the ancient earth, struggled with mysteries. Why was thus and thus so? Given a fact, what went before the fact, and what was to come out of it? The mind struggled, the mind pondered then as ever, and then as ever small, chance observations might put fire to long and long accumulated fuel…. “Sweet! Sweet!” sang the he-bird, and the she-bird listened, and the young birds opened and shut their mouths and pushed with their wings. Gata sat and watched. A compound happening, seen in her existence a myriad times with the physical eye, now, quietly and easily, took meanings unthought of before. Why did the he-bird bring food to the young birds? Why did the he-bird, as well as the she-bird, watch the nestlings and drive away harm? Why did the one, as well as the other, teach the young birds to fly?… “Sweet! So sweet!” sang the he-bird, and the she-bird listened, and the young birds opened and shut their mouths and pushed with their wings, and all around were the flowering bushes….

Suns rose from the fen and sank behind the forest, and Amru and his fellows finished making their boat. It was a longer boat, a more skilfully made boat than any the houses had yet seen. There was great triumph when, all pushing and pulling and lifting together, the men got it into the narrow stream by which they had worked, and then down this into the wide, slow-flowing river. The next thing was to be an Expedition—a seeing what was up the river, farther than any had yet gone!

Twelve young men went upon the Expedition. They hewed and trimmed saplings with which to pole the boat, for the oar was not yet. The long houses, women and men, watched them depart. It was a high occasion, one that called for vociferation, chanting, laughter, shouts to boat and boatmen until all had dwindled to a dark splinter upon the river, until a horn of the earth came between them and the houses. A number of the men followed along the bank for a distance, but after a time the forest grew chokingly thick and they desisted. Haki, shaking his string of gourds, tossing his arms in the air, went and returned with the followers…. Until the point of earth came between, Gata watched Amru, standing in the boat, in his hands the shaft of a young tree. Gata and Amru had not ended their quarrel.

The horn of earth hid the long houses. The boat could no longer hear the shouting and chanting. The fen dropped away and on both sides of the river stood the forest. It was very thick, it stood knee-deep in black, quaking earth. It dropped upon the flood leaves and petals and withered twigs, dropped them into the boat. The boat with the young men poling moved close to shore. The river was wide, but it looked to these Argonauts wider than wide, wide and fearful! That was ever the way with the impassable, with the heretofore unpassed. They hugged the shore. That was daring enough, so strange as yet was the fact of a boat at all!

After some time they came to the mouth of an affluent of the great river. They knew the nearer bank of this stream; nothing new to be gained by following it in a boat instead of afoot, ashore, among cane and trees! Amru gazed at the farther bank, turning the pole in his hands. He harangued the eleven. The adventurers poled across the affluent, drawing long breaths when it was done. Full of pride, they laughed exultingly. Amru stepped nearer chieftainship.

The twelve kept on, close to the shore, up the wide river. This shore was new. They peered through the rank waterside growth, but they saw nothing that they might not see nearer the long houses. Before the sun set they had gone a considerable distance. They found a bank of sand, and here they beached their boat, and gathering dead wood rubbed sticks together and made a fire. They had dried meat with them and made their supper of this. Night fell. The fire burned on, for protection against the serpent world and the four-footed world. One watched and eleven slept. Morning coming, they roused and had breakfast. In great good spirits they looked at the river and at their boat, the beautiful work of hand and brain! The twelve felt enterprising, gay, and bold. They pushed off the boat, climbed in, took their poles in hand. This day they went a long distance. The river became narrower, the world up here was new. In the afternoon they fastened the boat to a tree, took their spears and hunted meat. Having killed, they made a fire near the boat-tree, cooked and ate. Stars tipped the black trees of the opposing shore, stars mirrored themselves in the stream. One man watched, eleven slept. Dawn came; they sprang up and untied their boat.

Amru looked across the stream. Mist hung upon the opposite bank; then, parting, allowed a vision of a plain-like space of grass backed by hills sharp and soaring against a fleckless sky. Amru stared; then he said, “Let us go across the river,” and turned the sapling in his hand like an oar.

The twelve crossed the river in their hollowed and shaped trunk of a tree. That was a great thing to do and they applauded themselves. Amru felt affection for the boat that had done so well by them. He caressed it with his hand. Suddenly he gave the boat a name. “Tree-with-Legs!” he said. “Ko-te-lo!” and felt pride again in Amru’s prowess.

This shore was higher than that which they had left, higher and less heavily wooded. They found a shelving place up which they lifted and hauled Ko-te-lo. Then, as they rested, sitting around Ko-te-lo, they praised their collective prowess, and one among them said that the Great Turtle had helped them across. But Amru said that before they started he had gone into the forest with Haki and that Haki had sung and danced to One Other who lived in the sun. And then, because Amru felt very bold this morning, he said that One Other was like a man and not like a woman, and that he thought with Haki that it would be One Other who helped with the boat. That was natural, said Amru, since men made and used boats and not women. The Great Turtle was like a woman and helped women. Men wanted some one like men. One Other had a long house in the sun, and spears and clubs and boats—many boats.

The eleven listened, attracted but doubtful, somewhat awed and alarmed. “But he cannot make children—One Other cannot make children!”

Amru felt anger. Having been bold he must become bolder yet—that seemed a necessity in the case. Having entertained the idea of One Other, he must turn the idea away or make of it an inmate, clothe it, and give it powers. He wished to keep authority with the eleven, and it seemed to him that that could not be done if there was retraction. He must yet further aggrandize One Other. “He makes them with his hands,” he said. “He cuts them out of trees and sings to them and they come alive!”

The eleven pondered that. Possibly it might be done. Amru’s words made them see a hugely tall, strong, much-decorated man, a great hunter and spear-thrower, cutting shapes out of trees that presently came alive and stood and walked. Had they not themselves fashioned Ko-te-lo out of a tree? The eleven did not greatly care for Haki, but for Amru who seemed to agree with Haki they did care. They had for Amru a sentiment of admiration. He was treading firmly the unrolling path to chieftaincy. And all the long house men desired claims with which to set off woman’s claim. Their hearts began to lean away from the Great Turtle, toward the big hunter in the sun—he who could make persons.

The sun came up over the hills. They looked at the great ball with a freshened interest. But the landscape grew brighter and gayer and they turned toward more familiar explorations. If they climbed a hill they might see afar. Amru proposed that course and lifted from the boat his spear of tough wood with well-sharpened flint head. The others were content to follow him. They saw that Ko-te-lo was well placed above the water, then, armed with spear and club and flint knife, they took their way up the waves of earth. They might meet serpents and four-footed enemies. They did not look for foes who walked on two feet, and yet these were the ones they met.

Out of a ravine between hills rose a hunting band as well armed as themselves and outweighing them in number. There was some parley, but it led nowhere. The stronger party flung a spear—in a moment began a conflict that grew more and more fierce and red. When it ended four of the twelve lay slain. The eight, whelmed by numbers, lost spear and club and knife, had at last only naked bodies. The eight were captives. They glared, and Amru more redly than any, baring his teeth.

The victor group was one, it seemed, somewhat advanced in the notion of warfare everywhere, upon one’s own kind no less than other kinds. The settlement to which the eight were borne had that aspect. The people were fiercer, wilder than those who dwelled by the great river.

One of the eight died from a spear wound. Another had his brains beaten out one day by an infuriated giant of the tribe. The six in captivity saw three moons appear, wax and wane. Then they escaped—Amru the planner and leader.

A storm came up and blew between them and the tribe among the hills. They got down to the river—they found Ko-te-lo where they had hidden her. The people behind them knew naught of boats or boat-making. The six put off and poled for the other side of the river. A current caught them, carried them down, dashed them against a rock, the storm howling around. Ko-te-lo overturned—one of the six was drowned. The five got their boat righted, entered her again and came at last to their natal side of the flood. They put Ko-te-lo where she could not run away, then they lay down in cane and mire and slept like the dead. The storm beat the woods and roared and howled for a day and a night. They lay close until it was over and the sun shone out and the earth sent up steam. Then the five and Ko-te-lo turned homeward.

They had adventures, but not great adventures, poling down the stream, poling down the stream as fast, as steadily, as the five could go. Between the north bank and the south bank, between the sunset and the morning red, Amru thought of Gata.—Ko-te-lo and the five came in sight of the long houses.

Haki saw the boat upon the distant reaches. Waving his arms, bending and leaping, shrilly chanting, he cried the news. Women, men, children, the place rushed to the water’s edge. The five approaching broke into chanting. With a wild and deep rise and fall and swing of voice, they told the adventures of Ko-te-lo and the twelve. Before Ko-te-lo touched the bank the long houses knew the gist of it—how the twelve had travelled and for so huge distances—the crossing of the water and the naming of Ko-te-lo—the hunters encountered and how they were not stronger men, but more men—the slaying of the four—of the two—captivity—escape—the behaviour of Ko-te-lo—the drowning of the one—the final escape of the five—the journey home. Amru’s voice was the fullest, the most powerful and the richest. “Amru led them!” he chanted, and the four added their strength. “Amru led us!” “All brave men!” chanted Amru, and the four sounded with him. “All brave men!” chanted Amru, “we who are dead and we who are alive!” He stood in the prow of the boat and shook the young tree-trunk in his hand…. The voice of the long houses out-swelled toward Ko-te-lo and Amru and the four. All had been thought dead. To have five—and the five bravest, Amru and the four—was triumph! Ko-te-lo reached the bank amid a frenzy of voices, of gestures of welcome. The long houses would not let the feet of the explorers touch earth.

Triumph meant ceremonial feasting and dancing…. That evening such a feast was toward as had not been since the death of Big Trouble! It was a feast for the return of Amru and the four and likewise it was a birth feast.

The middle house was the greatest, the most substantial, the finest of the structures. Before it stood the carved-upon, the ochre-painted stone, sign and symbol of the Great Turtle. The houses could not remember how long it had been there, it had been there so very long. It had stood there before these houses were built, when they had only very little, rude houses of fresh boughs.

The middle house was high and wide and deep, a brown cavernous interior with a central hearth of stones. Here a fire burned, smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. The entrance to the house gaped wide as a true cavern mouth. Now, seen from within, another fire burned upon the baked earth terrace before the middle house and the other houses. Around this fire in an ellipse went the leaping, the dancing figures of the feasting, the commemorating people of the long houses. From within, from where Gata lay by the fire upon the hearth, it seemed that they went in an endless line, no end, no beginning. Only when the people in the middle house itself came between hearth and entrance-way did she lose the line, the endless line that yet brought Amru, time and time again, before the door. She lay upon wolf-skins, and beside her the day-old babe. Aneka sat by the fire, and women and men and children passed in and out. In the corners of the shadowy house were kept spears and shields and adornments fitted for such occasions. Men came to take these, changing from one dress to another. Without, within, beat the firelight. The house, the night without, were filled with forms, now dark, now bright. The forms had drums and rattles. Bom—Bommm! Bom—Bomm! went the drums.

The ellipse about the fire without broke. It became a serpentine line and entered the middle house. If Amru was a favourite, Gata was no less a favourite. Amru’s triumph for Amru magic—Gata’s triumph for Gata magic! In a world of mother-right, births were births. The dancers danced in the night without; they came with measured pace into the middle house and circled the hearth, the fire, the woman and her babe. Amru danced at the head of the young men.

Gata raised herself upon the wolf-skins. Her eyes dwelled upon Amru, followed Amru as he moved. She, also, had forgotten their quarrel. He seemed her delectable comrade, tall and ruddy, Amru the Great Hunter, Amru the Boat-Maker! The feast was his. The feast was hers. She looked at the babe upon the wolf-skin. The feast was the child’s. The feast was Amru’s, Gata’s, and the child’s. Her eyes shone bright, her cheek was ruddy as Amru’s own. The dancers went around her—they went around her and the hearth and the fire and the child. She looked at Amru, tall and ruddy, dancing there. He was dancing before her; his body swayed like flame, his body rose like flame and touched the roof-pole. She heard a singing of birds, she smelled the flowering bush. Boom! beat the drums. Boom! Boom! The fire swung, the fire climbed.

Gata rose upon her knees. She began to chant. Her voice was rich and full—strength seemed to have come in flood—it seemed that, to-morrow, she might hunt Big Trouble—save that Big Trouble was dead and done with! The drums stopped beating, the ring stood still. Persons yet without the house now came inside. There grew a throng. The fire-shine pushed from the hearth outward. Gata chanted.

“Folk of the Great Turtle—the Turtle who dwells Both inside and out of her house!”

“She is possessed!” cried the folk. “She is going to tell Truth!”

“Wise is Haki and wise is Aneka, but Wisdom
Drops in the wood for who picks it up!
Where I found Wisdom I lifted it, and bore it by day and by night.
Carrying it safe in the darkness, watching and saying naught.
Now will it live in the light that stirred in the dark,—
Now will I tell you Truth about woman and man and a child.

Bending, she took the child from the wolf-skin, held it high in her hands. The light leaped and caressed it. The great ring of women and men seemed to come into relation with it; they slanted toward it, it seemed to draw their bodies, to act as a magnet. Gata chanted on.

“Shout and dance, folk of the Turtle! Cry, ‘Gata is Mother!’
True and happy that is—but of this child two are mothers!”

Aneka rose beside her. “She has been given lash-lash to drink! She is singing foolishness! Beat the drums and dance!—Woman, woman, you had better go throw yourself into the river—”

But Gata’s voice sprang still. And the people of the long houses stood like a listening wood. A murmur had arisen, but it passed like a sigh. All hung intent.

“Now, rub the forehead and answer, you who sit by the council tree,
You who say, nodding your heads, ‘Boats are men’s work,
Children are women’s work!’
Now, answer, for I will question you, folk of the Turtle!
From the body of woman comes forth boy and girl—
In my hands lies him who will be a man—
How should a woman make both woman and man?
Woman only?
No wise one among you gives answer,
No woman and no man,
Haki nor Aneka!
Is it not a strange thing, folk of the Turtle?
Now, tell me again and give answer again,
Have you seen how often a child is like to a man,
One child to one man?
Has a man naught to do with a child that is like him—
A child that is like him—”

The people cried out, “Wisdom is on her!” The links of the ring shifted.

Amru stood before her. He spoke. “Yes, we have seen. Why is that, Gata? And why are men fond of children?”

Gata, holding the child aloft, rose to her feet. The flame-light wrapped her. It made of her hair a sunrise cloud, it made her flesh like flowers.

“Folk of the Great Turtle—the Turtle that watches the river Flow into the sea!
Now will I tell you a Truth—a truth that will bind us together.—
Mother is Gata—and mother is Amru!
Mother alike are Gata and Amru!
Amru and Gata came together.
To Gata’s strength Amru gave his strength.
To Amru’s strength Gata gave her strength.
Then the moons rose like dancers out of the fen {58}—
Many round moons—I counted them—many a dancer!
Then came forth him who will dance strongly, who will build boats,
Who will grow like Amru, whom I will name Amru,
For he is Amru!…
What woman have you seen make a child in a world of no men?
I am mother, and Amru—Amru and Gata make children!”

Like a flame she sank from her height, she lay among the wolf-skins, the babe against her knee.

The people of the long houses broke into loud, excited speech. Generations had walked as unconscious observers; now things observed took on order and meaning, came alive. Haki began to chant, and on the wall of the middle house there leaped and danced his tall shadow. Amru sat on the earth floor beside Gata—he put out a finger and touched the babe’s hand…. But Aneka said, “Woman, woman, you had better go throw yourself into the river—”

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CHAPTER IV

PROPERTY

The sky hung grey, with wisps of cloud. It vaulted a valley, and was propped by hills, long as billows of the open main. In part the hills stood wooded, in part they wore a robe of grass and stunted bush. The valley had a grassy floor, like a miniature plain. It spread jade-green beneath that sky. Far off soared, darkly purple, one mountain peak.

The huts, round in shape and fairly spacious, were built of upright stakes with an interweaving of wattled reeds. Close at hand huddled sheds and enclosures for flock and herd, and all stood together by the strand of a silver stream. Flock and herd, watched by herdsmen, wandered through the valley or drank at the stream. Near the huts boys were fishing, standing mid-leg in the running water. Seated among pebble and boulder a row of old men watched and with thin voices mocked or encouraged.

Evening drew on and the herdsmen brought the sheep and cattle to the folds. A woman came out of the largest hut, a strong woman with dark-red hair. Hand over eyes, her gaze swept the northern and western horizon. Bare hill met grey sky. She spoke to the herdsmen. They hearkened to her and answered, leaning on their staves. Said one, “We heard nothing and saw nothing at the other end where we were.” Another spoke in a surly voice, “If I were a war-man again and out of this valley, I would not come back!” A third said, “You might see, O Marzumat, from the top of the hill—” The woman nodded and turned away. She called to a boy and a girl at play near the folds, and they ran to her and walked with her.

Near the huts rose a hill, bare to the top, hard in this light as a mountain of jade. The woman and her children climbed it. At the top a wind blew, a swirling, melancholy wind. She looked again from this height, to the north and west. Nothing broke the earth-line, nothing came. The children, too, stared from point to point. The wind blew their hair into their eyes, whipped their bare limbs. They jumped up and down for warmth. “The dark is coming,” said the woman. “Not Saran and the others!”

Said the boy: “Let us go have supper! Bhuto is going to sing to us of how Bin-Bin killed the giantess!”

They went down the hillside. The boy and girl capered and danced upon the path. “Saran will bring me a bow and arrows and a dance-necklace!” cried the first; and “Saran will bring me a dance-necklace and an earring!” answered the second. They turned upon the red-haired woman. “What else will he bring, Mother?”

“Sheep and cattle and men to keep them, spears and shields and pieces of copper, grain and skins, and ornaments to wear.”

The boy danced and capered. “I am going to grow big! I am going to be war-head like Saran my father! I am going to fight other-people! I am going to bring home every kind of thing!”

They came to the level of huts, folds, and whispering stream. Earth and air that had been grey and green were now grey and purple. Fires burned in the larger huts, and the smoke, puffing out of the hole in the thatch, drifted and eddied. A smell of seething flesh wrapped the place. In pots of baked clay women were cooking the meat of sheep and goats.

Young, and in prime, and old, there were many women. Within wall and without wall showed the signs of their industries. They were weavers and made from the hair of the flocks a texture that to an extent took the place of the immemorial garments of beast-skins or of woven grass. They were potters, and they skilfully constructed baskets, great and small. Tanners, their tannery told where it was situated, a little down the stream. Living now upon creatures which they had corralled and mastered, the group, women and men, were mastered by the mastered and become wanderers and pasture-seekers. When this valley showed eaten up and small for the herds, another would be sought. Therefore there was little planting about the reed huts. But what farming and gardening was practised belonged, of old times, to women, and theirs were the stone mills for the bruising and grinding of grain. The indoor gear was counted theirs, and the rule of the house. Women and men, the group reckoned descent and took name from the side of the mother.

The woman who had climbed the hill was a chief woman. There were old women, wrinkled and wise, as there were old men, who sat by the fire or in the sun and were listened to and in much obeyed. But this woman, through native energy and also because she was paired with the strongest man, had achieved authority before she was old. The valley called her Marzumat.

Marzumat had few idle bones in her body. When now she went indoors, into the largest of the huts, she came to the hearth, she helped with the pots of meat. One great pot, steaming like a fire-mountain, must be lifted from the place of mightiest heat. With a rude handle, unwieldy and heated, it presented a weight for strong arms. Marzumat lifted it, swung it clear from the flame, and set it upon the unreddened hearth. With two or three of her fellows she took meal, mixed it with milk and water, made cakes, and, kneeling, baked them upon slabs of stone sunk in coals. Those around her talked; the place was filled with voices. Marzumat could speak on occasion, but to-night she was silent, her mind following Saran and the war-men.

The formless dark came down. Women lighted the torches of resinous wood, and women brought and filled from the huger pots bowls of fire-dried clay and trough-like trenchers of wood, and a woman, standing in the doorway, blew the summoning ram’s horn. All—women, old men and children and the herdsmen—ate together, in this greatest hut where the mess had been cooked, or just without, seated on the ground, in the light of the torches. Noticeably, there lacked young men and men in their prime. Among the herdsmen sat young men and middle-aged men. But certain of these were simple of look or in some way weak or maimed, and others had copper rings about their necks. That meant that the ring-wearers did not belong by nature to the group, but had been seized from some other group. No longer were they hunters or war-men. They were tamed to keeping the flocks and herds of the captors, companions to the weaker and duller of the captors’ own group. The intractable were killed, as were the too weak or dull. Class and caste were in the world.

The fire and the torches threw a smoky and uneven light. The sky hung black and low, a roof of cloud. The stream murmured over pebbles. It was the lambing season, and from the folds rose a continuous low noise, from the ewes and their young. In the circle of fire and torchlight shadows were thrown against the walls. The shadows rose and fell; now they were dwarfs and now they were giants and now they were something in between. The shadows were chiefly those of women. Women forms passed from darkness into light, from light into darkness, from darkness again into light. Marzumat was seated now and the fire-shine struck her brow and breast and knee. Behind her, on the wall, spread and towered her shadow.

Supper eaten, occurred a lingering, for the night was cold and the fire was warm. The smaller children went away, to creep under sheep-skins and fall asleep; the babes were hushed already, except a sick one that wailed in a hut a stone-cast away. A fire burned in the hut, and a woman passed to and fro before it, the babe in her arms. Certain herdsmen went to the folds and pens, others sat still about the fire in the open air. The older children, the old men, the many women remained in the zone of warmth and light. Talk was chiefly of the war-band that had gone forth against other-people dwelling by the purple mountain. Valley people and mountain people each had eyes for an intermediate rolling and verdant, desirable pasturage. Mountain war-men had struck a valley herd that had put hoof into this region, taking the beasts and killing the herdsmen. Now there was to be retaliation, and all the strong men had gone forth to retaliate and something beyond. Not in the memory of the valley people had there been such a Punitive Expedition!

Marzumat’s children, the girl and the boy, hung around a man with pale-blue eyes and a hawk nose and beard and hair as white as the fleece of a lamb. “Bhuto, Bhuto! Sing us about how we used to do!”

Bhuto sang out of the history of the group. In part he knew and in part he made up. He fixed his eyes upon the night beyond the fire, he marked time with a large foot and a veinous hand. He had a sonorous voice, a capacious memory, and a seeing eye. To-night the strain, the wishing-to-know felt throughout the cluster, was apprehended by him more clearly than by most. So his voice deepened, his words rang, the acts he narrated seemed neither far off nor obscure. Presently the whole cluster was listening. Bhuto chanted of long-since raids and war-bands.

The boy and girl sat beside his knees. Bhuto came to a traditional pause. Part one of the ballad was done.

The girl spoke. “Bhuto, why are there no war-women? Why do not women go with war-bands and fight other-people?”

“Once they did,” answered Bhuto. “That was long ago.”

“Why did they stop?”

“It was seen that peoples died—not here a man and here a woman—but peoples.”

“How did they die?”

“They were not born. So it was seen that women must not be killed and killed. So the women and men held a great council, and after that there were war-men, but not war-women.”

“But Bin-Bin killed the giantess—”

“Yes. Every people had a giantess who would not stay at home. The one Bin-Bin killed was a war-head. She was tall as a tree and she could run like a deer and see at night like an owl, and when she shouted the wood shook! But Bin-Bin killed her. Now women all stay with the houses and the flocks and herds. If other-people come here and make fight, they will fight. But they do not make war-bands. Men do that. Men have bows and arrows and shields and spears.”

The girl fell silent, sitting with her chin upon her knees. Bhuto began to chant the second half of the ballad.

A great distance away, as these people counted distance, behind the curtain of hills, at the foot of the mountain peak, the cloud-roofed day and evening had gone after another fashion. It had gone with struggle, fury, jubilation, terror, death, and subjection.

The war-band from the valley numbered a hundred men. The group upon which they fell in the hour before dawn fought back, men and women. But it was taken by surprise and bewildered, and many could not reach their weapons, and many were pierced with spears almost before they rose from sleep. The hundred wrought havoc, slew and bound. When the east showed purple, resistance lay dead, or glared, with tied hands, from a space into which, naked, it had been driven like a beast. The old men, the old women, the young children, were put to death. Many strong men and women lay slain. Resistance, raging, biting at its bonds, came to be the resistance of not more than the hundred could handle as captives. They set the huts afire, but not before there was gathered from them spoil and booty. This group had possessed flocks and herds. Flocks and herds were taken for riches for the group in the valley. The valley men had never before had so complete a victory. This was different from mere raids against herds or herdsmen, or chance contests upon plain or hill, away from the houses, away from the heaped goods!

The attackers sat down and ate and drank and rested from labour in the light of the burning huts, under the shadow of the purple mountain. They rejoiced when they looked at the heap of spoil, and at the sheep and the cattle and the human dead and the captives.

The leader of the hundred was a strong man, tall and ruddy, with the seeming of one who would march in front. In other lives, before war between human beings had well developed, he would have been a leader of the chase, a mighty hunter of the four-footed, a chief in expeditions, explorations. Now he was war-head.

He and all the other men from the valley rested through a smoky, a fire-filled night. When the day came they prepared their leave-taking. Yet another distance away dwelled another group, that, seeing a glow in the night, might send their war-men in strength. War was an endless chain, though these minds were not advanced enough to find that out.

Back among the huts in the valley the night passed, the day following passed, another night passed. The cloud-roof sank to the horizon, the sky above sprang high and clear. Dawn arose with purple figures in the east that looked like girdles and necklaces of tinted shells and pebbles. Dawn in the north and west showed a cool pallor, a blank wall behind the long hills.

The women came singly or in clusters from the huts, the herdsmen from where they had slept apart in a structure built against the sheep-fold, the older children with the women. All looked to the north and west, as they had done many times since the hundred went out. Now they were rewarded—now they saw the war-men coming back!

They saw them upon the top of a bare hill, drawn against the pale wall, and following them captives, and sheep and goats and cattle and asses, and these last heaped and burdened with the lighter spoil. The people of the huts shouted, leaped in the air, clapped their hands together.

“Marzumat! They are coming!”

“Bina! They are coming!”

“Ito! They are coming!”

The war-men had with them horns, a rude drum and cymbals. Faint clangour and blaring fell from the hill-top to the huts by the stream. The frieze showed black against the pale wall, then the east brightened and gave it colour. The line bent, came down over the shoulder of the hill. The horns blew, the cymbals clanged, the drum beat louder and louder. In the huts were yet a drum, cymbals fashioned of copper, ox-horns. The women snatched these—all who could run and hasten poured from the huts by the stream, hurried with cries and music of welcome over the valley floor. They went with a dancing step, and Marzumat at the head lifted the cymbals and clanged them together. The two bands met by the stream, where the mist was slowly lifting.

The war-head’s name was Saran. He and Marzumat met first. “Hail, Saran! Hail, Saran!” she cried with laughter and jubilee. “Hail, Marzumat!” he answered, and shook his copper-pointed spear and struck it against his shield of plaited osier bound with leopard-skin.

All met with acclaim, shouting out triumph and welcome. The older children took part. The native-born herdsmen joined in. Those herdsmen who were born on the farther side of a mountain or a river made slighter welcome. But of these some had been taken young and hardly remembered their own people, and some had been broken in, or, indifferent, took luck as they found it. Besides, the group against which the war-men had gone was not their group, and that being so, was outside their range of sympathies. So the herdsmen, too, shouted.

Of the war-men who had gone forth, seven or eight made no returning. For these the valley, when it had caught breath, burst into ceremonial mourning. Out of the mass sound emerged a sharper crying, a wailing of those most fond of the slain men, mourning that persisted when the other ceased. The other ceased because, death to the contrary, here was so much victory and spoil! Jubilation remounted. In the background rose the lowing and bleating of the captured herds. There was a great, swarming noise, and movement to and fro.

The first welcome gone by, there came into fuller notice the fruits of the raid, the greatest in the memory of the group. Those who had stayed by the huts saw the new flocks and herds, and that possessions would be increased. There would be need of a larger valley, of a plain! Hearts swelled with self-acclaim. The confused bleating and lowing was sweet as flutes and pipes in their ears.

There was pushed forward one part of the human spoil. The war-men exhibited the other-men whom they had taken. New herds would have new herdsmen. Trees that must be hacked down, drudging work that must be done, would not take war-men’s valuable time! Moreover, there was now experienced, and would be further experienced, a dark pleasure in authority, in power exercised over another. So long had human beings had power over beasts that exhilaration was passing from that situation. Authority there had lost its first lusciousness. Once it had had that taste. But with the taking of beings formed like themselves zest had come back to the palate.

The valley group was accustomed to such captives. It was among accepted things that bands of men, roving afar, meeting other bands of men, should capture, when they did not kill, and keep the captured for use. That was old story, old song. The women, the old men, and the striplings made loud admiration over these riches also, and the evidenced prowess of valley men. The swarm worked again and there came into the foreground the before-time obscured, other row of captives.

Silence fell among the valley people, astonishment upon those who had stayed, upon those who had gone, embarrassment. Marzumat was the first to speak. “Women—”

Saran answered with a wave of his arm. “Women we took and brought to you women. We take men to work for us and save us trouble. Now you shall have women to work for you and do as you tell them. Why not?” He spread his arms. “We took them for you, O women,—a gift!”

The throng worked. Insensibly, the women of the group drew together, leaving each woman the side of some man. They became compact, unitary, the woman with the dark-red hair in front. Presently the women of the valley were massed here, the men there. Between stood or lay, fallen upon the ground, the captive women. They were twelve in number.

Marzumat spoke. “Never, O Saran,—never, men of the valley, never, O women, was there heard of such a thing! You have committed evil! Mao-Tan will say to In-Tan, ‘Let us smite them!’”

Her voice rose loudly, her arms were spread to the skies. Behind her the serried women echoed assent. The war-men moved a little, to and fro. “Talk for us, O Saran!”

Marzumat’s voice went on. “Men may take other men. If women, fighting side by side with war-men are killed, they are killed. Mao-Tan says, ‘It cannot be helped.’ But men may not take women and bind them and say to them, ‘Come!’ or ‘Go!’ Mao-Tan!—Mao-Tan!”

Saran faced Marzumat. He threw out his hands. “We took trouble, O Marzumat! We set up a stone and burned food upon it, and poured drink for Mao-Tan. We danced and sang before her. Then we did the same for In-Tan. In-Tan will keep Mao-Tan from being angry. Otherwise she might be angry for a while! But we saw In-Tan sitting like an eagle upon a tree and heard him talking like the wind. He said, O Marzumat, that valley people were his people, and that Mao-Tan was not angry!”

The war-men made a deep, corroborating sound. They had seen the eagle and heard the whistling and searching noise, and Saran’s imagination leading, they had divined the words. A black-bearded man, next to Saran in moral weight, gave articulate testimony. “O women of the valley! In-Tan said that Mao-Tan and he held in hatred other-people, and cared not what befell them, whether they were women or whether they were men!”

Saran continued. “We take men to work for us; why should you not have women to work for you and do as you tell them? They are not our men. They are not our women. Other-group-men, other-group-women! Old Bhuto says that, long-time-ago, it was a new thing to make other-men work for us and be our herdsmen. At first, Bhuto says, we had men who did not like that. But soon they felt like the rest of us.—We thought, O Marzumat, that we would please you! O women of the valley! they can carry water for you and grind the corn. It is pleasant to rest while another works! Many things are right when they are other-people. They will call you ‘mistress’ and do as you tell them—”

The body of the valley women seemed slightly to sway. Two or three voices were lifted. “Let us take them! Let us keep them! There grows so much work to do!” The women and the war-men seemed to slant toward each other.

The black-bearded man spoke again in a loud and cheerful voice. “They are riches, O women! It is pleasant to be saved weariness. It is sweeter than honey and like the wearing of ornaments to sit and see other-people do what we bid! Now men have the most ornaments and rest longer under the trees!”

A woman burst into laughter. “Mao-Tan knows that that is so!”

But Marzumat spoke again. “Men take other-men. But women have not taken other-women. Now, to-day, shall men lay hands upon women and cry, ‘Our prize and our riches’?”

“If we took them, O Marzumat, O women, did we not take them for you? It is your bidding that they will do! They are your prize and your riches! Take them now, and is it not as if you had taken them yonder”—he gestured with his spear toward the purple mountain—“taken them yonder yourselves, and brought them to the valley?”

“What you say is true, O Saran!”

The women behind her echoed, “It is true.” If, then, it was true, and if Mao-Tan was not jealous for women?… Ornaments were desirable, and ease from work was desirable—riches were desirable—and power—power more than anything was desirable!… The soul of Marzumat inclined toward service from those other-women.

“They are a gift!” said Saran. “If Mao-Tan is not angry, why should Marzumat be so?”

Why indeed? Marzumat lifted her hands. “I do not know.—Where are the children of these women?”

“Not all had children.—These people are other-group people. In-Tan does not care for them—Mao-Tan does not care for them! The women are yours. We only took them for you.”

The day was bright and sunny, the valley a cheerful green. The men were back from danger with victory. The valley had new wealth; every one wanted to be rejoicing, to be counting the goods…. The twelve other-group women, young women and women in their prime, stood or crouched, sullen and vengeful in their bonds. Only one spoke. “May our gods slay your gods! May our gods kill and devour your children! Vile, vile,—you are vile and your gods are vile!”

Anger broke against her, anger of women and of men. She had cried out loudly. Moving as she did out of the cluster of her fellows, she had come to face Marzumat and the children of Marzumat. Her arms being bound she could not gesture with hand or finger. But she jerked her head, and her eyes burned toward those she fronted. “Mo-Tal hear me!” she cried. “Slay their gods and them! Mo-Tal! Mo-Tal! Slay their children!”

Marzumat grew all red. Her brows drew together, a vein in her forehead swelled, her nostrils widened, her teeth were uncovered, and her dark-red hair appeared to bristle. She stood for a moment tense and still, then, moving forward, she struck the mountain woman a blow that brought her to the earth. “Mao-Tan turn your talk upon yourself!”

The valley women behind her laughed with anger, and also now with willingness to triumph. “Their gods are not strong like our gods! They can do naught!—Let us keep them and make them work!”

“Agreed!” said Marzumat, the red yet in her face and the vein showing in her forehead.

The lambing season, the spring season, the season of fresh green and of birds that sang from every flowering bush passed into a summer hot and dry. The stream shrank to a silver thread, the flocks found but parched herbage. Sometimes clouds came up, but they never overspread the blue vault. They rolled away, and the earth again lay bare beneath the sun. The sun bleached the huts, turned brown the growth upon the hillsides, and the standing trees. The herdsmen went afar with the bands of the four-footed. The bondwomen carried water over the wide, pebbled stretch from which the stream had gone, or kneeling before hollowed stones, beat and ground the corn into meal. The weather made a fever in the blood. It was weather in which effect followed like a hound at the heels of cause.

A woman stood in the doorway of one of the huts. She looked at the grinding women, but looked somewhat absently. It was not a novelty now—other-group women grinding the valley corn! Presently, however, she remarked an absence. “Where is Gilhumat?”

A woman looked up from the grinding, shaking elf-locks from her eyes. “Endar, the black-bearded, shot an arrow at a great bird. The bird fell over the hill-top. Endar bade Gilhumat stop her grinding and go find the bird.”

The woman in the doorway turned her head over her shoulder. “Marzumat, come hither!”

Marzumat came out of the dusk. “Endar,” said the first woman, “shot a bird and it fell over the hill-top. Endar bade Gilhumat stop her grinding and go find the bird!”

“Where is Endar?”

“Lying under the tree yonder.—There is Gilhumat now!”

They watched Gilhumat coming down the hillside. She bore upon her shoulders a large bird, its plumage showing copper hues in the sun. Marzumat looked at her with her brows knitted, her lips parted. Gilhumat approached the level ground, came upon it, and to the tree under which Endar had stretched his length. She lowered the bird from her shoulder and it lay motionless beside the war-man. Gilhumat returned to her grinding.

The woman with the dark-red hair breathed quickly. Leaving the doorway she moved through the beating sun to the tree where lay Endar. “Endar!”

Endar sat up. “What is it, O Marzumat?”

“When did it begin with valley people that a man, killing meat, can send a woman to bring in that bird or beast? I ask you when, Blackbeard?”

Blackbeard scratched his head. “I was asleep, O Marzumat!—It was not a freewoman, but a bondwoman.”

“Bondwomen are ours, not yours!—O Mao-Tan! a woman to be bidden by a man to do his work and save him trouble! The sky will fall! If it falls or not, O Endar, do that again and valley women will deal with you!”

Saran appeared beside them. “She is angry,” explained Endar, “because I bade one of those mountain women do a small thing! War-men may bring the meat, but they must not put hand in the pot!”

The outer corners of his eyes moved up, his white teeth flashed, he laughed and stretched his arms. The huge muscles showed.

Marzumat’s eyes narrowed. “My heart will not be heavy,” she said, “when Mao-Tan gives Endar to the beasts to eat!”

Endar’s laughter stopped. He put up his arm and with the fingers of the other hand made a sign in the air. “Do not wish evil upon me! In-Tan hear me say it! I will bring the next bird myself!”

The tree under which he lay edged a grove that stretched toward the stream. Marzumat went away into this and Saran moved with her.

“What harm,” said the latter, “if Gilhumat brought the bird that Endar shot? Endar is next to me in the valley.”

His tone was sullen. Marzumat stood still. They were in the heart of the grove, out of earshot unless they raised their voices loudly. The people of the valley had hardly as yet developed restraint in quarrel. But something in this man and woman kept them from shouting each at the other, made them prefer the space of trees to the trodden earth by the huts.

“Ah—ah!” said Marzumat. “You have not set Gilhumat, that is bondwoman to women, to do your work.—But you have followed Maihoma when she was sent at twilight to draw water!”

Saran’s eyes, too, narrowed. “Is a great war-man not to speak to spoil that he brings?”

“‘Spoil’! O Mao—Tan! I wish that you had never brought that ‘spoil’!{76}”

“We brought it. You took it.”

“You speak the truth!—Mao-Tan, Mao-Tan! I wish that the spoil was back in the mountain!”

“Will you, O Marzumat, send it back?”

Marzumat stood with parted lips. Moments went by, leaves dropped in the grove, a bird flew overhead. Through an opening between the trees showed the huts and in the burning sun the bondwomen grinding at the mills…. The woman who, the first day, had called upon her own god to smite the valley people and their children was seen grinding…. “They are useful,” said Marzumat. “But men are not to bid them work. And men are not, O Saran, to follow them in the twilight when they go to draw water!”

Saran’s tanned face paled which was Saran’s way of showing anger. “How will you help that, red-haired one? You have strong arms. But will you bind our arms—mine and Endar’s? Will the valley women bind the war-men’s arms—set them to keeping sheep, away from the huts and the spoil?”

Red flowed over Marzumat’s face and throat and breast. “It is in my mind that we might bind many of you!”

“Not so many that the rest could not loose!” Saran stretched out his arm, regarded the play of muscle. “And we have the spears, the shields, the bows and arrows! Men are stronger to fight than women. As for Mao-Tan—Mao-Tan is very strong, but so is In-Tan. In-Tan has grown as strong as Mao-Tan.”

Out of the blue had come a flash and thunder, a shock unimaged before. Each stared at the other, each pale, each breathing short. Marzumat broke the silence. “What talk is this? The Ji-Ji, the ill spirits, have taken this place!… And all the same, I warn you, O Saran, not to follow Maihoma by twilight or by sunlight!”

With that she burst from the grove, and went over the shadeless earth, past the succession of huts, to the place where the bondwomen were grinding the corn. She spoke to a woman grinding. “You are bondwoman to women, not to men! Why, then, did you hearken to Endar when he called you, or go bring the bird he had shot?”

Gilhumat shook her hair back from her face, straightened her body from the grinding. “Why?… All of you are other-people, hated by Mo-Tal! Bring for Endar?—grind for Marzumat? Where is the difference to Gilhumat?” Her features twitched. “I had rather bring for men than grind for women! Women—women who bind their own hands and eat their own flesh! To do Endar’s bidding?—to do Marzumat’s bidding? Mo-Tal hear me, it hurts less to do the first!”

Marzumat made as if to strike her. “Do that also,” said Gilhumat. “Then weep when evil comes!”

The other withdrew her hand. “I will not strike you for your words, Gilhumat! But if you turn again from the task we set to a task a man sets, I will strike you many times! And what I say to Gilhumat I say to every grinding woman!”

“Say on,” said Gilhumat; and with her handstone crushed the grains of corn spread upon the hollowed surface.

That overheated day went by, another day, other days, and all were heated, with clouds that puffed up from the horizon, deceived and went away, leaving the earth unclad and the sun a fire. A number of valley women, working in the morning in a bean-field, observed a war-man of no great account take a basket of fish from his own shoulders and put it upon those of a bondwoman. That same day Gilhumat was seen to answer Endar’s crooked finger and, leaving her grinding, carry for him the bundle of osiers for mending broken shields. This was told to Marzumat, who gave Gilhumat the promised blows. But that did not turn away the Ji-Ji from the place! She left the punished woman, foaming at her from the ground, and as she entered the great hut saw in the dusk, in the distance, Saran with Maihoma.

That night there broke a great thunderstorm. The Ji-Ji might be praised for bringing rain and coolness, but blamed for the most frightening noises and a sky of white fire! For the night the valley group forgot differences within itself and huddled together in mind as huddled the bodies of the sheep in the folds. All to be thought of was the Ji-Ji, and if the upper spirits would hold back the Ji-Ji from all lengths. The Ji-Ji struck down trees and smote one of the cattle pens. The Ji-Ji threw hugely long, crooked spears of white fire and uttered noises that made women and men and children stop eyes and ears. Then at dawn the Ji-Ji went away.

They left the air cool and bright. Old times seemed to come back to the valley, though new times could not be wholly killed either. Old times thought to-day that new times might be held in bounds.

Copper was wanted by the war-men for spear-heads. Copper was dug out of the hills to the south. Half of the war-men went on an expedition to get copper. They were gone a week. Those who stayed at home seemed in a quiet mood, in what, later in time, might be called a spiritual mood. Back of the grove stood a large, rude, booth-like structure appropriated by valley men to their sole use. Here they kept ritual costumes and here they feathered arrows, and adorned with red and black pigments quiver and shield, and did other work purely pertaining to great hunters whether of beast or man. The men who did not go for copper resorted to this place, returning to the centre at mealtime. Day after day they kept the good mood. The women heard that they were working upon an image of In-Tan. That seemed a good thing to do!

The herdsmen went afar with the flocks, the bondwomen did as they were bid to do, ground the corn and carried the water. Certain of them, like certain of the herdsmen, ceased to make protest outward or inward. Gilhumat said nothing, but kneeling, crushed the grains beneath her handstone. Maihoma carried water from the stream to the huts. She moved slowly, with a body stiff and sore, for Marzumat, the chief woman, had beaten her terribly, as she had beaten Gilhumat. The valley women went about their manifold business, pursued vocation and avocation with a feeling of serenity.

The war-men came back, laden with copper. At the same time came again the heated weather. It seemed also that the Ji-Ji had only been asleep….

After five days of heat and Ji-Ji in an awakened condition, things changed again. One of the larger flocks, grazing far to the west, wandered out of the valley upon a plain behind the chain of hills. Here a band of other-men fell upon them. There had been three herdsmen. Two were slain. The third, a swift-foot, escaping, won back to the valley with the news.

The war-men who had gone for copper and the war-men who had stayed at home went out, swift-foot, to the west, out of the valley, through the hills to the plain. It was a small, newly arrived group that they found there, a wretched cluster of huts, wattle and dab, with little more in the way of possessions than the stolen flock. But the men and the women fought like wolves. Even the children bit and tore. But the group was very small.

The valley men killed and those they did not kill they bound. Fighting over, they ransacked the place, but found little spoil beyond their own recovered flock. Only in one hut they found jars filled with a fermented drink new to them and stronger than the drink the valley made.

The weather was hot and dry. The mood of the copper-digging and of the making of In-Tan’s image was passed. The struggle-lust and delight in killing, the more complex delight of binding fast the unslain, was over with for the time. Victory had slaked thirst for revenge. The goods were back with usury. The minds of the valley men were for the moment empty. They sat upon the earth and lifted to their lips the jars of drink.

It seemed to the valley men that their minds enlarged. There came to them from In-Tan, or perhaps only from Ji-Ji, a blissful sense of power and daring. They were such great war-men!

The captives remained bound in a space between the huts. The two or three men among them were those who, in the face of odds, had thrown down their weapons. The rest—the women—had fought to the end, but had been encumbered by the children. Now the children were dead, those two or three weaker men cowed. But the women reviled from their bonds. It was shameful that they should thus revile such great war-men, favourites of gods and Ji-Ji!

They looked at the women over the rims of the jars of drink. They had not looked so at the women of the purple mountain, the women they had taken to the women of the valley for a gift. But it seemed a long time since that day! Points of view must change in a changing world…. The hot weather and the Ji-Ji and the drink—never the little light man in the heart falling asleep while the little dark man stirred and grew…. The war-men began to reason, and it seemed to them that they reasoned loftily. The world was divided into one’s own people and other-people to whom nothing was owed. In-Tan certainly and probably Mao-Tan approved the division. Now, women—own-group women and other-women…. Certainly own-group women chose absolutely when they would pair and with whom they would pair. That was order-of-nature. No one questioned it…. But these other-group women…. If you could make war with other-women—if you could kill them—if you could bind them to their own door-posts—if you could take them for bondwomen to grind corn and carry water…. What else might you not do if you were sure that order-of-nature would not rise and blast you? Casuists sprang up and inner and outer arguing against any such abstractions as natural sanctities. The war-men tilted the jars of drink and found that the liquor helped to free them from abstractions. It gave them fire, it added height on height to their courage. It helped them to questions such as “For what, then, was greater strength given?” and “Do sanctities apply to the conquered?” It helped to the answers and the answers were according to their desires. Saran and Endar were the subtlest disputants…. All drank again and the pitchy fire within broke its bounds. Presently they were quite free from abstractions. They moved toward the other-group women….

The hot night went on. The day came up in a blaze of light.

The war-men quitted the plain and threaded the hills, but they did not carry these women with them. The dead and the yet living, they left behind all of this group. It had been a small, small settlement, seekers of fortune newly arrived in the land. The valley men took with them their own flock and the few beasts that the cluster had owned, but then these could say naught, nor awaken the wrath of Mao-Tan….

They marched back to the valley over parched herbage. The tale that they told to the huts was of a band of robbers who had fought until one and all were slain…. As to their greeting from the women of the valley, it was cooler than once it had been. Maihoma was dead. Gilhumat ground corn in silence.

The weather was hot. Mao-Tan and In-Tan were perhaps somewhere in green meadows by waterfalls. But the Ji-Ji liked heat and dryness and a feeling in the air like a singing bow-string. The first day and night went by in a general taciturnity. The second day Saran and Marzumat encountered under a tree by the field of corn.

“Maihoma that is dead was a fair woman,” said Saran. He was pale and his nostrils opened and shut.

“So?” said Marzumat. “All of us die, and even fair women.”

The two stared each at the other. The sky like fire, and the Ji-Ji active, and man and woman at odds….

The next day held quiet. Most of the men went to the booth behind the grove. Endar, going, said to women in the bean-field that In-Tan’s image occupied them. He said that it was going to be a great In-Tan, twice as tall as a man. They meant to set it up in front of the men’s booth, and it would be a great help in keeping women from the place. Endar’s black beard moved, and his white teeth flashed, and his eyes crinkled up.

Women, truly, went not to the place, but two, passing at no great distance, heard first Endar and then Saran haranguing, and coming to the fields reported what they had heard. It had not been much, a few shouted-out words, chance-caught. “Lesson…. Teach a lesson!… Show power, and then have peace!” The women knew no more than that of the harangue. It was to be presumed that the men were talking of raid and foray against other-people.

That day passed. The next day all the war-men went early to the grove and the booth. A woman, weaving, spoke to a woman making baskets. “When I waked at first light, the men were taking spears and clubs to the great booth. I asked what they were doing and they said they were going to make a hunting-dance before the In-Tan they are cutting from a tree.”

The sun walked up the sky in a dazzling robe and throwing arrows of heat. Women were in the bean-field and the corn-field. They wove at rude looms. With bone needle and fibre thread they were sewing garments. They were making baskets; they were preparing to fire a rude kiln and bake therein vessels of clay. The meat had been killed for the next meal; they had brought it from the pens, they were quartering and dressing it. They were at work upon this and at work upon that, or they were resting from work. Some were crooning to babes. The bondwomen worked without being able to say, “Now I shall rest awhile!” The noise of all their industries blended into a steady, droning, humming, not unpleasing sound. Here and there a woman sang, and through the whole fluted the voices of children.

A woman at the loom shaded her eyes with her hands. “The men are under the trees, dressed up to dance.” Another looked. “They are coming from under the trees—that’s a new dance!” A third, carrying a large jar, stopped to look. “They have their spears and clubs. I see Saran. He has hawk wings bound upon his head.—Ha, you grinding women! They looked that way when they came down upon your huts!” As she strained to look, her grasp upon the jar loosened. It slipped from her hands and broke at her feet in twenty fragments. “Mao-Tan! choke that Ji-Ji!”

The women generally began to observe. Marzumat rose from a stone beside a hut door. The men left the grove. The sun dazzled against their array—she saw Saran with the hawk wings bound upon his head….

Saran and Endar and all the others came across the space between the grove and the huts. They came shouting and swiftly. The women saw their procedure as inconceivable; then, in a moment, the inconceivable became the actual.

While the men used their weapons, their spears and clubs for advantage, they were not used to the uttermost. But they made for advantage, as did muscular strength and training in battle, as did organization, as did prepared attack! Even so, there was for a long time breathless, swaying struggle. The women were not weak-thewed, and behind them stood ancient powers of combat. Furious anger sustained them against the valley men. Man and woman, old kindnesses, old unities, were forgotten. All grudges were remembered, all separatenesses. They wrestled, they fought, and around all their own noise rose the crying of children.

The war-men had strong advantage, and they had swelled their numbers by the herdsmen. A woman and man, wrestling together, reeled near to the eleven bondwomen where they were gathered by the grinding-stones.

The woman cried, panting. “Gilhumat, you and the others give help!”

Gilhumat’s laughter rose and whistled like a storm. “Give you help? No! We shall stand still and rest, O women who grind women like corn!”

Marzumat cried to no one. She lifted a great stone, struck Endar Blackbeard with it, and stretched him at her feet. Two war-men came against her, then herdsmen crept up behind and seized her arms. Saran appeared before her, shaking his spear. She foamed at him and his hawk wings.

At last there parted the struggling mass—the men flushed conquerors, the women flung to earth, bruised with clubs, panting, beaten…. The men produced a rite which, with some self-pluming, they had devised and rehearsed.

Bondmen drove toward the trodden space sheep from the fold. Saran, the war-head, Endar Blackbeard, and other chief men took bow and arrow, shot strongly, and brought this game to earth…. The men were here, the beaten women there, the slain beasts lying beyond the two groups.

Saran stood forth with Endar just behind him. “O valley women, war-men have been hunting, and are tired!—Go you and bring in our game!”

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CHAPTER V

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Vana lay awake at night pondering how to get riches for her children. Between the middle of the night and morning, not being able to sleep, she rose and stood in the doorway of her house of unburned brick. Mardurbo, the children’s father, had riches, but when he died, in a world where descent was counted from mother-side, his riches would go to his brother Kadoumin and other kindred. They would not go to his children because children did not take name nor inherit from fathers, but from mothers. That was order-of-nature, and accepted like the seasons, or sun at day and stars at night. When she, Vana, died, her possessions would go to the five children. Once they would have lapsed to her kindred in entirety—the five children, her sisters and brothers, the children of her sisters, and so on. But now old usage would give what she left chiefly to her nearest kin, and they were the children of her body. Her children would have her riches, such as they were, because over the earth, in her tribe and in all the tribes she had ever heard of, descent was reckoned from women. By the same token they would not have Mardurbo’s wealth.

It was all right as long as women had in the world the most wealth!—If she had much riches and Mardurbo little, she would not be standing here wrinkling her brow and not even seeing the round moon behind the juniper trees and the well and the cluster of sheep astray. It was right enough where there was equal wealth. But Mardurbo was much richer than Vana and growing richer all the time. All men, it seemed to Vana, were growing richer than women. Her lips parted. “They say that once-upon-a-time inside the house was richer than outside….”

She stepped without her door upon the crooked, sun-baked street of the town that spread around. Many small houses of unburned brick, lanes and paths, knots of trees, rude, surrounding wall of stake and clay, the place lay still in the bright moonlight. She looked at her own house where she had left her children sleeping, and near them, sleeping too, her three bondwomen. Her house was not larger than another, but she thought with satisfaction of the goods that it contained. She had much household gear and garments and ornaments. In the moonlight she looked at the bracelets upon her arms. They were of silver, and her anklets were of silver. She was a most skilful weaver, and upon his next trading journey Mardurbo would take with him certain webs and bring to her in return earrings and frontlet of gold. She knew, better than any in the town, how to make rich patterns in her weaving, and she had taught her bondwomen. With her work she had bought those women from a trading band coming from the south, and now they worked for her and she sold the cloth they made and the finer stuff that she wove herself. She was richer than most women and the knowledge made her proud. And still Mardurbo was the richest. And when he died all that he had would go to his kindred, and his children would have naught of it.

The moon might have said to her: “It will be long before you die. You are young yet—you and Mardurbo.” That was true, but often persons died before they were old. Mardurbo went afar, trading in towns afar. Robber bands might attack his company—a rival trader might creep in and slay him—he might come to a tribe that believed in seizing goods and giving death in return—he might eat of poison, grow sick and die—as he crossed desert places a lion might spring! He would die and flock and herd and drove, sheep and ass, ox and horse, and all his bondmen, bronze and iron and silver, weapons and well-made garments and ornaments—all, all go to his kindred! She felt bitter toward that kindred, and bitter toward Mardurbo.

Especially she hated that Kadoumin should have Mardurbo’s wealth.

She stared at the moon above the juniper trees. It was like a silver shield. She wished that she had such a shield. She wished that she could weave silver and gold, and purchase many more bondwomen than three or seven or ten, and with them weave further in gold and silver and purchase more to weave more. One field she possessed, and she wished that she might make that one two and then set the two to breeding fields. She wished for sheep and oxen and wagons, asses and swift horses—wished to trade afar like Mardurbo and make quick increase. She had in her an able trader—a trader like Mardurbo. Vana drew a sharp breath. Win increase for the name of riches and for the children—for the children—for the children! So they would be great and proud in the tribe. “O my children!” she said; “Kadoumin who is already rich will reap, though he has not sowed, while the children of Mardurbo walk without the field. O my children! the field that I sow for you is not so great—no, not by many measures!”

She stood in the doorway until the moon rose high, then within the house threw herself down upon her bed of dressed skins and strove to sleep. But it was become an obsession—that thought of riches. She could not sleep. The bondwomen breathed deep in the inner room. A ray of moonlight entering struck upon the looms where they and Vana worked. Mardurbo was away—Mardurbo was journeying toward a town that would trade metals for horses such as Mardurbo bred, and for weapons that the men of his tribe made and webs that the women wove. Vana saw Mardurbo journeying. Ordinarily her feeling for him was a curious one, half fond, half estranged. She divined that he had for her a like feeling. At times they were as close as hand and hand, allied as two strings of Saba’s harp. The very next day might fall a misliking, dark and cold as iron in winter. Coming thus, sometimes it worked with one emotion, sometimes with another.

The moon paled, the pink dawn came, the trees rustled in the morning breeze. The town awoke. Without the wall shepherds and herdsmen moved with their charges far upon the plain. The light strengthened, cocks crowed, dogs barked, there arose spirals of smoke, voices conversed and called and sang. The morning meal was toward. Women and men renewed their work. Tones of children and pattering feet of children made a song of spring.

Without the wall spread fields of wheat and barley, of millet and of flax. Women and men went to the fields. Outside, too, slid a slow, murmuring brook. Women washed here, and on the banks in the sun women bleached webs that women wove. And near by, in a shady place, they had vats where they dyed their webs. Without the wall was the clayey place where bricks were made and dried and here also was a rude rope-walk. Men and women made brick, and cords and rope, though more men than women. But within the wall women moved in the greatest number and here the industries were chiefly theirs. And again, where men worked, without wall or within wall, they were, with some exceptions, the slower, the gentler, the older, the less strong of body among men. These, and bondmen, of whom there were many. Gone from the town were trading bands, and a war-band raiding the tents of trespassers, and a hunting band. At home, however, stayed Dardin the magic-man and his sons, and Saba the harp-player, and Kadoumin the wily, and others. But all the women stayed in the town or in the fields just without—the strong and the young women with the old and the weak, the skilled with the dull, the adventurous with the sluggish, those without children with those who had children, branching natures with sheathed natures, travelling minds with rooted minds. Kamilil the magic-woman said that once women wandered abroad like men. Not just like men, for there were always the children, but yet wandered and hunted and fought. But few really believed Kamilil. As things were, so must they always have been!

Vana went to see Bardanin her brother. She took with her her eldest son, a boy straight as a reed, strong as a master bow, and handsome as a deer of the hills. As they went through the lanes of the town all remarked the two. Vana herself had “looks.” Moreover, none failed of knowing how skilful she was and richer than most. Every one knew every one else, and what they did and how they did it.

Bardanin was a hunter. He lived in a house by the wall, and he had just returned with his son Targad from hunting in the hills that bordered the plain. They had brought two antelope and had cast them down upon the ground beneath a tree. Vana found Bardanin and Targad seated beside the house door, between them a bowl of lamb’s flesh and a platter of barley cakes. They welcomed her and she sat down near them. While they ate she watched the women of the household lift and shoulder the game beneath the tree and carry it to the open-air place of all work behind the house.

Said Bardanin: “Hunting is not what it used to be.—Mardurbo has not returned?”

“No. He was going to the people between the rivers and the people by the sea. He will gather handful and armful…. Bardanin, my brother, it is hard that this boy and the four I have left at home will not have Mardurbo’s wealth when he dies!”

Bardanin broke a barley cake. “The five will have your wealth—and it is known that you gather by the handful!”

“What matters that when Mardurbo gathers by the armful? Mardurbo will be the richest man between the hills and the sea. Why should Kadoumin who has twelve fields have Mardurbo’s wealth?”

“Kadoumin is his brother.”

“Bardanin, I know that! But I ask are not his children nearer to Mardurbo than is Kadoumin?”

Bardanin stared at his sister. He was a great hunter, but a slow mind. Targad laughed. Bardanin drank from a pitcher of milk, then set the vessel down thoughtfully. “Nearer in his liking,” said Bardanin. “Just as I like Targad and his brothers and sisters more than I like my own brothers and sisters. But if the lion that we met had slain me my goods would belong to my kindred. Targad and the others take their mother’s goods.”

“You are unsorrowing, Bardanin, because you have so little!”

“That may be true,” said Bardanin. “When you gather riches you think more, but you sleep less.”

“It is true that I have not slept,” said Vana. “Mardurbo’s riches should come to Mardurbo’s children.”

“There are always good reasons for things being as they are,” answered Bardanin, and stretched his arms, for he had lost sleep in the hills.

Vana went to see her sister Lonami. Lonami lived in the street of the well, and it being now afternoon the two, sitting upon the doorstep, could watch a procession of women bringing pitchers and jars and water-skins for filling against the night.

Said Lonami: “Have you finished the web with the purple border?”

“Not yet.”

“Any chief will give you oxen for it.—I make a patterned web myself, but it is not like yours.”

“Lonami, men journey and make war. They take all manner of cattle and trade for what they do not take. The sheep and cattle, the asses and horses, breed fast, and they have great flocks and herds. Then they trade with these, and always it grows! Men say that theirs are the metals that come out of the earth. How big the earth is I do not know, nor when she gave them the copper and silver and iron! They go to war and bring back rich and strange things and many bond-folk. A woman must weave much cloth or dye many webs, or make many pots or baskets, or plant much grain before she can buy a bondman on a bondwoman. Men grow richer than women, and that to me is like a cloud in the sky when the brook is already flooding!”

“It is true enough!” said Lonami.

“I think of my children! If I die, what do I leave them? A field and three bondwomen, a house and its gear and a few webs of cloth! But Mardurbo dies, and what is not taken by Kadoumin!”

“Harran is not rich like Mardurbo,” said Lonami, “as I am not rich like you, Vana! Yet I would that Harran’s great bow and his bronze-handled long knife might go to Eninumo his son! Harran would so, too,—and Eninumo.”

“I knew that you would understand! When no one was richer than any one else, it did not matter. But now it matters—if you wish your children to go fine in the world!”

“I do not see that anything can be done about it,” said Lonami.

Vana looked at her out of dark eyes beneath dark-red hair. “There are long reasons why one makes patterns in cloth that is woven and one makes them not!”

That night she watched the moon again. The next morning she went to Kadoumin’s house where it was told her that Kadoumin was in the barley-fields. Vana betook herself to the fields, moving swiftly, with a clinking of silver anklets. Kadoumin, mounted upon an ass, was watching five bondmen reaping the field with sickles of iron.

“A bounteous day, Vana!” said Kadoumin.

“A bounteous to Kadoumin!” answered Vana, her eyes travelling down the swathes.

Kadoumin dismounted from his ass and sat in the shade of a tree and Vana sat beside him. “I had a dream of Mardurbo,” said Kadoumin. “He was by the sea and he had a jar which he dipped into the wave. When it was filled he emptied it upon a tent cloth spread beside him, and the water was not water, but earrings of gold and pieces of silver as large as your fist. It seems to me a lucky dream!”

“A lucky dream for you, Kadoumin, who when Mardurbo dies will get the gold and silver, the tent cloth and the jar!”

Kadoumin regarded the barley-fields. “I am an older man than Mardurbo. He is more like to get my fields from me.—It is true, however, that he trades in dangerous places.”

“He has a charm against deaths.—I was not in earnest when I said ‘A lucky dream for you!’ for Mardurbo is marked for long life.”

Kadoumin, who ailed inwardly and showed an outward leanness, made a sign for health that Dardin the magic-man had taught him. As he did so he looked aslant at his visitor. “Istara, Mardurbo’s mother and mine, was killed by a falling beam, but Matara, her mother, lived long, and Matara’s mother, Innannu, very long.—It is a good barley year, Vana of the silver anklets! Is it a good year for weaving and for purple dyeing?”

“It is good, Kadoumin.—I have a web with a purple border made like the vine, and another with a yellow pattern like a wheel, and another that is fine and white as mist over the brook,—Would you have them?”

“A free gift or in trade, Vana, mother of the five fairest children?”

“Kadoumin, the stars and next year are very well, but the wise man considers the field before him.—For the three webs—seeing that Mardurbo is the younger man and should outlive—will you, witnesses sitting by, give over to Mardurbo’s children Mardurbo’s goods when he dies?”

Kadoumin took up a stalk of barley and drew it between his lips. “Mardurbo is a rich man. Three webs, even though their like was never seen, weight light against sheep and oxen and Mardurbo’s swift horses.”

“You know that field I have by the brook. I would add it to the webs.”

Kadoumin drew the barley stalk again between his lips. “Why do you consider the stars and next year?”

“I know not, but I do.—Children, children—men do not know how that feels!”

“I left the town at first light. Perhaps a swift runner has come with news that the tribe by the sea or a lion out of the forest has slain Mardurbo?”

“By Air the goddess, no!” said Vana.

“Then I will think,” said Kadoumin, “of what you say until Mardurbo returns.—Dardin has taught me, too, a great spell that gives long life.”

Vana in her turn looked at him aslant. “It does not show—that spell. The webs are fair and the field joins yours. Better the lowing of one heifer before the door than the seeing of herds in the clouds of the sky!”

“I will think,” said Kadoumin, “of what you say until Mardurbo’s return. If there were more advantage yet….” He seemed to fall to dreaming. “Mardurbo, I know not why, is fonder of children than of brothers. I have no children and so I know not why…. Mardurbo might add to the webs and the field…. If all the men in town and plain—and all the women—would agree, all men might leave their goods to their own children.”

Vana struck her hands together. “Kadoumin the wise! I have thought that, lying on my bed at night! But I thought that it was my thought only, and it seemed to me too strange to tell!”

Kadoumin drew the barley stalk through his hands. “The matter is one of kindred, and there is no rope like kindred, and no bull with its strength!”

“Nearly all have children. Children are loved more than are sisters and brothers. It is wise to lay a gift upon the ground if thereby you take two from the tree!”

“I have no children.”

“So we make you the webs and the field and what Mardurbo will give!”

Kadoumin laid down the barley stalk, and the sun being at height and the reapers coming to the tree, got slowly to his feet. “You see much with your eyes, Vana, maker of fine webs! but there is, in this matter, something down the lane and beside the wall…. I do not clearly see what it is myself, but it is there…. I shall go talk to Dardin the magic-man.”

Vana went to Kamilil the magic-woman, taking with her a gift. Kamilil lived near the gate in the wall, in a very clean house with two daughters to care for it. She smiled when any one spoke to her of Dardin and said that many made magic, but that few made it well.

Vana gave her present of two hens into the daughters’ hands and sat down at Kamilil’s feet. The daughters went away.

Kamilil was spinning wool. “Do you come for magic, Vana, rich in many ways?”

“Mother Kamilil,” said Vana, “mothers want more magic than most!—I lie awake at night to think how to make my children rich and great!”

“They must do some of that themselves,” said Kamilil, and put red wool upon her distaff.

“Yes,” said Vana, but still she thought that she could do it for them. “Mother Kamilil, is there a magic to make all men, no less than all women, desire to leave their goods when they die to their children?”

“A weak magic will do that,” answered Kamilil, “seeing that in their hearts most men desire it now.”

“Then is there a magic to make every man’s kindred ready to give over claiming when he dies and the children stand forth?”

Kamilil span and span. “There is the magic that you see that what you do for others others will do for you.”

“So!” said Vana. “Give me a magic, Kamilil, that shall make all this tribe see that!”

Kamilil leaned back from her spinning. “That is a greater thing than I thought you came about…. That means to think of many children and many years and many men and women!”

“Yes,” said Vana. “How can it hurt children to have fathers as well as mothers leave to them?”

Kamilil fingered the red strands. “Change spreads…. When a river is in its bounds you know what you have to do with. You say, ‘It waters this field—it flows by these trees.’ Flood comes—that is, change—and you say, ‘Where are its banks?’ Throw a stone into a great pool. A little ring—a wider ring—a wider yet! As great as is the pool, so far the rings widen. That is change…. There is something in this that you talk about that I do not see clearly. To-night I will gather plants, and to-morrow I will brew from them, and in the smoke I shall see—I shall see—I shall see….”

Her distaff twirled faster. “Come to me three days hence,” she said, and called to her daughters to bring Vana honey cakes and wine.

Vana went home and brooded over what Kadoumin and Kamilil had said. A day and night passed and she determined to go to see Uduma, who lived by herself. That was to leave the town and follow the brook until it narrowed and you reached a cypress wood. Vana tied a measure of wheat in a square of fine cloth, and taking a staff in her hand set forth.

Uduma was one that was held in awe. Vana, as she went up the brook, thought first of her own fishing and the nets she was flinging over the future, then, the wood growing deep and the air darkly pure, her mood changed. She seemed to remember many things, only they were all blended, merged, fused. What came from it seemed to be a light-touched sadness, a chained and bound longing. Vana sighed, and used energy to overcome that mood.

The trees grew thickly, the gliding water talked to itself. Vana thought of offences against gods and goddesses, sprites and ministers. She made in the air Kamilil’s sign to banish evil and beckon good, and pursued her journey with a quickened step.

Before her broke a sunny space and here, in the midst, was the hut, round and low, of Uduma the seer, and Uduma herself seated on a stone, and near her an ewe and her lamb.

Vana stood still. “Hail, Uduma!”

Uduma turned. “Hail, woman! Come within the sunny ring.”

Vana came, and laid before the seer the wheat wrapped in fine cloth. “Gift from one who would gain knowledge!”

“It is only to be gained,” said Uduma, “by those who would gain it.—The wheat is good and the cloth is fine. Sit in the sun and rest from the shadows.”

Vana sat, cross-limbed, upon the short grass. Uduma became silent, and Vana, as was manners, held as quiet. The sun poured down its rays, but the dry and aromatic air was in motion, and the heat not oppressive. The light burned clear gold over the open round, the small hut and the deep, surrounding wood. Time passed.

At last said Uduma the seer: “To love children of one’s body is well. To think for children of one’s body is well. To hold the flower of the vine before the eyes is well. But it is not well to hide therewith earth and the ripened grape, the moon, the sun, and the stars.”

“O Uduma!” said Vana, “we are all flower of the vine for so many years that we live! Will it not be well for all to take goods from our fathers as well as our mothers?”

“I do not say that it will not be well…. Observe my ewe and her lamb. See, wherever she turns, the lamb turns with her.”

Vana nodded. “She is all the lamb’s good.”

“You say well.— But now if the ram came and made magic so that the lamb got much good from him and then more good and more? Would the lamb any more look wholly to the ewe?”

Vana sat with an arrested look in the sunny round. At last she spoke. “Fathers as well as mothers have praise from children…. I do not know—I do not remember—if it was ever otherwise.”

“Praise, but not so great praise.”

“When the people from the hills came against us, four barley harvests since, and broke down the wall and poured through the ways and struck against the houses, Mardurbo fought mightily in our doorway. I also fought, but Mardurbo fought with great blows. Did not the children praise him then?”

“Yes. Were the ram and the ewe and the lamb together, in a close place, and there came a dog, the ram would fight mightily, and for the ewe and the lamb as for himself. And if he is hurt the ewe will fight for him, as always for the lamb. And doubtless in its heart the lamb praises the ram, and another day, if there comes a dog or a wolf, it looks to the ram as to the ewe to fight for it…. All that is true, and there is praise now in the earth from children to fathers. But the food is the continuing life, and the warmth is the continuing life, and the taking of care is the continuing life…. The lamb turns with the ewe.”

Vana sat still. The light came down clear and dry. It might be seen why Uduma liked this place. “If the ram has food to give, and garments for richness and warmth, and fields for gain and pleasantness—”

“While it is very little the lamb will yet turn with the ewe.”

Vana sat cross-limbed, her eyes upon the earth. A great bird passed overhead; she knew it by its shadow on the ground. “This it was that crossed Kadoumin’s mind and the mind of Kamilil, but neither could gain its shape!” She sat still, in the dry light, but she was not wholly accustomed to that light—by no means wholly accustomed to that light. Not even Uduma was that.

“What else?” asked Vana at last, and she spoke in a dulled and weary voice.

“If the ram can do all that,” said Uduma, “if the lamb at last turns with him, then the ewe must seek her gain elsewhere.”

Vana beat her hands together. “There is no gain elsewhere!”

“I have not dug deep enough nor built high enough,” said Uduma, “to find out about that. And this is all that I can tell you now of the matter, for the eyes with which I see grow tired.”

Vana took ceremonious leave of Uduma. She went out of the still and sunny round into the wood where the day murmured and was dim under roof, above roof, and down the stream where the clay thickened and coloured the water. As she went her mind was torn within her, and she saw, as it were arising in the wood before her, Mardurbo making wealth, and her own loom and the web within and her field and three bondwomen, and afterwards the five children, and how they grew, and the little she would have for each. Vana’s children, and they should go in purple through the town…. This talk of ewes and women—and who ever saw a lamb turn from its dam or children turn from women?

Mardurbo—Mardurbo! Vana walked slowly, sat down at last upon the stream bank. The five bending toward Mardurbo—Mardurbo demanding from the five since he fought and was strong, and besides was going to make them rich—Mardurbo’s favour, Mardurbo’s disfavour—in the children’s eyes Mardurbo the waxing moon and she the waning—Vana drew sharp breath, struck at the air with her staff. “Fly, bad dream!” she said. But it would not avoid—it seemed to come toward her, between the trees, the strongest in fight and the richest—! Vana uttered a strangling cry. “Mardurbo! I know not if I wish life for you!”

She stared at the dark trees and the dark places between them. Slowly there rose in her mind Mardurbo as she had known him first—Mardurbo and she as striplings amid the wheat and the vines—Mardurbo before they came into the same house, and afterwards for a time, before the eldest boy was born, and the two years of her suckling him—Mardurbo before the days of the bondwoman whom he bought and to whom he gave a house…. Mardurbo and Vana, striplings among the wheat and the vines. Slow tears rose in Vana’s eyes. “Mardurbo! Mardurbo!” she breathed.

She took up her staff, rose to her knees and then to her feet, and went on down the stream to the clay-built town. And here, even outside the wall, she heard that Mardurbo had come home.

The men who told her exaggerated the wealth Mardurbo had brought. According to them it was exceeding much—in metals, in cattle and bondmen, in stuffs and weapons and tools to work with, in salt, in ornaments of silver, and all such matters! Mardurbo had come with a train—now the cattle were stalled without the wall, and the other goods heaped beside and within the house. To-morrow and the next day and the next Mardurbo would hold market. Horses were what were wanted in exchange.

Inside the wall Vana still heard of that much wealth the trader had brought. It seemed that the people by the sea had been hungry for horses. The town was excited over Mardurbo’s return.

Approaching her own house, she saw in the distance that goods were, indeed, heaped beside it and before it, and Mardurbo in the midst of his men directing the goods’ bestowal, and children and bondwomen and a number of town-folk watching. Sound came to her in a gush, and a perception as of bees at work. Her hand closed hard upon her staff. The honey—all the honey—to go to Kadoumin and the other kindred!

The children saw her and ran to her, the bondwomen saw her and snatched up distaff or water-jar. Mardurbo turned from sacks of salt and goods in bales that the people by the sea traded with. He came through the press to Vana as she came through it to him.

“Ha, woman!” cried Mardurbo. “I am back alive!”

Vana put her hands upon his. They drew each to each, with suddenness they embraced. Each felt, each showed a rude, a passionate fondness. “Glad I am that you live!”

“I have brought the fairest earrings and frontlet—”

Their hold each of the other loosened. Manners of the tribe demanded restraint in the open in love-tokens. But their faces still shone. Then the shining lessened, and there dropped between, neither knew from where, the sundering force.

“Wealth and wealth!” said Vana. “Kadoumin dreamed that he saw you dipping riches from the sea!”

“Kadoumin!… I have brought a gift for each of the children.”

A bale threatened falling. Mardurbo lifted it on strong shoulders, bore it to the room for storing built beside the main room. Bondmen followed, carrying much goods. The children chattered like monkeys, the watching town-folk, men and women, made admiration or offered help; over the place played red sunshine of the shutting day. Largely the gathered crowd were Mardurbo’s kindred. Vana stood still. In times before to-day assuredly she would have laid hand to matters herself, lifted and borne and called her bondwomen to the task. But now she saw Vana and her children one kindred, and Mardurbo with Kadoumin and the others one kindred, and between strangeness. She would not help put away Kadoumin’s goods—but lightly she would have helped to put away goods of the five children! Desire of riches that had trembled toward departure, came back and held her with full force. Standing in the bronze light, she knew covetousness—she knew hatred of Kadoumin and the other kindred—knew for that moment hatred of Mardurbo. Stronger, stronger!—richer, richer!—and how could she take the children with her, going trading to make them rich?… Those who spoke to her she answered shortly, standing in a brown study, then went into the house and, calling her women, fell to preparing supper.

The meal was over. Mardurbo’s followers gone away, the precious, the weighty things that he had brought home bestowed against further trading. Reclined upon an ox-skin spread without the door, Mardurbo watched the five children at play with other children in the pinky, twilight street. They ran up and down, they joined hands and swung in circles, they played at hunting and at war, stalking and capturing one another. Then they played the tribe by the sea and the tribe in the hills and Mardurbo with his horses trading from the plain to the hills and the sea. The children of Vana and Mardurbo claimed to play Mardurbo. It seemed that their claim was good. But other children set up shrill objection, put in an opposing claim. Mardurbo was their kinsman. Contention arose. “Mardurbo is our father!”—“Mardurbo is our kin!”—“He lives with us!”—“Ho! If he and your mother part he will come back to grandmother’s house!”—“He brought us presents!”—“Ho! your presents are only little bits! All the big things belong to kin! We’ve got horses and bondmen and salt and copper and silver!”—“Anyhow, we’re Mardurbo!”—“No, you aren’t! We’re Mardurbo!”

Mardurbo turned on his ox-skin. “What does a man toil and journey for? Kadoumin, and the children of Istara?”

Twilight deepened, earth faced night. The town went to sleep—all save prowling dogs and winged or creeping things of the dark, and human folk in pain of body or of mind. Vana and Mardurbo lay awake. They heard the children’s breathing and the breathing of the bondwomen and of Mardurbo’s men who slept at the door of the treasure chamber. Mardurbo turned again.

Vana spoke. “Did you have your fill of sleeping between here and the sea?”

“I slept little upon this journey. There were many to watch against.”

Vana rose from that couch of skins. “Whether one goes or stays there are many to watch against…. A lion and a lioness and their cubs….”

“What put that into your heart?” asked Mardurbo.

“I do not know….. How large is the heart, seeing that everything finds room?” She moved from the couch to the door, stood upon the threshold and looked at the town asleep.

Mardurbo followed her. “I want to talk. In there the others will waken.”

Vana let fall behind them the mat that made the door. She sat down upon the threshold step, and Mardurbo beside her. The breathing was now withdrawn. In front of them lay the hot, still night with nothing moving save a dog by a distant wall.

“I should have drunk sweetness upon this journey,” said Mardurbo, “but instead I have drunk bitterness.—Why should not my riches go to my children?”

“Why not? Why not?”

“Saba the harp-player says, and all men know, that women are seen to be mothers of their children. But men are not seen to be fathers. So we count from our mothers, knowing that we are theirs. Men must take it from women that they are fathers. It is ‘faith,’ like ‘faith’ when we ask from the Powers.”

“Do you not know that the five are yours and mine? They are yours and mine.”

“I have ‘faith,’” answered Mardurbo.

“It is evil for Kadoumin and for Istara and her children to have wealth that should be our children’s! How to change that—how to make magic that shall change that—!”

“I know a way,” said Mardurbo. “It came to me in the desert while I lay awake. Just like a falling star it fell into my heart!”

“What is it, Mardurbo? What is it?”

Mardurbo looked at the sky and around at the silent town. He made upon the earth at his feet one of Dardin’s signs. He was a bold man, but change is a difficult thing in the world, and what is now has all the honour and observance! “Count kindred another way,” said Mardurbo, and he dropped his voice yet lower and looked somewhat fearfully at his companion. “Have a great council of the tribe and determine it! Let children come into father’s kindred.”

“How can that work?” asked Vana. “How can they be reckoned of fathers’ kin when already they are of mothers’ kin, and the two kins are separate?”

Mardurbo traced another sign upon the earth. “Take them from mother-kin and put them in father-kin.”

Vana’s lips moved. “Is that your way?”

“It came as though there were light all around it—or as though you ate up the desert on the swiftest horse. It seemed so hard, and then it seemed so easy! Everything to stay as it is,” said Mardurbo, “save that, after the council, children take name from father-side. Name makes kindred—when men die kindred take their goods.”

Vana’s breath came quick and thin. “Do you think the folk will agree to that?”

“Men will agree quickly,” said Mardurbo the trader.

“The men—the men! But the women—”

“Men grow richer than women, for the outside is bigger than the inside of the house. You wish the five to have my riches when I die. Lonami wishes Eninumo to have the goods of Harran. Innina wishes her three to have the flocks of Akarnad. It will be so with other women.”

“Children to go from mother-kin into father-kin—”

“Still they would be your children—as now they are my children—and yet I have no honour from them, and when my kindred gather to a feast they come not with them!”

“I give them no longer my name, nor the name of my mother!”

Mardurbo was deep in love with the plan that had fallen like the shooting star. He struck the threshold stone. “What harm to women if they take name from fathers instead of from mothers?”

“If they take name from men!”

“To this night,” said Mardurbo, “men have taken name from women.”

“I go to see Kamilil,” said Vana.

She went when the sun was pushing above the plain. Kamilil was already twisting red wool, while in the rear of the house the daughters sang like birds. “Mother Kamilil,” said Vana, “what did you see in the smoke of the plants you gathered?”

“I saw,” said Kamilil, “that there is much restlessness in life, and that when gain perches on one person’s shoulder it has not come out of nothing, but has flown from the shoulder of another…. Cease thinking of great riches for your children after you.”

“That I cannot do,” said Vana. “My children are my dear life.”

“Then the bird,” said Kamilil, “will fly from your shoulder to Mardurbo’s shoulder.—And that is all that I saw in the smoke from the plants.”

Vana, returning home, found Mardurbo and the bondmen establishing booths for the market. Ordinarily she would have given great help, but to-day there was abstraction in her gaze.

Mardurbo came to her where she stood. “Every one will be here to trade or to look. I will speak to the elders about the council.”

“Say nothing until I return,” said Vana. “I am going to see Uduma the seer.”

She left the town wall behind her, and followed the winding of the brook, walking with a silver tinkling of her anklets. Presently she found again the clear, sunny space, and Uduma carding wool.

“Hail, Uduma!”

“Hail, woman-who-was-here-yesterday!”

Vana sat upon the grass before Uduma. “Uduma, Uduma! the lamb must take the name of the ram as well as his riches!”

Uduma, who had put by her carding sat with her eyes upon a bright place in the sky. She sat very still, her body unbowed, her hands folded in her lap. “Uduma, Uduma! if the lamb learns to say, ‘I am son or daughter of the ram’—and thinks nothing of the ewe—”

Uduma still looked at the bright sky. Time went by. The place was golden, warm and dry, and possessed an aromatic breath. The breath seemed to come slow-drawn, and Uduma’s breath the same. At last she spoke. “I see what I had not seen…. For a long, long time, for a long, long time, the lamb thought all of the ewe and nothing of the ram…. The wind goes to and the wind goes fro. The summer is, and then the winter is. The day is, and then the night is. The winter is, and then the summer is. The night is, and then the day is.”

“The two,” said Vana, “are evened in night-and-day and summer-and-winter.”

“There is more wisdom in you,” said Uduma, “than shows every day! Why do you give milk to pride and greed?”

“I do not so. I give milk to my children.”

“Pride-for-children and greed-for-children are long names for short things.”

Vana with her long, embrowned fingers moved her silver anklets. “O Uduma, will not Mardurbo remember that, for the children, I let the council be called, and said in my turn, ‘Change the old ways’?”

“Mardurbo—Mardurbo! Look in your own heart for Mardurbo and his thoughts!”

“Will we make evil, O Uduma, changing the old? If there were evil to tribe-women, would Istal, the Mother of the gods, let me make it?”

“Look in your heart for tribe-women, and look in your heart for Istal!… You will do what you will do, and there will come out of it what there will come out of it. As for me, I am a watcher, but my eyes are not very good. I do not know what the gods wish— And now I am tired, and I will speak no more, woman-who-came-yesterday!”

Vana left the golden-lighted circle and went through the dark wood, down the falling stream. As on yesterday she had thought of Mardurbo, so to-day she thought of Mardurbo. But first she said, and said it thrice, “I do not believe that I shall be less in the world by this one and that one saying ‘Mardurbo’s children!’—Who is it that knows not that they are my children?—It will be nothing but a saying!” For since yesterday she was the more set to gain for the five those riches from the seashore and the country between the hills.

Mardurbo—Mardurbo! To-day she felt affection for Mardurbo. She was glad that no lion had felled him with a stroke, and no serpent crept into his tent, and no man-foe sent arrow against him. Mardurbo loved the children as she did, and he would make for them wealth and more wealth. It was not much of a price to pay—to say “son of Mardurbo—daughter of Mardurbo!” Especially when it would be naught but a saying. The tribe would continue to know that Vana had borne them in agony, had suckled them and wrought for them, day and night. Mardurbo … Mardurbo! To-morrow she might again feel anger against him, desire to see him gone, and care not for his dangers. To-day, all was as oil and wine. The will of Vana was set to obtain that turning of wealth from Kadoumin and from Istara and her children to the five in the house of the loom. To feel for any cause violence and bitterness against Mardurbo would make difficulties more difficult, and therefore she felt it not.

The sun was in the west when she reëntered the town, and the greater part of the town hovered yet about Mardurbo’s market. The town fed desire with strange, precious goods, and gave to Mardurbo in exchange home-made matters. Home-made matters seeming nothing like so precious, the town’s giving outweighed its taking. Mardurbo would have much of fine and precious with which to feed the desire of the people by the sea and the people between the rivers, who in turn would outweigh that much with their homely, home-furnished matters. So Mardurbo prospered. And much to his liking were the horses that the plain now gave him.

So he knew satisfaction, and the men and women of his town knew satisfaction. A rich and expansive mood pervaded the place of the booths. Except for a few scattering thrusts trading, that had gone on since dawn, was over. Covetousness, fed, rested with sleepy, half-shut lids. Minds that, as each had thought, had shrewdly bargained, relaxed tension. Saba the harp-player sat against a wall and made music to tread the harp’s stretched chords. Dardin the magic-man had, in return for his spells bringing health and successful trading, a great dish of bronze. With it in his hands he looked at the noble sickle that Kadoumin the wily had bought with a brown foal. Bardanin the hunter had shoes that would tread thorns like gods, and Targad had a painted quiver and baldric. Harran had a silver armlet. Lonami had given her greatest web for an ewer and dish of well-wrought metal, Istara had an ivory spindle made by the people between the rivers, and the daughters of Kamilil had garments dyed and fashioned by the seashore folk. The town made a deep, contented, murmurous sound.

Mardurbo rested near Saba the harp-player. He looked at the horses in the staked enclosure the bondmen had made, and he thought of other steeds that he was to examine in the morning before the change goods left his hands. The people by the sea were lean with hunger for horses. He looked at a row of new bondmen, and he looked at goods that his town made, piled like tall anthills. Mardurbo sat embrowned, weary and satisfied, still observed by the town, granted to be the greatest trader, and good beside in war or council.

Vana, making her way to him, met likewise with observance. Vana and Mardurbo … Mardurbo and Vana!

Vana stood beside him. “Let us speak now to the elders, and let them call the folk to council to-morrow.” Her hand rested on the head of the eldest of the five, the boy straight as a reed, strong as a master bow, and handsome as a deer of the hills. “Mardurbin, when he goes trading, shall have somewhat to begin with!”

They spoke, and when men and women understood the subject-matter there lacked no interest. The grass was dry fuel for the dropped fire.

There stood in the middle of the town a council-tree, huge of bole, many-branched and forest-leaved. Beneath it the tribe had held council since the days of the far-back mother from whom it took origin and name. The day that followed the market they held the council here. The elders sat around the trunk of the tree, and about these the chief men and women and the others in their degrees made larger and larger rings.

All the chief men and women spoke, and some spake twice. All day that council held, a council to be marked by the tribe, in their annals of the earth, with a stone and a pillar and an altar smoke. When it began the eastern side of the tree was golden, when it ended the western.

It ended with choice made, with a great number crying out for the choice that was made. A few voices differed from the most, but faintly and more faintly, until they were like distant cicadas. The earth was bondwoman to the voice of the many. At the close of day the law of this tribe was changed…. When the eastern side of the tree was gold there held the ancient mother-right; when the western side was gold there came upon the plain father-right.

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CHAPTER VI

THE PROPHET

Halmis liked to sit by the river, among reeds or beneath willows, narrow-leaved and moving with the slenderest breath of Myr the air-sprite. Near her brothers’ house, where she lived, there lay among reeds, half drawn from the water, the ruin of a boat. It was a place to sit and think, whether the sun shone or the clouds scudded. Halmis possessed a stringed instrument of music, a thing akin to the lyre. Sometimes she brought this with her to the boat, and played upon it sitting there, hidden by the reeds. Sometimes she sang, her voice rising from the reed bed like a voice of the earth.

Ramiki likewise could make a song and sing it.

Halmis could prophesy; Ramiki likewise.

Each had, beyond the common, perception, memory, imagination, and moving gift of speech. When either recited certain things to the people of the river country, and gave advice or promised good or threatened penalty, it was called prophecy. When what they said came to pass they received great honour; when it failed they said that the time was not yet, but that the people would reach it. Halmis believed in her power. Ramiki believed in his power. While that was so, either was capable at times of inner doubt and unhappiness. But, very largely, they kept that to themselves. That course, they thought, was undeniably wiser, in the world as it was constituted. As for belief in each other’s powers, that wavered.

Halmis dwelled by the water-side. Ramiki had his home upon rising land, where he lived with his father in a well-built house guarding field and pasture. The people still thought that the old chief would give the house to Ramiki, keeping a corner for himself, and that Halmis would leave her brothers by the riverside and come into Ramiki’s house. Surely it would be advantageous to her to do so!

Halmis and Ramiki also thought, many times, that they would put hand in hand before witnesses and become man and wife. But after each time that they thought this, and before they could really speak of it to others, they quarrelled.

“I believe not in your power!” said Halmis, and she said it with scorn.

“I believe not in your power!” said Ramiki, and he said it with fierceness.

When they spoke thus each experienced ill-feeling toward the other and wished for some occult gift of hurting. They did not observe that these disbeliefs bubbled darkly from days when they did not believe in themselves. Halmis went to her brothers’ house, Ramiki to his father’s above the fields. The village talked, but old tradition gave it forth that prophets might be allowed to differ from other folk.

Whether individuals loved or hated, the river-country people had troubles of a collective nature. They had been long, long seated in a plain, great enough and rich enough for the forefathers, not so great nor so rich for the descendant swarm. Now it was crowded, now it was being sucked dry. For a time there seemed help in being a terror to the plain on the other side of a chain of hills, in organizing each bright season a great raid to bring home wealth and provision for man and beast. But that recourse was failing. Other plains, too, were crowded, sucked dry, growing poor…. There was much exposure of children, almost always female children. The old, too, were put to death. But all that only partially helped.

People must move—at any rate, some people. There was an old song of the plain which said that before the memory of man there had been a moving; in short, that the plain-folk had moved from elsewhere into the plain. It was hard to believe….

The chiefs and the elders consulted together. They applied for help to all likely forces, including, well to the front, the supernatural.

A concourse was held, an assembly of the folk of the plain. Not so many miles wide and long was the plain; it did not take thousands to make living difficult. The most got within hearing of them who harangued from the great flat stone that was the sacred or hallowed stone, alike of speech and of sacrifice. Chiefs must be orators, elders must know how to bring wisdom home, priest and prophet must be able to fix the ridge-pole…. All was done in order, throughout a day of sun and shadow.

Ramiki and Halmis stood together upon the stone that was wide as the floor of a house. The day was advanced, the light gold-red; behind were three great trees, before and to either hand the scimitar-shaped crowd of the people, excited already by music and by passionate, persuasive speech. The drums beat, the cymbals clanged, then silence, then right posturing by prophet and prophetess, then words half spoken, half sung, sent from the lips with force, ringing and reaching!

“Folk of the river-plain!”

chanted Ramiki.

“People of Arzan, the high god, the great god,
God of the gods!
For you I cried to Arzan.
‘O Arzan!
he people increase as it were the river in spring time!’”

Halmis the prophetess took the chant:—

“In the fresh green month there are two birds!
In the bright, flowering month, there are six.
I said to the god,
‘It is a weary thing,
This giving death to nestlings!
The old, too, often like to rest a little longer,
Watching the children!’
I said to the god!”

Ramiki chanted:—

“Arzan answered Ramiki the prophet,
‘Look, O man!
How the river breaks its bonds and is at home in new lands!’”

Halmis chanted:—

“The god sang to Halmis—to Halmis who prophesies!—
‘Stay the birds in the tree where they nested?
Lo, at morn see the wings in the sky!’”

Ramiki made a great gesture. His voice soared and rang:—

“From the storm spoke Arzan: ‘Learn O prophet,
What my folk of the plain have forgotten! Of old ye moved as ye grew,
Ye left ever the eaten land for the fresh land!’”

Halmis swayed in the wind of rapture.

“Two shall stay and two shall go,”

chanted Halmis.

“For some love the home tree and some love the new tree!
The new soon becomes the home tree.
The god smiles on both so we judge when to alter!”

Ramiki moved upon the stone. At the edge he stooped, he caught from one below a drum, he beat upon it.

“I awaked in the morning!
Arzan who dwells in the mountain said, ‘Go!’”

Halmis took cymbals, she lifted her arms, there clashed forth sonorous music.

“‘Part!’ saith the god.
‘Two nations where there was one.
And one it shall tarry, and one it shall wander!’—
‘Come!’ cries the earth, ‘for my arms they are wide,
And my breasts they are full, in the east and the west!’”

“Hai! we will divide!” cried the people; and would have done it that day if the chiefs and the elders had allowed….

Halmis went down in the evening to the boat among the reeds and sat there in the moonshine, her arms upon her knees and her head upon her arms. Ramiki left the throng of chief men gathered in the chief house, drinking there red juice of the vine. He walked up and down in the moonlight. He was not calm within, nor triumphant because wisdom had become the choice of the people. Something dark within was spreading and staining the light within. The river-country people had many words for jealousy, but usually these pointed to a forthright lover’s jealousy. That was not the jealousy that Ramiki felt to-night. He spoke to the skies. “Why should she prophesy, dividing the praise?”

Down in the reeds Halmis rocked to and fro, making decisions.

When the wine had passed from their heads, in the favouring tide between foaming enthusiasm and the back-drag to old levels, the elders and chiefs pressed the partition of the people. Came to the river-plain humming days of excitement, deeper, more sonorous and richly coloured than any remembered. So many should fare forth, so many should rest behind! These individuals would stay, these would go. An imaginary line was drawn, and some stepped to the one side and some to the other. Heads of families and owners of wealth chose for themselves and their households, for women, youths, children, and bondfolk. So that they might be distinguished, those staying painted across their foreheads a band of blue, those going a band of red. A vast preparation of wagons arose, a sorting of flocks and herds, a gathering of horses and strong oxen, a filling of grain sacks, a heaping of weapons and implements. Life took a quicker stride, had more life in its eyes. Every day there was debating, every day choice.

Ramiki went down to the boat among the reeds. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the reeds were moving. Halmis sat in the broken boat, and Halmis had across her forehead a stripe of red. He halted, he stared…. He had come to find Halmis, to speak of their taking hands and faring forth with the migrating host—prophet and prophetess, and the prophet the head of that household! And here, before he spoke, was Halmis with her forehead marked for outfaring!

He stared.{120}

“Ha, red-on-the-forehead!” said Halmis. “I had a dream last night! We met rivers and mountains, but the wagons and the oxen swam like boats and flew like eagles and we came to a golden house—”

Ramiki was often jealous of Halmis’s dreaming, but he did not think now of that. All was lost in the fact of that red mark, made now, not after he had taken Halmis’s hand in his, before witnesses!

He spoke, “Taru and Nardan, your brothers, stay in the plain. They have marked their foreheads with blue, and Ina and Matar, their wives, are marked with blue. All their household….”

“I leave their household,” answered Halmis. “I am going to seek it—the golden house beyond the hills!”

“My house?”

“I want to know what is there, beyond the hills! It was not your house, Ramiki, in my dream, nor my house.” She lifted a reed in her hand. “It was the house.”

Ramiki moistened his lips. “A woman without a husband goes or stays as goes or stays her father. If her father be dead, then she goes or stays as goes or stays her brother or her nearest kinsman.”

“They made that rule. I am prophetess of Arzan. I rule for myself. I have spoken to the chiefs and the elders. By the god-stone, many watching, I put red paint upon my forehead!”

Ramiki breathed hard. There was a Ramiki who was going to speak, and somewhere else there was another Ramiki. Both lived, but the one who had the word was of great size.

“It is unheard of!” said Ramiki.

He turned away, he left the shining sun, the blowing wind, the moving reeds. He went away in a heated darkness to his house and sat there upon his bed. Like the beating of a drum in his head, over and over, resounded words he had overheard.

Had said one of the old wise men to another: “The god is greater in Halmis than in Ramiki!”

Now Ramiki did not believe that saying, and now he experienced an agonizing doubt, and now he turned to proving to himself and to others that it was not so. That had been yesterday…. In the night he had waked, and there had poured over him like the river in flood another feeling for Halmis…. At the height of the tide he had not cared that she had so much of the god. If it was so, it was well so!… The tide was a wonderful tide; it held an hour, and then it began to ebb. But when morning came there was yet a fulness that sent him through the shining sun and the blowing wind and the waving reeds to Halmis. Then the tide had sunk with a harsh and dreadful noise.

Ramiki sat upon his bed and listened to the drum beat in his head. “One said to the other, ‘The god is greater in Halmis than in Ramiki!’ One said to the other, ‘The god is greater in Halmis than in Ramiki!’” His heart was bitter within him, bitter as a root he knew in the forest.

His father came into the house, and, sitting down, began to feather arrows.

Said Ramiki at last: “I found Halmis with a band of red upon her forehead…. She goes like a young man, walking alone!”

“That should not be,” said his father. “If one woman does a thing like that, another woman will want to do so too.”

“She is prophetess.”

“She has breasts all the same,” said the arrow-featherer.

That night, in the night-time, staring from his mat into the velvet darkness, he did not want to keep her from going, for was not he, Ramiki, going? Then in the morning, with the sound of the crowing of the cocks, that sense of oneness fell again in two. He ceased to love Halmis. He felt again enmity and jealousy, and a great, oh, a great concern for himself. “Arzan! Arzan!” he cried. “Am I not man? Am I not the greater prophet?”

That day all the people saw him go away into a deep wood that yet was left upon the plain. He went with some ostentation of folded arms and brooding forehead. “The god will visit the prophet!” they said. In the evening Ramiki might stand upon the god-stone and break into rhapsody while all who were not preoccupied gathered to hear.

But though Ramiki returned at eve, it was not to the god-stone. He found Halmis in the glow, watching boys and girls who moved in a dance. He and Halmis went away together, down to the boat, for that was the quietest place.

“What did you do in the wood?” asked Halmis. “Sit all day and look at your shadow?”

It was evident that she was willing to quarrel. She was no less capable than Ramiki of formulating the notion that where there was not room for two one must be pushed away. She looked at Ramiki, and Ramiki, rightly or wrongly, suddenly believed that she wished there was blue paint upon his forehead. The thought was as unexpected as an earthquake and well-nigh as devastating.

They parted the reeds and stepped down to the boat. They sat there and looked blackly at each other.

“No, I did not,” said Ramiki, “sit all day and look at my shadow…. I praised Arzan…. Then I heard his voice from the clouds.”

Halmis shivered slightly. “What talk did he make to you?”

“His speech was about women,” said Ramiki fiercely.

“Oh—ah!”

“It was as though I were in his mountain. He told me many things—great and wonderful things. To-morrow I am going again to the wood—to praise Arzan again and listen again.”

“Then you will stand upon the god-stone and sing his words?”

“So!” said Ramiki. “In a great song. To which the folk will listen as I listened to Arzan.”

Halmis looked at him in silence. When she spoke it was in a whisper. She bent forward, her hand touched his knee. “Ramiki…. Did Arzan really speak? Perhaps it was only you—speaking to yourself?”

Her words had behind them at least an amount of comprehension. If it had been that way she could match it from her own experience!… Sometimes she thought that she really had seen the god or had heard the voice. At other times she thought blackly that it was only that Halmis who seemed a negligible thing. But she did not confide these doubts to the folk before whom she prophesied. Nor would Ramiki. Nor did she see how any could be brought to question Arzan in him.

Nevertheless, she ached to take the tall bright feather from Ramiki’s headdress—to take it at least for a time! In fact, she felt much as Ramiki felt. Where he had Halmis before him, she had before her Ramiki. When it came to that jealousy, there was small difference between them.

The difference between them was a matter of the status of men and the status of women—of hunters’ stations. And this hunter may have a coign of vantage and, in security, bring down the game he wishes to bring down, and that hunter may be placed disadvantageously and the matter end quite differently.

Ramiki’s eyes burned. He looked over Halmis’s head at the many-shaped and tinted clouds. “Arzan spoke—Arzan! He told me things about women that I had not thought of before!”

Halmis sat in silence. Before her, between her and Ramiki, formed a picture of the god-stone and the three trees behind it, and the people pressing close, and Ramiki chanting greatly to them what Arzan had told him—making them believe. At his best Ramiki was a great prophet…. What had Arzan told him?

She raised her eyes. “What did Arzan tell you?”

Ramiki laughed fiercely. “He told me why it was that women go or stay only as men say it!”

“Why is it, Ramiki?”

Ramiki looked at her, and now there was trader’s cunning mixed with the prophet strain. “Arzan has not yet given me the right words!—It may be four or five days before I sing to the people.”

“Four or five days,” thought Halmis, but she thought it to herself. She nursed her knees and looked at the bowing reeds.

“In all ways,” said Ramiki fiercely, “men are stronger than women!”

“Ha!” said Halmis. “The fountains of milk! The beings that he draws from himself!”

“Four things are tabu for women! Noble hunting, noble warring, noble owning, noble choosing!”

“O great man who is noble throughout! Cold does not chill him! Wet does not wet him! Thirst does not parch him, and those he binds are not shaped like him!”

“Arzan wither your tongue!” said Ramiki.

The sun carried its torch underground. The plain darkened, the wind sighed in the reeds. “Why do we quarrel so?” asked Halmis. “Now, I like Ramiki, and Ramiki likes me. And then I would kill Ramiki, and he me. And then I like Ramiki again, and am sorry…. Ramiki!”

She moved nearer to him. “Ramiki!”

Ramiki cried out. “O Arzan! still she befools me!”

He had cried so loudly that his words appeared still to sound over the marsh and the river. Halmis stood still, then, turning, stepped from the boat upon the reedy riverbank. “Thou fool! not to know when!” said Halmis.

Ramiki rose from his mat at dawn, drank milk and ate barley cakes, and passed through the fields to the thick wood. After wandering for some time he found a tree that liked him. It was huge of trunk and spreading of branch, and near by, in a round basin, a spring murmured. Ramiki sat down beneath the tree. At first he looked at the boughs and the leaves and the birds, and at the sky between the boughs. Then he looked at the spring, and it made a centre for him—a small, bright, round pool, shot at by the arrows of the sun. The wood was still, and had a manifold fragrance. Ramiki felt still likewise.

Ramiki spent the day in the wood. He had barley cakes with him in a wallet. Now and again he moved about, once he slept a little. When he waked he saw a serpent drinking. About midday a great cloud mounted into the sky. At top it was dazzling white, but underneath and in hollows shadow-dark. Ramiki watched it until it sank again beneath the wood and there was only clear and open heaven. He watched it very intently, swaying his body back and forth as he watched. When it was gone his gaze returned to the spring…. He had a good day, a balmy, idea-flowing day!

It was so prosperous, his spirit was at once so fluent and so soothed, that earth and life, and Halmis in both, grew more than tolerable. Ramiki sat cross-legged in the wood and stared at the cloud or at the spring, until the god had given him the song he should sing. When he had it he relaxed, and resting against the tree let his mind go doze and play. The god had spoken and gone, but Ramiki would remember! After a time he sat upright again, and finding at hand a bit of wood, drew his knife from the sheath, and began to whittle an arrow. As he worked he hummed to himself. Once or twice he laughed. It slipped into his mind, from where he knew not, that that was a fine boulder to throw into the camp of women!… He felt so balm-bathed and free that he lost for a time any grudge against the camp of women, any grudge against Halmis.

The light began to weaken in the wood. Ramiki, moreover, was hungry. He rose from beneath the tree, and retraced his steps to the village. The sun was sinking as he came near. A red and gold light caressed the river-plain. He heard blow one of the long trumpets, and presently saw that folk were gathering to the central place where stood the god-stone. A boy passed him, running from the fields. Ramiki called after him. “What is doing?”

“Halmis-who-prophesies,” spoke the boy over his shoulder, “will tell the folk who go what they shall find!” He ran on.

The balm flowed away from Ramiki.

He turned to the river, and there was Halmis coming up from the water-side. He waited for her. She came even with him, and the red sunlight made burning and bright the red upon her forehead and the red in her hair.

Ramiki choked. “The large things of the people are for a man’s thinking upon and handling—”

“O Ramiki!” said Halmis, “how can I help thinking upon and handling my own?”

She moved on toward the god-stone where the people were gathered. Ramiki kept her company. At first they moved with an equal step, then Ramiki quickened his. Halmis looked aside at him. His frame was drawn to great height, his feet seemed hardly to touch the sunburned earth. He seemed to move in quivering air; the inrush of force was evident. “The god is in him! The god is in him!” thought Halmis. Quickening her step she came even with him again. But now Ramiki uttered a shout and began to run….

He came to the massed people; crying aloud, he pursued his way. “Arzan! Arzan!” he cried. “I have been with Arzan in the wood! O people of the river-plain, Arzan has given it to me to say!”

The gathered folk were tow to flame, wax to the moment’s sharp impression. The crisis in their affairs had lifted them, shaken them awake. Now they were ready constantly for new excitement, craved the new, or the old made new. It had been good that Halmis the prophetess should prophesy of what the going stream might find! It was good that there should arrive the fresher alarum of Ramiki the prophet—Ramiki returning from an immediate interview with Over-Knowledge, Over-Power! “Arzan the great maker!” shouted Ramiki. “I have talked with Arzan! You have sinned before him, and I will show you how!”

All turned from prophetess to prophet. All saw Ramiki, but all had a sense of the overshadowing Energy. “Arzan!” cried the people, and “Hearken to the prophet!”

Ramiki came to the god-stone. He mounted to the place of the prophet. He turned, he faced the chiefs and the elders and the people, men and women. The wind blew his garment and lifted his hair; they thought that they saw around him the red light of Arzan. They turned, every one, from Halmis, they centred on Ramiki.

Halmis leaned against a tree. Her heart beat heavily. At first she had felt only rage. She thought she would come to the god-stone and dispute it with that usurper, and then had come fear to halt her. She hated fear, she fought it as with fire. But it was a great beast that, beaten away, came again! To-day she tried to fight fear with scorn, scorn being an arrow always in her quiver. But it failed to-day. Halmis looked at the women about her and farther away in the throng. There were many women, but that did not seem to help…. Men held better by all men. Women held better by the children, but the men by one another…. Halmis felt alone and afraid. Ramiki was speaking for Arzan. Arzan was a terrible deity and an eloquent! Halmis thought that a mist was rising around her….

Ramiki was not telling what the people marked with red should find or do, out of the river country, beyond the heaven-propping hills. He was not telling how plentifully now would be fed the folk marked with blue, the folk staying in the ancient land. He was not telling—or at least it did not yet appear that he was telling—why the wreath was given to man. He was not telling—or at least not yet telling—how, in this moment, the folk were sinning against Arzan. He was telling how the world was made, telling old things that they knew already, and perhaps new things.

Sometimes Ramiki spoke and sometimes he sang, passing from saying into singing, from singing into saying. To a great part of the listening throng what he said or sang was the literal word of Arzan. Imaginings and making to see and touch the Not-There were the Works of Arzan—when they were not the works of Izd, who, with the river-country people, meant darkness and demon….

Passion sustained Ramiki the prophet. He was a strong man to-night, a dancer, a hunter, a chief with hawk wings bound upon his head. The red sunset passed into dusk, the dusk into night, bondmen lighted torches, the people slanted toward the god-stone. Ramiki sang the battles of Arzan and Izd—Arzan and his hosts and Izd and her hosts—Izd the monstrous serpent, Izd the ancient dragon! That was old story, but the river-country people did not easily tire of old stories. And Ramiki was singing with power, and there were new things that he was telling. In especial they learned feats of Izd that they had not known. They knew her slaying breath and the injuries she did to Arzan, and the keen knife with which Arzan slew her and made of her body the sky and the earth! But the prophet gave them new detail and incident—new and exciting—and all to them seemed clothed in beauty and terror, and all was true—sublimely true!

Then Ramiki sang how Izd, though she was cut into sky and earth, yet made evil, and Arzan made good—Izd and her helpers and Arzan and his helpers. He sang the making of great waters, and the beasts of wood and field, and the making of trees and of grain, and it was all well known to the river-country people and often recited. He came to the making of people—of the great father-man and mother-woman, ancestors of the river-plain—and here he had brought from the wood new wisdom.

The river country had not had it before, but, dimly or clearly, it had been aware of that vast unexplained. Why? And why—and why? It had put forward groping and tentative answers to its own questions, but those answers had not really explained. The air held the answer diffused. Now it was coming together like the rich cloud that on summer days rose behind the mountain where Arzan dwelt.

Why were men here, and women there? Why, when a man entered his house, did he stamp with his foot to show mastership?…

Ramiki had used a great strain, a wide-flowing, deep-rushing chant. Now he changed. This to come was a story within a story. He made a pause, he regarded the deep night above, he altered posture and manner. The village, marked with blue and marked with red, drew breath for new things. There was a company of youths who, when prophet or prophetess spoke, were wont to band themselves at one side of the god-stone. These repeated loudly word or line wanting that stress, or in silences came in with refrains of their own, or merely shouted approbation of the god in the singer. Now while Ramiki watched the dark, they shouted, “Arzan in the prophet!”

Halmis heard them where she leaned against the tree, decked to sing and not singing, here to prophesy from the god-stone and not prophesying, come from the river with a high heart and now knowing fear. It was like a spell upon her, a slow, cold poison in her veins. Ramiki—Ramiki—Ramiki only was singing to the people…. She heard him, and though she tried not to believe what he sang, at last in great part she believed. How could she else, being of the river-plain and so very like Ramiki who himself believed?… She was very capable of a sense of sin—and perhaps it all had come about that way. Arzan had his favourite—no doubt of that! There must be reasons for favour and disfavour…. Ramiki—Ramiki—Ramiki was singing. As she stood under the tree she seemed to herself, for one strange moment, to have a child in her arms…. Ramiki sang:—

“On the mountain-top stood the stone of Arzan,
Arzan-stone where Arzan dwelled.
Izd came and coiled around the mountain.
Izd said to her daughters, ‘Yet shall we win!’
Arzan had nothing to do that day.
He was ready for work he had dreamed about.
By the sacred river stood the sacred tree.
He broke a bough that was shaped to his mind.
Arzan sat on the stone and carved,
Arzan carved the bough of the tree.
Arzan cut from the bough a man!
Fair was the man, and tall and brave!
‘My man,’ said Arzan, and gave him blood,
Piercing the arm that shook the god-spear,
Pouring the drops in the veins of the man.
‘My man,’ said Arzan, and gave him warmth,
Held to his side within the god-robe.
‘My man,’ said Arzan, and gave him breath,
Putting his mouth to the first man’s mouth.
‘My man,’ said Arzan, and gave him speech:
‘Arja!’ said the god. Said Arja, ‘Arzan!’”

The river-plain that was descended from Arja clapped hands and rocked itself. The band of young men shouted to the sky:—

“‘Arja!’ said the god. Said Arja, ‘Arzan!’”

Ramiki pursued his story, and while he chanted he acted.

“Izd heard them talking, the evil Izd!
Izd and her daughters were coiled below.
Arja lived happy, Arja alone.
Arzan spoke from the sacred mount.
‘To make more blissful, I will give you sons.’
Arzan shook leaves from the sacred tree.
They fell in a throng around the god-stone.
They fell down as leaves, they rose up as men,
Sons of Arja.”

“Sons of Arja!” the youths shouted. “Arja’s sons!”

“Ten moons of Arzan, a thousand years,
Arja lived happy, he and his sons.
They had golden bows and golden arrows,
Antlered deer to make them food.
When they put in wheat it came up thick.
When they planted barley it never failed.
Arzan breathed on the grass that grew around,
So were sheep and oxen and horses bred,
And all were the best that ever were seen!
The fish in the river loved the net.
They made a boat with a thought from a tree.
Their houses were large and filled with goods.
Arzan from pebbles formed bondmen,
Made them strong to take and bring,
Gave them heart-love for the Arzan-men,
So that they wrought and never rebelled.
The grapes grew in clusters twice that big!
Winter was not, nor was parching heat.
Rain came at their call and went at their wish.
Arzan made a herb named Love-among-friends.
They planted it thick, and tended it well.
Arzan took from each man a red drop of blood,
Mixed it with earth and made the bull, Courage.
Arzan took from each man a thought while he slept,
Drew all through his hands and made the rope, Wisdom.
A thousand years lived Arja there,
On the mountain sides, near the Arzan-stone.
Izd and her daughters coiled below,
Cried Izd to her daughters, ‘Yet shall we win!’
Arzan looked down from the Arzan-stone.
‘Are you there, Izd? The man is mine!’”

Shouted the youths,—

“‘Are you there, Izd? The man is mine!’”

The strong sound smote the night. The flame of the torches appeared to leap. The god-stone was lighted, and the figure of the prophet. The crowd, seated or standing, bent like vines to the sun. Interest was carried to a point, and through the point, on the other side of the point, seemed to be space and new landscapes. The mind of the river-plain was ready for explanation—so that the explanation did not offend its sense of probabilities, so that it seemed godly and kingly, so that it was a boat that could sail the river….

“Izd said naught, but she set to work,
Izd and her daughters set to work.
Over their heads they wove a roof,
Wide-long as earth and black as soot.
Arzan looked down from the mountain-top,
But Izd was hidden under her roof.
Izd took black mire, a reed and fire,
Izd took white flint and a cherry stone,
Izd took dawn-mist and sunset-red,
Izd took false-dreams and ill-delight,
And out of them all Izd made a shape.
She gave it breasts and a beardless face.
Izd and her daughters lived in the shape.
Arja sat in the vineyard deep.
Izd tore the cloud-roof vast and black.
Beneath the rent she set the shape.
Arja said, ‘I see down there,
In a wild, bright light a thing most strange.’
Arja said, ‘From that to me
Runs like a stream, a deep, deep wish.’
Arja turned to the Arzan-stone,
‘Arzan, O Arzan, maker of me!
Down there is that that would climb to me!’
Arzan looked through Izd’s torn roof.
Arzan was angry with Izd the snake.
He made a storm and thatched the place,
So that ever it thundered there and burned,
And the Arzan-man could not see the shape.
Then Arja pined, though he could not die.
‘O Arzan, make me a thing like that,
To keep me company in Arja-land!’
Then Arzan frowned and shook the mount.
Arja hid his head and Arja feared.
‘I am naught,’ said Arja, ‘but thou art god!’”

“We are naught!” cried the people, “but he is god!”

The drum-players and the long trumpets were come to the stone.

“Arzan took a bough from the sacred tree,
Less was it at once than the Arja-bough!
Arzan sat by the river and wrought with the bough.
A shape Arzan made, like and not like to a man.
Smooth-faced he made it and gave it breasts.
Woman, said Arzan, and wrought it fair.
And gave her to Arja in the grove.
‘Live!’ said Arzan, ‘Be wise and good,
Tend Arja-land without sorrow and pain,
And give to me praise who made all well!’
Then Arzan took of the reeds of the land,
He spake his word and they stood up fair,
Daughters of men, with streaming hair.
Izd and her daughters wept with rage.
There rose a spring on the mountain side.
It made a pool like a silver shield.
The clouds saw themselves and the trees around.
It drew from a spring by the Arzan-stone.
‘Touch it not!’ said Arzan. ‘It is mine alone.’
Izd and her daughters coiled below.
Said Izd to her daughters, ‘Yet shall we win!’”

The music beat and blared. The women of the village looked aslant at the men, and the men at the women. Whatever there might be of old, old woes, terrors, mistakes, jealousies, sins, conflicts, emulations, tyrannies seemed, for one moment, to come up through the past, burst into fire, and stream and fork.

“The Arja-woman walked by herself.
The pool made a gleaming among the trees.
Said the Arja-woman, ‘Were that water mine,
Surely it would give me strange wealth and bliss!’
The Arja-woman looked around,
The Arja-woman moved through the thick trees.
The Arja-woman sat by the spring.
The water bubbled and the water shone.
‘Why is’t forbid?’ said that lately-made.
Izd, below heard the word she said.
Izd tore the roof so the woman might see.
And under the rent she set the shape.
‘I see down there a strange, fair thing.
I wish it were come more near to me!’
Up rose the shape and clasped her knee.
‘Put your arms around and draw me close,
And wish it to be and it will be.
And we who are two will then be one,
And we shall drink of the Arzan spring!’
The Arja-woman put her arms around,
And drew her close and wished it to be.
The shape entered in; the two were one.
The shape was evil, the shape was Izd.
The Arja-woman grew more fair,
But evil of heart, and a bringer of ill.
Arjaya stooped to the Arzan spring.
She drank the water, she washed therein.
The tabu-water, the sacred spring!”

“Ahhh!” breathed the river-country people, men and women. It was so. They had known it must be so.

“She took a pitcher and drew it full.
On her head she bore it through the grove.
Arja sat in the pleasant shade,
And feathered his arrows bright of hue.
rja sat by the vineyard edge,
And sang to himself with a merry heart.
He saw Arjaya and he felt a thirst.
She came to Arja through the grove.
‘Arja, hail! Will you have to drink?’
She lowered the pitcher to his hand.
Arzan thundered from the Arzan-stone.”

“Arzan! Give us protection!” cried the rhythmically moving river-country people.

“‘Whence drew you the water?’ asked the Arzan-man.
She stood with anklets of silver fine.
She stood with armlets of burning gold.
She stood with a frontlet starry bright.
She stood in a robe as thin as mist.
And she had within her that witchcraft shape.
She bent herself and she kissed his mouth.
‘Good is the water. I drank. Drink thou!’
Then Arja drank the tabu-water.
Arzan darkened from the mountain-top.”

Arja and Arjaya, and how and when the Golden Age went down…. The river-country people beheld the form of that of which they had long heard rumours, old speech-of-things, passing from people to people, changing shape but keeping substance as it passed! The river-country people both remembered and freshly imagined.

“Arzan! Arzan! The sin—the sin!” cried the river-plain. Men believed and women believed.

The vineyards were blasted, the barley, the wheat.
Day-night, week-month fell fire and ashes.
The flocks and the herds went down to death.
The antlered deer ran out of the earth.
The fish drank the fire, the river sank.
Arzan threw stones from the mountain-top.
They fell like rain, they smote and slew
The sons and daughters, the leaf-wrought folk,
And the pebble-bondmen who drudged for love.
Arja and Arjaya hid under a hill.
Arzan ceased to thunder and pour down fire.
But the land was a withered and briery place.
Arja and Arjaya crept from the cave.
And Arja had sorrow for that great sin.
But Arjaya had Izd coiled round her heart.
Arzan spoke from the Arzan-stone.
‘For vineyard and wheat that grow of themselves,
For golden bow and golden dart,
For antlered deer that never fail,
For ox and horse of a mighty breed,
For shining fish that love the net,
For boats adorned that are never lost,
For houses large and heaps of goods,
For sons of Arja who live in bliss,
For work-folk strong who are glad of toil,
For always-spring, for life all sweet,
Arja, O Arja! tarry and see
What shall fall to you from out my mount,
Because you drank of the tabu-water,
Because you held my power so light,
Because Izd came between you and me!’
Arzan thundered and Arja feared.
Arjaya kneeled upon the ground.
Arzan spoke from the Arzan-stone.
‘Woman I made from the lesser bough,
And gave for help and gave for play.
Now woman shall have the greater pain!
Hers is the sin of the tabu-water,
She turned to Izd and made her her god,
Half Izd she is, that evil snake,
And Arja she harmed, the Arzan-man,
And shut him from the blissful land!
Now take from her her anklets bright,
And take from her her armlets gold.
And take from her her frontlet of stars,
And mark her brow with the mark I show.
In all that is done man shall be head,
Man shall rule and woman serve,
Man shall speak and woman be mute,
Man shall own and woman own not.
Folk shall she bear to fill the land.
The sons shall rule, the daughters serve,
The sons shall speak, the daughters be mute,
The sons shall own, the daughters not.
For the sons are Arzan, the daughters Izd!’”

Ramiki ceased his singing. His heart was freed, and he felt relief and escape, and a cheerful largeness of mood. The anger against Halmis was fallen. There even stole again over his being a fondness for that prophetess. The energy that had boiled within, thick and murky red, had been beautifully worked off by the late improvisation. Diffused and expanded through quite vast ranges, it was no longer an aching and concentrated desire to pay Halmis back and to make evident his own superiority. He became conscious of a tranquillity, of something like vision above vision…. Through this pushed suddenly up, for all the world like a lily in a pond, a willingness, a desire, that Halmis should keep the red band upon her forehead, that she should go, if she would, like a young man, walking alone! But he had made it too late for that!

The people of the river-plain thought it best that women should break no more tabus….

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CHAPTER VII

THE AMAZON

The country of the Amazonian women ran in deep mountain gorges back from the sea to a tableland and certain forested peaks. At the foot of the gorge spread salt meadows, flat and green, overbreathed by the fragrant sea wind. Here was capital pasturage, and here on a day came down from the plateau a dozen mounted women driving before them flock and herd. The day was warm, the meadows bright. These gave to shining sands, the sands to sapphire sea. Behind the level green sprang the wood. Lowing and bleating, cattle and sheep came to the grass. The drovers saw all disposed, then, hot and tired with much work from dawn till noon, dismounted, fastened their horses in the wood and went down to the sea. Having bathed, with laughter and play, they stretched themselves upon the sand and opened a great wallet that held bread and dried meat, and untied the mouth of a wine skin.

Their town was built three leagues away, in a cup of the mountain excellently guarded by grey crags. They thought that it had always been there, though indeed the old wise women said no. They said that their mothers had told them that their mothers’ mothers had heard of a time when there was a battle at the edge of the world, and that then fifty women, fleeing, had climbed to these mountains and here built a town and kept ancient customs. These were the ancestresses and divine! However that might be, here was now the town and the people. A queen ruled them.{140} On certain ritual days of the year they had intercourse with men of two neighbouring nations. Of the children born they kept the girls, but when the boys had seen twelve summers they sent these to the father nation. Year by year their ways of life, at first not so strange, grew to seem strange and stranger yet to the peoples who heard of them and elaborated and legended what they heard. To themselves it was old nature, very right and proper, dear, familiar life!

The drovers lying upon the sand, between the blue sea and the salt meadow, were all on the younger side of prime. Among them was Lindane, the Queen’s daughter. The sea-wind caressed them, they heard the contented voices and movements of the grazing beasts, they had bread and red wine and sweet rest. When they had eaten they posted two watchers, and the rest closed their eyes.

To the left of where they lay dipped into the sea a hook of land, a long, crooked finger of Mother Earth. The watchers looked inland toward the wealth in the meadows, the horses fastened in the wood. The world hereabouts went little to sea; the sea made no danger save to small fishing craft in rough weather. The watchers never saw until too late the long, dark boat, fifty-oared, with sails beside, with carven prow, that stole around the crooked finger…. The watchers heard the sails when they rattled down, and sharply turned to see the prow touch the sand and the men leap forth—and all so close the eyes might be seen! “Awake! Awake!” cried the watchers and snatched bow and quiver. The ten sprang up, seized weapons; all raced for the wood and those tied steeds. Close after them, with shouts, came the sea-rovers.

There were fifty and five strong young men, strong and{141} untamed as eagles, swoopers from islands below the horizon. The chief was Sandanis. Elsewhere upon the far-stretching mainland coast they had lifted spoil in their talons, robbing towns that spoke a dialect akin to their own. The long boat held wrought gold and brass, rich woven goods, strange weapons, objects of value. Here upon this strand was stopping only to fill the water casks. But when they saw the sleeping forms the sea-eagles again set beak and talon.

At first they did not know the twelve for women, for they were not habited like the women of the islands or of any country that the sea-rovers knew, and they were tall and deeply bronzed, and they showed a practised hand with javelin and with bow and arrow. They ran like deer, and the sea-rovers ran at their heels. They menaced the pursuit as they ran, then, reaching the wood, plunged past tree and swinging vines to the tethered horses. They waited not to untie, but each stripping knife from sheath, severed the bridle and sprang to steed. One further minute and they might have shown clean heels, won away to their mountain fastness. But the fifty were on them, keen as winter wolves, knife-armed, javelin-armed, knowing their quarry now for the famed women! A hundred hands caught at bridle and mane, or used knife or flung javelin against the horses. Of these several sank to earth, others, rearing, beat with their hooves at the foe. One only escaped, making with its rider at a furious gallop for the trail, the upward-running gorge and the crag-guarded town.

Yet mounted or with foot upon the ground, the remaining Amazons fought for life and freedom. They fought with knife and shortened javelin, being unable to use bow{142} and arrow in the close conflict. They fought strongly, with skill, with desperation and tenacious courage. Lives were lost from among the sea-rovers, bitter wounds were given. But the sea-rovers were fifty and they who had brought the cattle to the salt meadows were twelve. And one was gone and two were slain and two had death hurts. The seven that were left were overpowered, dragged to earth and bound with thongs and cords.

Lindane, the Queen’s daughter, fought with Sandanis, the king of the sea-rovers, a second strong man giving him needed help. It took the two to bind her. Sandanis’s hands upon her wrists, the other’s against her shoulders, they forced her down the sands, they lifted and flung her over the boat side. All the seven were brought to the boat and guarded there while the sea-rovers gathered wood and burned their dead.

The sea-rovers drew out to no great length the details of that rite. In their minds was a humming thought of the fled Amazon and of possible rescue. Kindling the pyre, they left it blazing there, at the edge of the wood. A forewind had sprung up and they took advantage. Making sail in haste, they left behind the golden sands and the salt meadows and the dark, mounting forests of that land.

The sun went down, the moon came up. The women yet lay where they had been flung. Then Lindane rose to her knees, and with her two or three of the more resilient sort. They looked astern, and by the light of the great full moon saw, sinking from them, their country-shore and all it held of home and friends. Lindane, straining at her bonds, broke them, and with her doubled hands struck Sandanis that was nearest to her. Sandanis, thinking himself conqueror, laughed. He seized the Amazon’s wrists,{143} struggled with her, and nodded to his helper to wrap the thong about her arms. Enmeshed again, she turned her head and prayed to the sea.

When the moon was an hour high they came to an islet known to be desolate, a mere hand’s breadth of waste sand and rock, blanched by the moon. The favourable wind had fallen, and the rowers wished not to row through this night. They pushed prow upon the shelving sand, they left the boat and took with them those captured women. They had store of meat and wine. They ate and drank, sitting in the moonlight upon the sand, above the murmuring sea, and they set food and drink before their captives. Their tongue and the women’s tongue had one origin. Victor and vanquished understood much of each other’s speech. “Eat, drink!” said the sea-rovers. “Our country is going to be your country.” When they themselves had finished their meal, then, with noise and laughter, they cast lots. The moon shone very brightly, a soft daylight seemed to visit the place.

Sandanis was the island king. He cast no lot, but made his choice at once, and her he chose was for the king alone. “I take the flame-top,” he said.

The king’s comrades laughed and clamoured. “O Sandanis, she will turn thee red too! She is demon!”

“I am her demon bridegroom,” said Sandanis with answering laughter. “I have come from afar to her!”

The moon climbed to her meridian, and all the islet was bathed in light. It was light upon the beach where life lay, shaped into men and women; it was light where the sea-rovers’ king held between his arms Lindane whom he had bound. The dawn when it came hardly made it seem more light. The dawn reddened, burned scarlet in sea and in{144} sky. The wide-winged birds sailed and circled and with harsh voices uttered their cry to the morning. The sun sprang out of the sea, and he was red and strong. Sandanis and his companions once more bestowed those captive women in the boat and pushing from the desolate isle, themselves leaped in and lifted oars. The favourable wind sprang forth again; they hoisted sails and steered for the island that they called home.

Five days they sailed or rowed as the wind sent them on or failed them. The second night Lindane’s teeth met in Sandanis’s shoulder. In return he struck her so mighty a blow that she lay stunned, the moonlight blanching her backward-drawn face. Sandanis, regarding her, felt he knew not what of ruth. He bathed his own wound with wine and he forced wine between the Amazon’s lips. She stirred, opened her eyes and raised herself upon her hand. “Flame-top!” he said, “where did you learn to bite so hard?”

But “Let me go!” was all her answer. “Let me go!” and the ruth passed for that time from his heart.

When the sixth morning broke it showed the island. The sea-rovers broke into a chant of rejoicing for home, but the women they had rapt away looked on a picture of their own home, their home that the morning did not show.

Limestone cliffs had the island with woods climbing to mountain pastures, and above these a rounded mountain-top. Many springs it had, and sunny glades, and deep ravines where the shade was black. Huge spreading trees it had, and blossomy meads and hillsides planted with the vine, and fields of waving grain. It owned sheep and goats and oxen, horses and herds of swine, fed by the each-year-renewed rain of beech-nut and acorn. Coming to the hu{145}man, herdsmen were there, shepherds and shepherdesses, and tillers of the earth, both men and women. Artisans also the island held, though not so many of these. But carpenter, mason, and smith were there, shipwright and bowyer and others beside. And old prowess in such lines and now old custom had given these and like crafts to men. Certain crafts leaned to women and women were traders-in-little. Household offices fell to women, and women ground at the mills, and all the garments, whether for use or ornament that the people wore, were of their weaving and fashioning, and the food they prepared and cooked, and in their hands was the cleanliness of all, and they kept alight the fires. Also they bore and long suckled the children, and gave them their early training.

Above the mass of the island population, men and women, bond and free, stood in self-seized and self-confirmed rank the warlike sort, the fillers of long boats, the sea-eagles swooping upon other islands and the shadowy mainland, traders-in-great on occasion, raptors of goods and of lives when that better suited. Out of this body of war men, young and in prime and old, had risen by degrees the elder-wise, the firm and politic, to become a council and point the road their history should tread, and at last from captains, chiefs, and counsellors had come the chief of chiefs, the casting voice, the king. And all these were men, and when they died they left to their sons. Next in caste stood the attendants and ministers and interpreters of the gods, and these were men and women, as the gods themselves were male and female. But, aided by that topmost caste, the priest was gaining over the priestess, the god over the goddess. The highest god, the ruler of the rest, was held to be by nature male. In the island, man and{146} woman professed to heal the body. But the dominant wind blew for the man-physician and against the woman. Both men and women made minstrelsy, and men and women wove the dance. But in the island they that bore rule and heaped together the fruit of war and directed public action were men. And the servants of the gods that were strongest to persuade or to awe were men.

To this island came the Amazon.

The cliffs lifted higher, the green grew brighter, the sea-eagles saw their harbour and its small white quay, and their town on the hill above the sea, saw the folk hastening down from the gates. They raised a home-coming song, welcoming shouts rang from the water-side. The boat flew on with sail and oar. The sails rattled down, the oars sent it forward, it lay beside the gleaming, landing place. Arms were outstretched, there prevailed a leaning down, a springing up, shouts, vaunts, welcomes, a swarm of bodies, a humming of the mind. Here was home-in-triumph for the sea-eagles; here was land-of-captivity for the women from that old continent.

The house of Sandanis! That was a very great house according to the notions of the island and the time. It was filled with bond and free, but with more of the bond than the free. When they reached it, built above the town, and entered a court that enclosed for shade two vast sycamores, forth from the inner rooms to meet her son came the widowed woman, the old island queen. With her moved her two daughters, Lindace and Ardis, and behind them pressed the women of the household.

The king’s men who had robbed with the king took each to his own house his share of the spoil that had been heaped{147} in the king’s court and portioned there. Brass and gold had been heaped, and weapons and implements and rich stuffs and adornments, and among these had place the captives from that ancient strand. With a beating of voices a crowd entered the court. Sun and shade struggled there. Women were weighed against gold and brass. All things were parted and in the mean time the feast was made and set in Sandanis’s hall. Bondsmen took away to each sea-rover’s house his chosen spoil. To the six of greatest fame went the six Amazons, companions of Lindane. But in the court, beneath the hugest sycamore, yet rested the gold and brass, the weapons, the rich stuff and the woman set apart to Sandanis the king. The crowd of the unconsidered dwindled. The chief men passed with Sandanis into his kingly hall, there to feast and carouse and recite mighty deeds.

The island folk had looked with curiosity upon those stranger women, unlike other women, different from what the gods had created women to be! Hands had touched them, voices had beaten against them. But now six of the seven had been taken away, and all the crowd was dwindling. There came and stood before the Amazon shared to the king three priests of the island, priests of a warlike god who was become the chief deity. One was a man past middle-age, a dark enthusiast. The other two were younger.

“Woman-out-of-nature,” said the first, “who is your country-god?”

Lindane sat silent among goods and weapons and cunningly wrought matters in silver and brass and gold. “She is dumb,” said those who had gathered behind the priests. “Maybe the king has cut out her tongue!”

“Speak, man-woman!” said the second priest, inferior{148} to the first. “Who is the god of your country? Whoever he be he is less than our god!”

“They have,” said one behind, “a goddess only, no god!”

“Woman and captive, answer the chief priest!” said the youngest priest, and he turned red as he spoke.

But the Amazon did not answer. The chief priest’s look darkened over her. “Not to us the offence, but to the god!” he said; and turning with the two, went away.

The press in the king’s court further lessened. Came, threading her way through the groups, an old handmaid, one named Eunica. She spoke to Lindane. “My mistresses, the old queen and her daughters, would have speech with you, Amazon!”

Lindane followed her across the court and by a passage to a steep stair, and so to an upper room lined with oak. Here sat the old queen with a silver distaff in her hands, and beside her a basket of coloured wool. The daughters sat near her on cushions, and they, too, had distaffs, and in the back of the room handmaids wove at a mighty loom.

Spoke the old queen. “Stranger woman, were you bond or free before my son the king took you?”

Said Lindane, “My mother is the queen of my country.”

“Then you shall have,” answered the old queen, “an ivory distaff to spin with. There are here three daughters of kings, and they all have ivory distaffs. Sit down and spin.”

There was but an hour to spin before dusk fell, with supper for that great house. All descended from the upper room, but they did not eat, that eve, in hall, because the king and his chief men were feasting there, and wine, wine, wine was flowing.{149}

In Sandanis’s hall the torchlight was bright, but through the rest of the house it flared dim. At last the Amazon came to a place where was hardly any light, to a cell in the wall where she would sleep that night with Eunica, the old handmaid. So near was it to the great central room of the house that there might be heard in waves the mingled voices of the feasting men. What light there was seemed to come from that place of triumph, stealing through cracks in the wall.

Eunica had a bed of straw spread with sheepskins. The two bondwomen sat upon it, in the cell narrow as a tomb.

“I was the daughter of a king,” said old Eunica. “Sandanis’s father brought me here. Then I was young like you, but my hair was never red like yours. The old queen was young, too. She made herself a terror to me, but Myrtus cared more for my hand than he did for her whole body. But Myrtus died. Long, long ago, Myrtus died…. Sandanis was to have wed the king’s sister of the next island. But the maiden perished at sea, being brought here by her brothers. Now there is talk of a bride from another island. When she comes, if Sandanis yet holds you in liking, she will hate you. She will find occasion against you. When Sandanis likes you no longer, then, if you break a water-jar, or if there is a knot in your weaving, she will have you beaten. And when Sandanis likes you no longer, he will not care—he will not lift a finger to help you!”

“Sandanis…. That is his voice now in the hall. It is as though the sea were behind me and about and before…. Ah, Sandanis! I hate thee!”

“Hate or love, be wolf or dog—by all the dark gods, what does it matter?” said Eunica.{150}

“Has it been always, in your earth, that a man could do so with a woman?”

“Always that ever I heard of,” answered Eunica. “I do not know where time goes to, behind us.”

“Will not the women conspire and slay them?”

But Eunica laughed at that. “When creatures are tamed, the power to bound and to rend is there and is not there!”

“Now, by the goddess! I would untame them!”

Eunica laughed again. “Then, to show the way, each must rend its own hunter! Now I had Milon by Myrtus, and I could not rend Myrtus.—I have wonder if you would rend King Sandanis.”

Rising, she moved to the wall and with her fingers loosened a wedge of wood, broad as an axe-head. The cell became more light, the sound of revel fuller and more plain. The old handmaid came back to the pallet. In the hall they sang war the glorious, the chief exalted, the warlike gods. They sang man-strength and what they called freedom. They sang the rape of gold and land, the rape of women and the rape of lives. The harp-strings were struck, wine flowed, men beat fist against board. With flashing eyes, with eloquence of gesture, starting to their feet, men declaimed their virtues. All through the king’s house was listening; up and down ran an hypnotized, inner murmuring. “It must be so. It must be so.”

The night passed, and the next day and night, other days and other nights. Sandanis the king and Lindane from the Amazon country drew together, dragged apart, and neither knew at times whether a passion of love or a passion of hatred was what their souls meant….

In this island stood a principal fane, built to the god of{151} the sea-rovers, in a wood that topped a cliff that fell sheer to a foaming sea. Here came Sandanis and his following to sacrifice, and to hear from the dark priest who lived by the fane if a bride from the island that on clear days might be seen afar would bring luck to the king’s house, binding in amity Sandanis and the king of that land. The wood was dark, the poplars shook in a whistling wind, the priest divined, and brought the king an answer from the god. “The bride will bring fortune if the prow of the ship sent to bring her is touched with the life of the king’s latest prey.”

Sandanis heard. “That would mean,” he said, “the bulls I took from the herdsmen of the red island.” And he sent for the bulls and sacrificed them.

That done with due ceremonies, a fifty-oared ship, the prow smeared with bull’s blood, quitted quay and harbour for the myriad-painted sea and the island like a little cloud upon the horizon. No great number of days and back it came, broken-winged, less twenty of its oarsmen. No bride was with it, but a story of disaster, sudden inexplicable enmity of that island folk, found arrayed against them when they landed…. There arose a murmur in King Sandanis’s town.

Said Sandanis in council, “That island woman is not fair, and her brother who is king much resembles a quicksand. As well not treat with him, nor be called his friend!”

The cattle of the island fell sick. From every dell and meadow and mountain pasture came herdsmen ominously shaking the head, bringing to the town one tale. A solemn procession wound, men and women, and the king at the head, up to the fane above the sea. The god was pro{152}pitiated; the priest, a poplar wand in his hand, stood as in a trance, then opened his mouth and gave forth the words of the god. “The cattle will grow strong when the horns of a black, a white, and a red bull are touched with the life of the king’s latest prey.”

The crowd murmured like the sacred grove. “That would mean,” said Sandanis, “the hare that yesterday ran through the court and was taken from under my cloak where it lay on the ground.” And he sent for the hare and sacrificed it, and touched the horns of the bulls with the blood. Likewise he gave to the god three great pots of brass and an image of silver.

That was one day. The next he took bow and quiver and with eight companions went hunting in the forest that stretched to the mountain-top. “I will shoot stag or doe that shall be latest prey,” said Sandanis to himself. But, going, a prodigy occurred. The sky blackened, then lightning rived an oak before him, and the spread of the bolt caused the king to reel, and made as dead for an hour right arm and right knee. The eight wove a litter of branches and brought him down through the forest. In sight of the king’s house vigour returned, and he stepped from the litter and made them scatter the branches. But he spoke no more of hunting, but held silence and a knitted brow. Entering the house, he went into his chamber and shutting out all, lay there in darkness and strife of mind. The eight, parting from the king, were not silent.

The cattle continued to sicken and to die. A monstrous hailstorm came and cut down the wheat and beat into ruin the dusters of young grapes. The fishermen of the island took few fish in their nets and those not the ones desired. At last the people said openly, “The king’s latest{153} prey, that he took with his two hands, who is it but that woman from the Amazon country?”

Sandanis, in his house, listened to the chief priest of the island, and he listened with a hunted mind and a divided will. “Man cannot avoid the god!” warned the dark priest. “If the god’s hand points to this abhorrent and barbarian woman, will King Sandanis say him nay?”

“And if I did?” said Sandanis.

The priest rose and stood in the shadowy place. The king of men, the priest of the gods—these two were, or seemed to be, the greatest of the shapes that trod the earth! The king-shape appeared to have sinew and bulk, the priest-shape height. Sometimes the king-shape twisted the neck of the priest-shape, but ever the next hour it rose the same. Sometimes the priest-shape made the king-shape creep upon the earth, but never could it keep it there. Sometimes the two were friends, and though they used differing darts, pursued the same quarry. Sometimes the two were one, priest-kings. In the countries where that was so the ruler-shape had power indeed…. In this island of the blue sea king and priest were two. But the priest had in his quiver awe of the huge supernatural. And all shapes, king-shapes and others, deeply feared those arrows, dipped in juices not of earth.

When now the chief priest stood in the dusk of the king’s chamber, Sandanis saw the bow in his hands and the arrow headed against himself. “King Sandanis! King Sandanis! The god will part your house from you, all your friends and your island—”

Sandanis, sitting upon his couch, clenched hands upon the wrought cedar. The chief priest felt for and found a master arrow, and found it the sooner for that he, also, at{154} times, knew lands deeper than the land of worldly loss. He towered, he became the invulnerable Archer. “Are you more great, O man! than God? Are you more wise than the Immortal? Do you withstand? Then your part in him will dissolve like a cloud! It will pass like a cry when he is not listening!”

A seabird went by the king’s door with a whistling cry. Rose the priest’s voice, “A portent!—A portent!—”

Men took and bound the Amazon in the king’s house. The priests made proclamation of a great and solemn procession to the fane and the altar above the sea. That was to be in the morning. In the deep middle of the night stole King Sandanis to the room hollowed in stone where there was wont to be kept the sacrifice until the east was red.

The two men without the door said naught, but rested on the earth, their heads wrapped in their mantles. The king went in, and there were two torches, burning gold-coloured and straight, and between them, bound to a stone sat Lindane.

Sandanis took station opposite. “Lindane! Lindane!”

Lindane opened her eyes. “Thou who would slay me! Are there no queens and priestesses to draw breath and cry ‘Save’?”

“Queens are but kings’ wives or mothers. If the god says ‘Sacrifice!’ will the priestesses say him nay?”

“The god! O Thou-who-bringest-forth! where art thou, my goddess?”

“Lindane, I love thee—and yet thou must die!”

“O Earth! this love!”

“Such as love is on earth, I have it for thee.”

“Maybe so,” answered the Amazon. “I have been{155} weary of the sun since you took me by numbers on my own sea-strand.”

“By strength of my own arm, also!”

“Strong arm, dull wit, unjust heart!”

“O woman, are you so different from me?”

“If I had here an apple,” said Lindane, “I would cut it in two, and give Sandanis half, keeping half myself. The two halves would not be different, but the king would have one, and a slave for the sacrifice the other!”

Sandanis came nearer to her. They kept silence in the rock-hewn place, then the island king uttered a cry. “When we fought that day in the wood by the salt meadow, yea, by the god! when I sent a javelin through the neck of your great white horse and dragged you down, it was as though many times we had fought and loved before!”

“Much fighting, little loving.—O my mother! O my queen!”

“Thou art for the sacrifice. I may not touch thee to help thee. The god has said it.”

“O Earth! This love that a god can make to be put off and on like a garment!”

“Unless a king were god, he could not help—”

“And would he then?… O my goddess, hear me!”

“The god’s word is over every goddess…. Lindane that diest, live if thou canst!”

“The grey rock town upon the grey mountains—”

“I that thought it was sweet, find it bitter to be king—”

“O my goddess! Back to me comes every sin…. The cock is crowing!”

The door was opened by the men without. King Sandanis hid head and face in his mantle and went from the{156} rock chamber, hallowed to the sacrifice. The cock crew again, the dawn opened slowly, like a red flower.

The processions formed in the town, in the countryside, before the king’s high house. The participants carried a sacred torch, they carried images of the god, they carried baskets of flowers and burning incense. Music went with them. The priests and King Sandanis walked at the head, and behind them walked the Amazon. “Now the god will smile upon us!” sang the people. “For here is the king’s latest prey!”

In the wood, before the image of the god, upon the altar, they took the life of the sacrifice, and they touched with it the prows of the ships in the harbour, and the horns of bulls, red, white and black.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE PRIESTESS OF MARDUK

Babylon, builded of brick, lay four-square in its fat plain. Fields of the best grain in the world shimmered out and afar, westward, beyond Euphrates to the desert edge, eastward to Tigris, to Akkad north, and south to the sea where stood Eridu, city of Ea, the old Father-God. Babylon was moated, Babylon was walled, a great, slow river ran through Babylon. Houses stood thick in Babylon, and the narrow streets were many, and every building was made of baked clay, for there was little stone in the land, and where long and long since had waved uncounted trees now waved the heavy-eared grain. The houses where the people dwelled were small and low. The house where the king dwelled was not high, but huge of breadth, and brazen-gated. Likewise the houses of the gods were huge, where-ever they rose in the city. And hugest of all, huge as two or three of the others put together, covering no mere hands’ breadth of earth floor, spread the house of Marduk, son of Ea, once god of this city only, now strongest god of many gods in a wide land.

Many-courted and many-roomed was the house of Marduk.

A blue sky hung over Babylon, and the sun rode in strength with Marduk and with Sharrâni the king. The sun and Marduk and Sharrâni the king were somehow one….

Temple wall, palace wall, walls of tall gateways had a{158} strange and effective decoration of glazed tiles coloured blue and red and white and black and yellow. On the tiles were painted, colour against colour, huge winged men, genii, together with great beasts, unicorns, lions, bulls. Repeated and repeated, these became processions, troops of creatures inside and outside temple and palace. Sometimes, in the heated, quivering air, they seemed to palpitate, to move in their places.

The vast house of Marduk, thus coloured and adorned, reared itself from a yet vaster platform of earth and brick. Beside it, within the wide temple enclosure, rose higher and higher yet, the “mountain of the god,” the tower of seven stages. Each stage spread wider, rose taller than the next that was built upon it, until at the top was only the chamber of the god and the pathway around, and each stage was mounted by an outward stair, a broad, gradual and parapetted ascent, and each stage contained a ritual number of rooms, looking out upon a surrounding, guarded walkway. From top to bottom the wall space glowed with those coloured tile-pictures, with winged genii, trees of life, bull and lion and dragon. The sunshine of Babylon lit them as with fire behind; in the moonlight of Babylon they still showed. Then they were faintly-hued, but they seemed vaster and more solemn than in the daytime. The “mountain of the god,” the “lofty house of Marduk,” sprang two hundred feet and more above the low roofs of Babylon. From its stages was watched the life of the city, the movements on the plain, the glittering presence and solemn actions of sun, moon and stars.

Iltani, the mother of Iltani, had died at Iltani’s birth. Lugal-naid, her father, had taken another wife, Ramtû, who was kind enough to Iltani, but a passionate and cruel{159} mistress to Ina-banat and Belatum, slaves and concubines of Lugal-naid. Iltani dwelled in the house with the three women, and now took the side of one and now of another, though for the most part secretly. Evil would it be if any of the three, conceiving dislike to her, should blacken her forehead in the sight of her father who owned her to do what he would with her! Lugal-naid was not unkind, and Iltani fetched and carried for him, and regarded him with awe, and with pride in his weight among the people, for he was superintendent of the temple granaries.

“Iltani is leaving childhood,” said Ramtû to Lugal-naid.

“Let her be a little longer,” answered Lugal-naid. “She is use and ornament in the house.”

Iltani grew for another year. “O Lugal-naid, you must be thinking what you will do with Iltani!”

“I will think,” said Lugal-naid.

“There is Ninmar, son of Ur-Enlil—”

“I will think,” said Lugal-naid.

On the other side of Euphrates flowing through Babylon, dwelled the brother of Lugal-naid, Ibni-Shamash, who had an office in the king’s palace. Ibni-Shamash had sons and two daughters, Innina-nûri and Tuda-Ishtar. The latter were older than Iltani, who had child’s admiration for them and their ways and adornments. Ibni-Shamash gave Innina-nûri for wife to Nanâ-iddin, son of the assistant of the under-governor.

That had been in the spring time when the plain was green and there were blossoms in every garden. When it was autumn, and all the land was brown and dry and the heart longed for rain, Iltani heard Ramtû and Ina-banat and Belatum talking all together.{160}

It seemed that Innina-nûri was doing wrong…. It seemed that Nanâ-iddin was going to accuse her before the judges in the temple court…. It seemed that all the kindred of Ibni-Shamash were deeply concerned. It seemed that they were angry with Innina-nûri, that they sent and exhorted her, even pleaded with her…. It seemed that Innina-nûri had listened, though with the air of the skies in rain and storm, and at last, pushed against by all, had bowed her head before Nanâ-iddin…. It seemed that there had followed a time of stillness and that the kindred all had congratulated themselves…. It seemed that then, suddenly, with a crash, all was wrong again! Nanâ-iddin and his father the assistant of the under-governor were gone to the judges, who summoned before them Innina-nûri.

A wind ran through the houses of Ibni-Shamash’s kindred. Iltani, too, heard the wind.

“Justice of Marduk and the King. Innina-nûri, that will not be wife to her husband, Nanâ-iddin, shall be thrown into the river…. Mercy of Marduk and the King. Two days are given to Innina-nûri for repentance and returning to Nanâ-iddin.”

“O women!” said Lugal-naid when he returned to his house that eve. “See what comes of wrong-doing!”

On a summer day, some time after Innina-nûri returned finally to Nanâ-iddin, Iltani went with Ramtû across the river to Ibni-Shamash’s house to see Gin-Enlil his wife and Tuda-Ishtar that was not yet wed. The year before, Tuda-Ishtar was, indeed, to have been given for wife to a very fine young man, son of one in favour with the King. But in a war with Elam the man had been killed. And now Tuda-Ishtar would not be wed until the savour of his{161} death was gone from the general mind. Tuda-Ishtar was beautiful, and who took her would give Ibni-Shamash a good price, and out of this Ibni-Shamash would give to Tuda-Ishtar herself garments, two slave women and a wheat field.

Ramtû and Iltani found at Ibni-Shamash’s door slaves waiting, staves in hand. They had in keeping an ass with an embroidered cloth upon its back, and strung along the bridle rein little silver bells. “For whom is all this?” asked Ramtû. “For Tuda-Ishtar, mistress,” answered the old man, the head slave.

Ramtû and Iltani, entering the house, met there an air of business and excitement. Gin-Enlil and Lamazi, wives of Ibni-Shamash, and a dozen handmaids were gathered in the next to the greatest room in the house about Tuda-Ishtar who stood in the middle of the floor. They were putting upon Tuda-Ishtar fine garments and ornaments of gold and silver and gems. Tuda-Ishtar was more beautiful than ever for there was a red stain upon her lips and cheeks and her eyes were quite like stars, and on her head was a curious, crown-like headdress.

When Ramtû saw this she smote her hands together and cried: “Why did you not send word that Tuda-Ishtar was going to-day to the temple of Mylitta? I would have brought her my chain that I wore the day I sat beneath the palm trees!—You, also, were there that day, Gin-Enlil!”

“Yes. Twenty years ago…. We did not have to return, Ramtû, day after day, like some we know!”

“By Ishtar, no!—And Tuda-Ishtar will not have to return, nor, indeed, have to wait at all! The first man that sees her—the bee and the honey-bloom!—You should have let us know!{162}”

“She would go now and have it over with, and her debt to Mylitta paid.—After all, even though we are told it is a high duty, a woman wants the day behind her and out of mind!”

Iltani, going home with Ramtû, crossing the river in a boat, looked at the walls of the temple of Mylitta. There could be made out the court, surrounded by palm trees, where, for one time in her life, every woman of Babylon, saving only priestesses and votaries of a god, must sit until there came some man, no matter whom, who dropped a piece of silver in her lap. Then would the woman rise and go away with the man and pay her debt to Mylitta, keeping the silver piece ever after to show clearance.

The young Iltani saw behind her forehead Tuda-Ishtar sitting there under palm trees. They said that she would not have long to wait. That was because she was beautiful. Everybody admired that in Tuda-Ishtar, and served her because of it.

The young Iltani did not think of all that; she only saw a picture of her cousin sitting under the palm trees, and of a man coming near and then standing still before Tuda-Ishtar. Her fancy made the man young, and also beautiful…. Iltani looked at the palm tree and the blue sky behind them, and then she looked over the side of the boat at her own image in the still water. When she had regarded the image for some moments, she glanced aside at Ramtû. She longed that Ramtû should say to her, “Why you, too, Iltani, are beautiful!” But Ramtû talked to the boatman of the price of food….

Iltani grew apace. Said Ramtû to Lugal-naid, “What will you do with this girl? Younger than she have sat their day in the temple of Mylitta! And Ninmar has{163} wed Beligunu!—Do you mean to present Iltani to the god?”

“That is what I intend,” said Lugal-naid. “It is an old oath that I swore if I prospered. I waited to see if I did so prosper. This year I am made superintendent of superintendents. Now Iltani shall become bride of Marduk!”

Iltani went with all her ornaments to the temple of Marduk. She went not unhappily, though she wept at parting with Ramtû, Ina-banat and Belatum. She was going to a life of honour that, so far as it went, and did she always follow righteousness, would reflect honour upon her kindred. A votary of Marduk gave up certain sweetnesses in life, but also she found others. Iltani’s kindred and their friends brought her in procession to the temple. Priests and priestesses ritually met her, Lugal-naid ritually renounced his part in her to the god, her dower that she brought was ritually spread around her, music was made, incense hung in the air….

That had been some months ago. Now that part of the huge temple which she inhabited was familiar to Iltani. Familiar were the rooms and rooms within rooms, the courts in sun and shade, the rites and duties, service of the temple, spirit of the hive!

Huge was the temple, many were its inmates, multifarious its activities. The god and the king who ruled under his shield so merged that the king was half-divine and the god more than half-royal. All life moved under the glance of the god and his fingers pushed it here, withdrew it there, or, resting underneath, held it steadfast. The fingers of the god, clothed in flesh, became his most numerous priesthood. Learning was of the god, judgement and law were of{164} the god, administration was of the god, though the king was named with him.

Marduk was served by a mighty host of priests. Priestesses there were also and in number, but by no means in so great a number. But men and women together, his servants swarmed in his enormous temple. The people likewise filed or poured through the long series of temple rooms and passageways and small and large courts. The people came to the temple for knowledge, for law, for healing, for divination, for exorcism of the innumerable evil ones, for directions as to paths through every thorny desert, for comfort, for glow, for subtle excuses, for life anew, for spiritual wine, and for direct, practical, everyday business. They brought covenanted-for produce of every description, they poured into the temple treasury the temple-tax, that was a broad and deep and continuing stream.

Much life was there, centring in, flowing through the temple, for any to view who had vision, and to grow by who had the seed of growth.

The priestesses of the temple taught, judged, divined, exorcised, healed, performed work of scribe and notary, directed, executed, much as did the priests, and as well. They received honour as did the priests. From their status there fell a fairly broad shaft of warmth and light upon all women of their land. In Egypt, too, fell by the goddess-way a certain light and warmth and colour upon the entire mother hemisphere. In Egypt there was Isis, in Babylonia, Ishtar. And all the Babylonian gods had consorts, goddesses with powers and with devotees. There was Ninlil for Ea, and Antum for Anu, and Sarpanit for Marduk.{165}

That was all true. Yet all was in the convention. Ishtar, indeed, remained dimly, hugely, outside, but Ishtar to an extent undefined, general, like the air that you breathed without thinking of it. But all the others were as wives of men, honourable, free in much, in much powerful, but with distinctness secondary. All men and gods, by virtue of manship, rose by a head above women and goddesses. That was held to be the nature of things, fundamental and unalterable. Faint, old trails of old, old story, old, inexplicable customs resting like crones in nooks and corners, might breathe of a time when the indubitable truth was hardly so firmly established. But the time must have been ancient, ancient! Now ever the truth seemed to grow more established.

The young Iltani came to a wide corner of the temple quarter, rooms below, small, low rooms above, twisting, outside stairs, passageways, large court and small courts, and in the central court a well and old trees. In many places the walls, within and without, had those great pictures of gods and goddesses and sacred beasts and all their huge adventure. It was like living, in a far later time, with a child’s gay picture book or blocks. In the long hot summer, these pictures struck like brands upon the tissues of the mind. In the short, chill winter, with their red and their yellow, they gave out warmth and light.

Inmates of this part of the temple, and they were many, were not at all without steady, even employment. The whole, huge place worked, religion being so official, Marduk so actually pervading all that the land knew of the actual…. Iltani found herself with others under the orders of the votary Â-rishat, who kept the room where were kept the clay tablets upon which were written, week by week,{166} the simpler annals of the house of the women of the deity. Iltani had been taught to write. Now with a bride of Marduk a little older than herself, she copied defective tablets upon fresher clay. She worked in a little room from which one stepped into a little court in which there grew a great and old fig tree.

Amat-Tashmit loved to talk. When the votary Â-rishat was near, when other, older votaries passed or stood talking among themselves, the two novices were silent enough. But when none was by, Amat-Tashmit talked, and Iltani also, though less than the other.

Amat-Tashmit, having had the longer residence here, could instruct her sister in devotion. Iltani learned the round of life, so far as Amat-Tashmit had trodden it or could report upon others’ treading. Iltani heard from Amat-Tashmit of the idiosyncrasies of her many and many companion votaries of Marduk. There was a votary of Marduk for every day and night of Marduk’s year. And Amat-Tashmit talked of the bands and bands of priests, the huge number of servants of Marduk. She talked of individual priests of fame, persons of high rank in the court of Marduk. When she spoke of these reverence sat upon her tongue and in the ears of Iltani. But she talked also of priests of no especial fame whom she had chanced to observe. The most of these were young—young men under guidance in the house of Marduk. If was all harmless talk enough that Amat-Tashmit made, but around it and through it ran a haunting warmth and colour.

Matters of fact, serenely accepted as the right and proper will of the god, the king and all Babylon, came also into the talk of the two. As they worked they might look up from the clay and from the fine wedge-shaped stylus{167} which each used, look up and forth, and beyond the fig tree see the “mountain of the god,” the tower, rising by stages high, high against the blue heaven. They saw the broad, winding way leading from stage to stage, and the figures, small at that distance, ascending, descending, ascending. And they might see the chamber atop, room and shrine of Marduk, high up, high up, goal of the seven stairs! The light struck against the bright pictures of the chamber’s outer walls. Sometimes the tower top dazzled like the sun, sometimes it was cosy or golden, a star of morn or eve.

Iltani with Amat-Tashmit watched with a kind of fascination this tower of seven levels, one above the other. It was the “mountain of the god.” Within that topmost room stood the great figure of the god, overlaid with gold, and all around were ranged the most precious votive figures, figures given by kings and by the queens of kings. And in the room was the bed of the god, hung with gold, the bed of Marduk, god of gods, whom to serve was honour and felicity, whom to represent was honour and felicity, the bed of Marduk and the goddess Sarpanit, his spouse.

Each day the novices saw borne around the tower and upward the votary whose name was set against that day in the year of Marduk. She was borne in procession, with music and song. The two watched her and that sister throng mount from stage to stage. Arrived upon the seventh the company circled three times the mountain-top. Then the bride of Marduk went alone into the freshly swept and garlanded Marduk-room. The two watching from the court of the fig tree might see the company part from her it had brought, reabsorb into itself the votary whose place she took, whose day this year was passed, and{168} again with music descend the spiral way. The day went. Iltani and Amat-Tashmit, working with stylus and clay, gave not much thought to the tower and the votary who praised Marduk alone in the chamber where was reared the great gold-covered image.

But when the rays of the sun were slant they stepped from their own small room into the court of the fig tree, for they heard trumpets and knew that the priest who that night would represent the god now went to the mountain-top. Small figures in the distance, they saw him and the band that bore him thither. The strong chanting of the priests came to them, the light glinted upon the lifted, waved, gilded, many-shaped symbols and insignia of Marduk. They watched this company also from stage to stage, to the tower height, watched the company part there from the human Marduk, watched it descend in the red sunset light…. Up there the votary was no longer alone. Up there were Marduk and Sarpanit.

The days passed, the weeks and the months. The temple, or her corner of the temple, grew home-like to Iltani. Around her were much folk and manifold business. She laboured with others, rested and played, ate and drank and slept in a field of crowded bloom, of a thousand bees that gathered honey. All was under rule, all that was done was done ritually, arrows drawn to hit the sun. But many had forgotten the aim of the arrows. The marked rhythm pleased Iltani. Her body seemed to move with it, and that within her body, the worker that had spun the body from itself….

Amat-Tashmit had been given by her parents to the god some months before the coming of Iltani. Now Amat-Tashmit was shown her name written against such a day{169} “for the holy room in the lofty house of Marduk.” Even the seeing of her name written made a gala day for the votary concerned. That day she was excused from work, she was served first at meal time, she was given a wreath of flowers. The next day she went to a range of rooms across the great court of the well and the trees. There, for so many days, would be training, instruction, purification, lasting until the day they adorned her and bore her with timbrel and song to the door of Marduk. As, every day, through the year of Marduk there wound the procession to the “mountain of the god,” so, every day, there moved through the courts of the votaries a woman crowned with flowers…. Iltani watched with a thrill Amat-Tashmit set the flower wreath upon her head.

The next day Amat-Tashmit was gone across the court of the well. Iltani, alone, copied accounts in the small room behind the great tree.

The thrill did not go away. Behind it arose a strange feeling that turned the tree into a forest through which Iltani wandered. The young Iltani, for all her copper-coloured hair, could not remember ever once having been in any forest, but that was what she felt. She worked all day in a dream; whether she sat alone, or found the humming of other women about her, in a dream. When the sun’s rays came slant and the trumpets blew Iltani turned face to the tower, and through her poured and thrilled and pulsed something new in the forest that seemed to turn red and purple and splendid.

At night, lying awake in a room with many young, sleeping women, the glow seemed to Iltani to pass into glory…. In the morning one of her companions said to her, “You look differently!{170}”

That day the votary Â-rishat installed beside her two writers upon clay, and there was no more loneliness in that kind. But Iltani wandered in the forest of the inner world.

Lugal-naid had brought her to the temple in the spring of the year. She had been given in the days just following the New Year high festival, the god day of god days, the day when Marduk and Sarpanit remembered and celebrated their eternal wedding, immortal, without beginning, without ending, the day when out of his power and bliss Marduk portioned, for the year to come, the lot of mankind, the high day, rising like a tower out of ten preceding, marked days during which Babylonia remembered its sins and cleansed its heart, the day of the Sun when he put off his winter mourning. All the rest of the year fell away from that shining point, then turned upon itself and climbed again to the golden mark. Six months it fell away, six months it climbed…. The wreathed day, the high day, looked forward to by all Babylon, the huge festival, the day of mystic union and good omen, the day when to serve Marduk was fame and joy, Marduk who came in fulness of power, raying light….

To Iltani the votary the forest seemed to fill with light, rose light. Within it sprang desire like a strong tree, desire to be the Sarpanit of that day.

So high an honour was the dream, the aspiration, vague or distinct of every maiden in the house of the women. It was ever a maiden, chosen halfway in the year, in the autumn, then at once set aside, honoured, instructed, purified, made beautiful within and without against that high New Year day. There were many in the continually fed house of the women who might have that dream. Iltani, daughter of Lugal-naid, knew no reason why Iltani should be chosen.{171}

But now, day and night, she saw before her the winged Marduk, shining one, god of gods! Desire held her, to be, that day, of the mountain-top. It sprang like a strong tree in the rose-lit forest, or rather it stood the forest itself….

Day after day went by, and here was autumn. The votary Â-rishat spoke to Iltani. “The rulers of the temple sit to-day in the room of the lion. You and twenty more are chosen to pass before them.”

Priests and priestesses, chiefs in sanctity, sat in the room of the lion. Iltani saw them as huge veiled forms, guardians of the way to Marduk, god of gods, raying light—

Three days, and she went again to the room of the lion. One day more, and voices told her that Iltani, daughter of Lugal-naid, was chosen for the New Year Sarpanit. With trumpets it was proclaimed in the temple. Babylon knew it presently…. Lugal-naid gave a feast.

Iltani went to a part of the temple mass that was called the house of the New Year, and to a room therein that was named the room of Sarpanit. This chamber was built high, and it gave upon the flat roof of a congeries of attendant rooms. Upon the roof stood great earthen jars, filled with growing plants, and around it ran a brick parapet. The outer wall of the Sarpanit room was overpainted with a great tree of life, and beside it, tall as the tree, the winged Marduk. The whole faced the east, and when the sun had passed the zenith, stood in the shadow of the “mountain of the god.”

From autumn to spring, throughout the winter that knew rain but not snow, the New Year votary dwelled in the Sarpanit room, dwelled watched by aged women who were now but as doorkeepers and gardeners in the great house of the god, dwelled subject to much instruction by{172} votary and priestess, efficient, famed, appointed to that service, dwelled in the midst of Sarpanit rites, a being set apart in the hive, symbolically, esoterically, the hive itself.

Iltani lived six months in the Sarpanit room. When the rains fell a great brazier filled with coals cast a dull glow upon pictured walls. When the sky cleared and the sun shone out, she might spend hours upon the roof warmed by the sun that again was Marduk. At night she might be a watcher of the stars.

She faced the “mountain of the god.” If it rained, a silver veil fell between her and it, or there was reared a leaden wall. If the weather was bright, all its colours dazzled. In moonshine and starshine it seemed to go yet higher, up among the stars.

Every morning she heard music and singing voices and watched the day’s votary mount to the seventh stage. When the sun’s rays came slant she heard the trumpets and watched the mounting priest of Marduk. When the dark came there was a lamp there, far above, in the Marduk-room…. The priest of the New Year…. She knew that he would be chosen for beauty and strength.

Iltani sat beneath the parapet of the roof by the Sarpanit room. It was night, mild as a spring night of more northern lands. The stars were shining. A young moon gave pale light. The beams fell against the tiled outer wall of the room and showed the huge, pictured forms.

Marduk was winged. He rose tall, tall and full of might! In his face, in his form was what majesty, what beauty the art of Babylonia could put there. He stood winged, his hand upon the tree of life.

Iltani had looked at him so long, saying, “God, God!” to herself, that now the wings and the crowned head seemed{173} to rise among the stars, to rise from earth and become the firmament, the firmament overshadowing, upholding, to be worshipped, and only that to be worshipped…. Iltani of her own motion, bowed herself together, touched her forehead to the ground.

Ishtar!… She did not know why Ishtar, not Sarpanit, should come into her mind—save that Ishtar was in some way Mother Earth and all that grew, and dimly, dimly very great! Ishtar was mother and children, bearing and growing….

But Iltani looked again at Marduk, and was wrapped in magic, fold on fold.

Spring came upon the plains that stretched from Euphrates. Verdure and flowers arose from the dark. The watchers of the stars in the high house of Marduk sent word to the king, and the king proclaimed the word to the people. In the heavens was written the sign that meant rich harvests at home, and abroad, in the king’s wars, victory. Marduk had thrown, before his coming, a handful of jewels. At that the city so rejoiced that the nine days before the high days that were officially days of supplication, repentance and cleansing of heart, humbling and propitiation, went themselves like festival.

In the house of Sarpanit the New Year votary was watched, tended, made in all ways beauteous…. Marduk, coming in power, must find a Sarpanit also in power, kindler of desire!

Babylon, in fresh heat, under a sky from which had passed all the rain clouds, put on holiday garb. The people thronged the temple courts, coming in groups and bands and processions, bringing the sacrifices. There was heard, as on no other day, the bleating of sheep, the lowing of{174} cattle, the voices of doves. King Sharrâni came in procession, with clangour and throb of instruments of music, with shouts of the populace. The gods from their lesser temples came in procession to visit Marduk, god of gods. Priest-borne, newly-decked, came the images by the Sacred Street, came to huge chanting, to the bowing of the throng. From the pictured walls looked the pictured genii, the pictured sacred beasts, the pictured gods.

Babylon and the brimming river Euphrates and the plain that was to thicken with wheat and barley, millet and sesame, waked through the starlight of the night before the day. Cresset lamps burned in doorways, the young men surged, singing, through the streets. Waned the spring night, arose a breath of balm and spice, came the light in the east. Trumpets blew from the city wall, trumpets blew from the king’s palace, trumpets blew from the temple roofs. Dawned the high day of the round year, the day when Marduk returned to his house in a golden mantle of strength! The children and all the people leaped up to festival. When Marduk the sun rose from where he slept, beyond Tigris, east of India, he was met with ecstasy. All day Marduk the sun rained light upon Babylonia, upon Babylon, and light intense upon his temple there. As ever, on the New Year day, were found men and women who claimed to see the winged Marduk, hovering in the heavens, above his lofty house….

At an early hour in the day the women votaries of the high god came with music, with garlands, with burning frankincense, to the Sarpanit-room in the shadow of the tower. They took Iltani and robed her in fine white figured with gold. They put a veil upon her like the mist upon the morning plain, and over it a twisted circlet of{175} silver and gold. They took her from the Sarpanit-room and in the court they placed her at the head of their band, with only musicians going before her. They gave into her hand a stalk with two flowers, they raised over her a red canopy. The music swelled, the voices rose. In a blue, upcurling, incense cloud, Iltani set her foot upon the broad, the worn, the clay and fire made tower stair.

Stage by stage, stage by stage, and the city was below her and the thronged and throbbing temple courts. Stage by stage, and a gulf of blue light, thrilling, tingling was around. It weighed her down, it upheld her. She looked to the sky and thought that she saw Marduk, winged, coming from the sun.

The procession returned to the court whence sprang the tower. All day the temple, all day the king and his chief men, all day Babylon and all Babylonia praised Marduk and did rites before him. All day Marduk was to be felt above the city, the river, the plain, above the temple quarter and its smoking altars, above the tower, the “mountain of the god.” All day the human Sarpanit awaited alone the slant rays of the sun and the human Marduk.

Symbols—symbols that were warm and glowed…. Iltani-Sarpanit sat in the gold-furnished temple room in the prescribed attitude of devotion. She sat still, and light and fire ran through her being. Marduk—Marduk—Marduk!

The sun’s rays came slant. At the mountain-top, she heard at the mountain foot, trumpets blowing…. She veiled her eyes, she quivered. All at once, her strong dream of ecstasy parted a little…. This was a man coming to the mountain-top, a man as she was a woman. Terror{176} threatened, a depth of headlong fall. O God, my God! O Marduk, raying light!

The lover was the winged Marduk—never, never must she lose him!… The trumpets were more loudly blowing, and now she might hear rising to her the strong chanting, the rhythmic tread. There was an altar in the room, and upon it a burning fire. Now she rose and, as she had been taught to do, heaped this with the richest spices, with sandalwood and frankincense. The room filled with thin clouds, blue and fragrant, and in the heart of these stood Iltani, and her soul beat about to repel the terror and keep the ecstasy.

Lugal-naid, and Ibni-Shamash and Nanâ-iddin, Ramtû, Ina-banat and Belatum, Innina-nûri, Tuda-Ishtar—teachings formal and informal, conscious, unconscious, word of mouth and blow from hand, long, long, long impressions, tellings and tellings and tellings, repetitions, as it were, before she was born, and repetitions after she was born—very much and very strong drew to themselves, whelmed and coloured the soul of the votary…. Iltani would have still the ecstasy, the abandonment, the feeling of god-presence. If he were not the god, make him such—make him such! Perhaps he was the god—perhaps he was— With man and woman man was highest always—Man was highest—Lugal-naid said it, Ramtû, Ina-banat, Belatum said it! Man was highest—man to woman was as god to votary!

She would not lose the winged Marduk, and she could not believe in her own wings. So she spread the burning frankincense, and she turned the altar of the god somewhat from the east, and in the blue smoke now rising, now flattened to right or left, now rolling downward, she, of her{177} own movement, touched her forehead to the earth and beheld man as god.

The human Marduk, too, was young and chosen for beauty and strength….