The Lost Continent by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (best desktop ebook reader TXT) 📕

that day, and I had put away all personal liking to carry out the commands which the Council had laid upon me. If I had known how to set about it, I would have fallen in with her mood. But where any of those shallow bedizened triflers about the court would have been glibly in his element, I stuck for lack of a dozen words.

There was no help for it but to leave all, save what I actually felt, unsaid. Diplomacy I was trained in, and on most matters I had a glib enough tongue. But to palter with women was a lightness I had always neglected, and if I had invented would-be pretty speeches out of my clumsy inexperience, Phorenice would have seen through the fraud on the instant. She had been nurtured during these years of her rule on a pap of these silly protestations, and could weigh their value with an expert’s exactness.

Nor was it a case where honest confession would have served my purpose better. If I had put my position to her in plain words, it would have made relations worse. And so perforce I had to hold my tongue, and submit to be considered a clown.

“I had always heard,” she said, “that you colonists in Yucatan were far ahead of those in Egypt in all the arts and graces. But you, sir, do small credit to your viceroyalty. Why, I have had gentry from the Nile come here, and you might almost think they had never left their native shores.”

“They must have made great strides this last twenty years, then. When last I was sent to Egypt to report, the blacks were clearly masters of the land, and our people lived there only on sufferance. Their pyramids were puny, and their cities nothing more than forts.”

“Oh,” she said mockingly, “they are mere exiles still, but they remember their manners. My poor face seemed to please them, at least they all went into raptures over it. And for ten pleasant words, one of them cut off his own right hand. We made the bargain, my Egyptian gallant and I, and the hand lies dried on some shelf in my apartment today as a pleasant memento.”

But here, by a lucky chance for me, an incident occurred which saved me from further baiting. The rebels outside the walls were conducting their day’s attack with vigour and some intelligence. More than once during our procession the lighter missiles from their war engines had sung up through the air, and split against a building, and thrown splinters which wounded those who thronged the streets. Still there had been nothing to ruffle the nerves of anyone at all used to the haps of warfare, or in any way to hinder our courtship. But presently, it seems, they stopped hurling stones from their war engines, and took to loading them with carcases of wood lined with the throwing fire.

Now, against stone buildings these did little harm, save only that they scorched horribly any poor wretch that was within splash of them when they burst; but when they fell upon the rude wooden booths and rush shelters of the poorer folk, they set them ablaze instantly. There was no putting out these fires.

These things also would have given to either Phorenice or myself little enough of concern, as they are the trivial and common incidents of every siege; but the mammoth on which we rode had not been so properly schooled. When the first blue whiff of smoke came to us down the windings of the street, the huge red beast hoisted its trunk, and began to sway its head uneasily. When the smoke drifts grew more dense, and here and there a tongue of flame showed pale beneath the sunshine, it stopped abruptly and began to trumpet.

The guards who led it, tugged manfully at the chains which hung from the jagged metal collar round its neck, so that the spikes ran deep into its flesh, and reminded it keenly of its bondage. But the beast’s terror at the fire, which was native to its constitution, mastered all its new-bought habits of obedience. From time unknown men have hunted the mammoth in the savage ground, and the mammoth has hunted men; and the men have always used fire as a shield, and mammoths have learned to dread fire as the most dangerous of all enemies.

Phorenice’s brow began to darken as the great beast grew more restive, and she shook her red curls viciously. “Someone shall lose a head for this blundering,” said she. “I ordered to have this beast trained to stand indifferent to drums, shouting, arrows, stones, and fire, and the trainers assured me that all was done, and brought examples.”

I slipped my girdle. “Here,” I said, “quick. Let me lower you to the ground.”

She turned on me with a gleam. “Are you afraid for my neck, then, Deucalion?”

“I have no mind to be bereaved before I have tasted my wedded life.”

“Pish! There is little enough of danger. I will stay and ride it out. I am not one of your nervous women, sir. But go you, if you please.”

“There is little enough chance of that now.”

Blood flowed from the mammoth’s neck where the spikes of the collar tore it, and with each drop, so did the tameness seem to ooze out from it also. With wild squeals and trumpetings it turned and charged viciously down the way it had come, scattering like straws the spearmen who tried to stop it, and mowing a great swath through the crowd with its monstrous progress. Many must have been trodden under foot, many killed by its murderous trunk, but only their cries came to us. The golden castle, with its canopy of royal snakes, was swayed and tossed, so that we two occupants had much ado not to be shot off like stones from a catapult. But I took a brace with my feet against the front, and one arm around a pillar,