"Dear me!" said I. "He"s not handsome, is he?"
He was not; resembling an ordinary buzzard with wings outstretched sitting upon that kind of emberesque fire that induces a man in a library to think mournfully about the past, and convinces him--alas!--that if he had the time he could write immortal poetry.
"Not very!" Cephalus acquiesced. "Still, he"s all right in a Zoo. He"s queer. Look at his nest, if you don"t believe it."
[Ill.u.s.tration: I MEET THE PH[OE]NIX]
"I never believed otherwise, my dear Cephalus," said I. "He seems to me to be a unique thing in poultry. If he were a chicken he would be hailed with delight in my country. A self-broiling broiler--!"
The idea was too ecstatic for expression.
"Well, he isn"t a chicken, so your rhapsody doesn"t go," said Cephalus. "He"s little short of a buzzard. Useful, but not appetizing.
If I were a profane mortal, I should call him a condemned nuisance.
Most birds build their own nests, and a well-built nest lasts them a whole season. This infernal bird has to have a furnace-man to make his bed for him night and morning, and if, by some mischance, the fire goes out, as fires will do in the best-regulated families, he begins to squawk, and he squawks, and he squawks, and he squawks until the keeper comes and sets his nest a-blazing again. He has a voice like a sick fog-horn that drives everybody crazy."
"Why don"t you fool him sometimes?" I suggested. "Make a nest out of a mustard-plaster and see what he would do."
"He"s too old a bird to be caught that way," said Cephalus. "He"s a confounded old a.s.s, but he"s a brainy one."
At this moment a blare of the most heavenly trumpets sounded, and Cephalus and I left the building and emerged into the garden to see what had caused it. There a dazzling spectacle met my gaze. A regiment of Amazons was drawn up on the green of the parade and a superb gilded coach, drawn by six milk-white horses, stood before them, while two gorgeously apparelled heralds sounded a fanfare. Cephalus immediately became deeply agitated.
"It is his Majesty"s own carriage and guard," he cried.
"Whose?" said I.
"Jupiter"s," said he. "I fancy they have come for you."
And it so transpired. One of the heralds advanced to where I was standing, saluted me as though I were an emperor, and, through his golden trumpet, informed me that eleven o"clock was approaching; that his Majesty deigned to grant me the desired audience, and had sent a carriage and guard of honor.
I returned the salute, thanked Cephalus for his attentions, and entered the carriage. A bra.s.s band of a hundred and twenty pieces struck up an inspiring march, and, preceded and followed by the Amazons, I was conveyed in state to the palatial quarters of Zeus himself.
It suggested comic opera with a large number of pretty chorus girls, but I could not help being impressed in spite of this thought with the fact that Jupiter knew how to do a thing up in style. I was indeed so awed with it all that I did not dare wink at a single Amazon while _en route_, although strongly tempted to do so several times.
IX
Some Account of the Palace of Jupiter
So dazzled was I by all that went on about me, by the gorgeousness of my equipage and by the extraordinary richness of the costumes worn by my escort, that for the moment I forgot that I was not myself clad in suitable garments for so ultra-royal a function. The streets, the houses, even the throngs that peopled the way, seemed to be of the most l.u.s.trous gold, and it became necessary for me from time to time as we progressed to close my eyes and shut out the too brilliant vision. Fancy a bake-shop built of solid gold nuggets, its large plate windows composed each of one huge, flashing diamond; imagine an exquisitely wrought golden drug-store, whose colored jars in the windows are made of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires; conjure up in your mind"s eye a sequence of city blocks whose sides are lined by ma.s.sive and exquisitely proportioned buildings, every inch of whose facade was fashioned, not by stone-cutters and sculptors, but by goldsmiths, whose genius a Cellini might envy; picture to yourself a street paved with golden asphalt, and a sidewalk built from huge slabs of rolled silver, the curb and gutters being of burnished copper, and you"ll gain some idea of the thoroughfare along which I pa.s.sed. And oh, the music that the band gave forth to which the populace timed their huzzas--I nearly went mad with the seductiveness of it all. If it hadn"t been for the ache the brilliance of it gave to my eyes, I really think I should have swooned.
And then we came to the palace grounds. These, I must confess, I found far from pleasing, for even as the avenue along which I had pa.s.sed was all gold and silver and gems, so too was the park, in the heart of which stood Jupiter"s own apartments made of similar stuff. The trees were golden, and the leaves rustling in the breeze, catching and reflecting the light of the sun, were blinding. The soft greenness of the earthly gra.s.s was superseded by the glistening yellow of golden spears, and here and there, where a drop of dew would have fallen, were diamonds of purest ray. The paths were of silken rugs of richest texture, and the palace, as it burst upon my vision, fashioned out of undreamed-of blocks of onyx, resembled more a ma.s.sive opal filled with flashing, living, fire, than the mere home of a splendid royalty.
I was glad when the procession stopped before the gorgeous entrance to the palace. Another minute of such splendor would have blinded me. A fanfare of trumpets sounded, and I descended, so dizzy with what I had seen that, as my feet touched the ground, I staggered like a drunken man, and then I heard my name sounded and pa.s.sed from one flunky to another up the magnificent staircase into the blue haze of the hallway, and gradually sounding fainter and fainter until it was lost in the distance of the mysterious corridor. I still staggered as I mounted the steps, and the Major Domo approached me.
"I trust you are not ill," he whispered in my ear.
"No--not ill," I replied. "Only somewhat flabbergasted by all this magnificence, and my eyes hurt like the very deuce."
"It is perhaps too much for mortal eyes," he said; and then, turning to a gilded Ethiopian who stood close at hand, he observed, quietly, "Rhadamus, run over to the Argus and ask him if he can spare this gentleman a pair of blue goggles for an hour or two."
"Better get me a dozen pairs," I put in. "I don"t think one pair will be enough. It may strain my nose to hold them, but I"d rather sacrifice my nose than my eyes any day."
But the boy was off, and ere I reached the presence of Jupiter I was very kindly provided with the very essential article, and I must confess that I found great relief in them. They were so densely blue that an ordinary bit of splendor could not have been discerned through their opaque depths, any more than Thisbe could have been seen by her doting lover, Pyramus, through the wall that separated them, but nothing known to man could have shut out the supreme gloriousness of the interior of Jupiter"s palace. Even with the goggles of the Argus regulated to protect one thousand eyes upon my nose, it made my dazzled optics blink.
I do not know what the proportions of the palace were. I regret to say that I forgot to ask, but I am quite confident that I walked at least eight miles along that corridor, and never was a mansion designed that was better equipped in the matter of luxuries. I suspect I shall be charged with exaggerating, but it is none the less true that within that s.p.a.cious building were appliances of every sort known to man. One door opened upon an in-door golf-links, upon which the royal family played whenever they lacked the energy or the disposition to seek out that on Mars. There were high bunkers, the copse of which was covered with richest silk plush, stuffed, I was told, with spun silk, while, in place of sand, tons of powdered sugar and grated nutmegs filled the bunkers themselves. The eighteen holes were laid out so that no two of them crossed, and, inasmuch as the turf was constructed of rubber instead of gra.s.s and soil, neither a bad lie nor a dead ball was possible through the vast extent of the fair green. The water hazards, four in number, were nothing more nor less than huge tanks of Burgundy, champagne, iced tea, and Scotch--which I subsequently learned often resulted in a bad caddie service--and an open brook along whose dashing descent a constant stream of shandygaff went merrily bubbling onward to an in-door sea upon which Jupiter exercised his yacht when sailing was the thing to suit his immediate whim.
This sea was a marvel. Since all the water hazards above described emptied into it, it was little more than a huge expanse of punch, one swallow of which, thanks to these ingredients and the sugar and nutmeg from the bunkers, would make a man forget an eternity of troubles until he woke up again, if he ever did. Here Jupiter sported every variety of pleasure craft, and, by an ingenious system of funnels arranged about its sixty-square-mile area, could at a moment"s notice produce any variety of breeze he chanced to wish; and its submarine bottom was so designed that if a heavy sea were wanted to make the yacht pitch and toss, a simple mechanical device would cause it to hump itself into such corrugations, large or small, as were needed to bring about the desired conditions.
"Do they allow bathing in that?" I asked, as the Major Domo explained the peculiar feature of this in-door sea to me.
My companion laughed. "Only one person ever tried it with any degree of success, and it nearly cost him his reputation. Old Bacchus undertook to swim on a wager from Chambertin Inlet to Glenlivet Bay, but he had to give up before he got as far as Pommery Point. It took him a year to get rid of his headache, and it actually required three-quarters of the Treasury Reserve to provide gold enough to cure him."
"It must be a terrible place to fall overboard in," I suggested.
"It is, if you fall head first," said the Major Domo, "and my observation is that most people do."
"I should admire to sail upon it," I said, gazing back through the door that opened upon Jupiter"s yachting parlors, and realizing on a sudden a powerful sense of thirst.
"I have no doubt you can do so," said the Major Domo. "Indeed, I understand that his Majesty contemplates taking you for a sail to the lost island of Atlantis before you return to earth."
"What?" I cried. "The lost island of Atlantis here?"
"Of course," said my guide. "Why not? It was too beautiful for earth, so Jupiter had it transported to his own private yachting pond, and it has been here ever since. It is marvellously beautiful."
Hardly had I recovered from my amazement over the Major Domo"s announcement when he pointed to another open door.
"The Royal Arena," he said, simply. "That is where we have our Olympian Games. There was a football game there yesterday. Too bad you were not there. It was the liveliest game of the season. All Hades played the Olympian eleven for the championship of the universe. We licked "em four hundred to nothing; but of course we had an exceptional team. When Hercules is in shape there isn"t a man-jack in all Hades that can withstand him. He"s rush-line, centre, full-back, half-back, and flying wedge, all rolled into one. Then the Hades chaps made the bad mistake of sending a star team. When you have an eleven made up of Hannibal and Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and Achilles and other fellows like that you can"t expect any team-play. Each man is thinking about himself all the time. Hercules could walk right through "em, and, when they begin to pose, it"s mere child"s play for him. The only chap that put up any game against us at all was Samson, and I tell you, now that his hair"s grown again, he"s a demon on the gridiron.
But we divided up our force to meet that difficulty. Hercules put the rest of our eleven on to Samson, while he took care, personally, of all the other Hadesians. And you should have seen how he handled them!
It was beautiful, all through. He nearly got himself ruled off in the second half. He became so excited at one time towards the end that he mistook Pompey for the ball and kicked him through the goal-posts from the forty-yard line. Of course, it didn"t count, and Hercules apologized so gracefully to the rest of the visitors that they withdrew their protest and let him play on."
"I should think he would have apologized to Pompey," said I.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE UNIVERSE""]
"He will when Pompey recovers consciousness," said my guide, simply.
So interested was I in the Royal Arena and its recent game that I forgot all about Jupiter.
"I never thought of Hercules as a football player before," I said, "but it is easy to see how he might become the champion of Olympus."
"Oh, is it!" laughed the Major Domo. "Well, you"d better not tell Jupiter that. Jupiter"d be pleased, he would. Why, my dear friend, he"d pack you back to earth quicker than a wink. He brooks only one champion of anything here, and that"s himself. Hercules threw him in a wrestling-match once, and the next day Jupiter turned him into a weeping-willow, and didn"t let up on him for five hundred years afterwards."
By this time we had reached one of the most superbly vaulted chambers it has ever been my pleasure to look upon. Above me the ceiling seemed to reach into infinity, and on either side were huge recesses and alcoves of almost unfathomable depth, lit by great b.a.l.l.s of fire that diffused their light softly and yet brilliantly through all parts and corners of the apartment.
"The library," said the Major Domo, pointing to tier upon tier of teeming shelves, upon which stood a wonderful array of exquisitely bound volumes to a number past all counting.