The Fountain of Youth :: :: University of Virginia Library

(A hall in the rock temple of Bimini.)
Atalpa.
A month has scarcely passed. The countless flowers
Which clad this temple for the Feast of Arrows
Are hardly withered, and the sacred gardens
Have scarce had time to reach another crop,
And lo! the garland-girls again are busy,
Crouching by hundreds on the temple-pavement
For a far greater feast. No yearly pageant
Calls for their skill and fancy, but a rite
Unmatched in all the annals of our race:
The great fulfilment of a prophecy
Centuries old, which Heaven's heralds usher
With every portent, prodigy and sign.
Did not the northern sky, three days ago,
Assume the colour of the pale, thin blood
Which runs in white men's hearts, and did the earth
Not undulate and quiver under-foot?
The victim should arrive to-day at sunset,
And I am come to view thy preparations.
I see the garlanding makes rapid way—
Is all progressing for the great procession
And for the sacred dances?

112

High Priest.
Never fear;
All will be ready by the stated moment,
And all will be upon a scale befitting
The greatness of the day. A hundred virgins,
Selected from the darkest of the tribes,
With leopard skins, and anklets of red gold,
Will lead her to the altar of destruction.
The companies of warriors have been chosen
Among the very finest, and their targes
Are studded with the nails of virgin gold.
The companies of priests are also ready,
The new white robes of sacrificial linen,
The charmers of the snakes, and sacred jugglers
Are more in number than the oldest man
Can recollect. Innumerable flowers
Of every shape and hue have been collected,
To strew the victim's path. As for the dances,
The javelin-men are practising all day
A reel of death, on a gigantic scale,
To dance around the victim in the crypt
Of the three hundred columns. Then a dance
Of sorcerers and snakemen round about her,
With new varieties of dreadful movement.
The sorcerers will show us in their fumes
Spirits that none have seen as yet,
And demon shadows through a haze of fire.
Oh, trust me that the Flower of Destruction
Has never had so grand or dread a pageant
Since the first trembling slave was offered up
To the great Executioner and Goddess
Fresh from her boundless forests.

113

Atalpa.
And the chants?

High Priest.

The beauty and the cruelty of Nature
Will find expression in a great, slow death-dirge,
Which all will chant as winds the great procession,
And slowly booms the dreadful Gong of Gongs.
The guilty beauty of the Scented Throttler—
Her heavy odour and resistless strength—
Will find their praise in sacrificial hymns
Of newest fear as we approach her altar,
And as we lay the victim in her lap.
Now I will make them chant and thou shalt hear.

In the hot, primeval forest
Once the Virgin Goddess dwelt,
When, before her frightful beauty
Man as yet had never knelt,
Nor her hug of horror felt.

Snowy were her monstrous petals;
Flecked with blood, though not of man;
Through her groves a rippling streamlet
With an endless whisper ran—
Nature's loveliness surrounded,
Like a shrine, her yearly growth,
Nature's cruelty abounded:
She was goddess of them both.

Great lianas in festoons,
Where the sense from odour swoons,
Hung from mossy tree to tree
Flowering for the gold wild bee;
Where the humming-bird flew bright
As an azure flash of light,

114

And the gaudy parrot clung
To the garlands as they swung;
Glowing flower and flaming feather
Vied in gorgeousness together.
While the panther, with a boundless
Hunger in his eyes, and soundless,
Slowly circled round and round,
Arching all his springs to bound.
Or the lazy current licked her
Of the great unrolled constrictor,
Once her rival; now surpassed
In the art of locking fast,
And of squeezing out the breath
In a silent vice of death.

Human flesh had never fed her,
Nor man learnt to love and dread her;
Only if some drowsy deer
Took close by its noontide sleep,
Would her iron tendrils creep
Round about it, draw it near,
And squeeze out its writhe and spasm
Slowly in the flowery chasm;
Or she caught some blue-faced ape
With the thongs whence none escape,
Or some guileless cockatoo
Straight into her bosom flew.

Man one day at last appeared.
And the great terrific Flower,
Luring him with beauty's power,
Slowly drowsed him as he neared,
Panting in the sultry heat
As she drew him to her feet.

115

Then her mighty tendrils clasped him,
Round the drowsy limbs they grasped him.
And as sank his heavy head,
Like upon a nuptial bed,
Drew him to eternal rest
On the horror of her breast.

Then her appetite began
For the daily flesh of man.
Yea, and his best blood he gave,
Fed her with a daily slave.
With our own dark race we fed her,
Gave her worship, gave her hymns,
Watching how her iron tendrils
Grasped and crushed the writhing limbs.
Now we bring a whiter victim,
Since she spurns our dusky flesh,
One as white as her own petals
When they bloom with blood afresh.

Hail to thee, thou Scented Throttler,
Goddess of the murderous thongs:
Hail to thee, Terrific Flower,
Take the limbs and take the songs!

Atalpa.
While thou hast been preparing all these flowers
And giving all thy thoughts to the procession
And chants and dances, I have not been idle,
But I have been maturing in the shade
The other half of this great work of death.
The ambuscade to which the great white chief,
Lured by the promise of a magic spring,
Is to be drawn amid the primal forest.

116

I have selected as the fittest spot
The dark and ever-memorable pool
Known as the Fountain of the Yellow Spirits,
Where sixty years ago the tribe of Hara
Was massacred to a man. The huge old trees
Which cluster round the solitary water
Are hollow one and all, and each can hold
A dozen silent warriors now as then,
And nought be lessened of the loneliness.
His escort will be small, and though they carry
The thunder-pealing arms which make each white
A match for twenty of our dusky bowmen,
Still we can hide within the hollow trunks
More warriors than the massacre requires.

High Priest.
The spot is well selected. May the ambush
Prove as successful as the one which ended
The thrice curst tribe of Hara.—Who comes here?

Atalpa.
It is a messenger.

(Enter Messenger.)
Messenger.
I come to tell you
That the white maiden will arrive at sunset
If all goes well, for I have speeded on
Faster than they could bear her in her litter.
The wounded will arrive to-morrow night
By slower stages.

Atalpa.
Wounded! Slower stages!
What dost thou mean? Explain.

117

Messenger.
As we were fording
The River of Green Snakes, the day we started,
A sudden and most desperate attempt
To rescue the white maiden on her way
Was made at set of sun. Twice did the whites
Surround her litter, wrested from our grasp,
And bear it off; and thrice we snatched it back,
Until at last, by dint of greater numbers,
And with the help of javelin-hurling spirits,
We saved her for the Goddess at the price
Of many killed. The leader of this onslaught,
One of their younger chiefs—with a great wound—
Is in our hands and three of his companions,
And we are bringing them to swell the show.

Atalpa.
The thought was wise to spare them for the torture.
They shall be carried in the great procession,
And then be handed over to the tormentors
In sight of all. Meanwhile it is for thee,
Great Pontiff of the ever-hungry Flower,
To keep them in thy prisons with the victim
Who will arrive at sunset. This attempt
To snatch her from our hold, though it has failed,
Makes me uneasy lest the ambuscade
For the destruction of the white commander
Should be upset by something unforeseen.
I must increase the number of the warriors
That I am sending to the lonely pool:
They must be six to one.

High Priest.
I think thee wise.
An ambush laid with insufficient forces

118

Is but a trap one lays against one's self.
But if thou wishest to behold the dances
Which now are being practised, come with me,
And thou shalt see the great wild reel of death
Which is beginning: I already hear,
Like the vague roaring of a distant whirlpool,
Its roar of horrors, rising from the crypts.

[Exeunt