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SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF LORD DUNSANY

MCMXII

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

The Gods of the Mountain
The First Act of King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior
The Fall of Babbulkund
The Sphinx at Gizeh
Idle Days on the Yann
A Miracle
The Castle of Time

INTRODUCTION

I

Lady Wilde once told me that when she was a young girl she was stopped in some Dublin street by a great crowd and turned into a shop to escape from it. She stayed there some time and the crowd still passed. She asked the shopman what it was, and he said, 'the funeral of Thomas Davis, a poet.' She had never heard of Davis; but because she thought a country that so honoured a poet must be worth something, she became interested in Ireland and was soon a famous patriotic poet herself, being, as she once said to me half in mockery, an eagle in her youth.

That age will be an age of romance for an hundred years to come. Its poetry slid into men's ears so smoothly that a man still living, though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stations he passed upon a journey into the country the verses he had published but that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regret too often that it has vanished, and left us poets even more unpopular than are our kind elsewhere in Europe; for now that we are unpopular we escape from crowds, from noises in the street, from voices that sing out of tune, from bad paper made one knows not from what refuse, from evil-smelling gum, from covers of emerald green, from that ideal of reliable, invariable men and women, which would forbid saint and connoisseur who always, the one in his simple, the other in his elaborate way, do what is unaccountable, and forbid life itself which, being, as the definition says, the only thing that moves itself, is always without precedent. When our age too has passed, when its moments also, that are so common and many, seem scarce and precious, students will perhaps open these books, printed by village girls at Dundrum, as curiously as at twenty years I opened the books of history and ballad verse of the old 'Library of Ireland.' They will notice that this new 'Library,' where I have gathered so much that seems to me representative or beautiful, unlike the old, is intended for few people, and written by men and women with that ideal condemned by 'Mary of the Nation', who wished, as she said, to make no elaborate beauty and to write nothing but what a peasant could understand. If they are philosophic or phantastic, it may even amuse them to find some analogy of the old with O'Connell's hearty eloquence, his winged dart shot always into the midst of the people, his mood of comedy; and of the new, with that lonely and haughty person below whose tragic shadow we of modern Ireland began to write.

II

The melancholy, the philosophic irony, the elaborate music of a play by John Synge, the simplicity, the sense of splendour of living in Lady Gregory's lamentation of Emer, Mr. James Stephens when he makes the sea waves 'Tramp with banners on the shore' are as much typical of our thoughts and day, as was 'She dwelt beside the Anner with mild eyes like the dawn,' or any stanza of the 'Pretty girl of Lough Dan,' or any novel of Charles Lever's of a time that sought to bring Irish men and women into one nation by means of simple patriotism and a genial taste for oratory and anecdotes. A like change passed over Ferrara's brick and stone when its great Duke, where there had been but narrow medieval streets, made many palaces and threw out one straight and wide street, as Carducci said, to meet the Muses. Doubtless the men of 'Perdóndaris that famous city' have such antiquity of manners and of culture that it is of small moment should they please themselves with some tavern humour; but we must needs cling to 'our foolish Irish pride' and form an etiquette, if we would not have our people crunch their chicken bones with too convenient teeth, and make our intellect architectural that we may not see them turn domestic and effusive nor nag at one another in narrow streets.

III

Some of the writers of our school have intended, so far as any creative art can have deliberate intention, to make this change, a change having more meaning and implications than a few sentences can define. When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany's work I thought that he would more help this change if he could bring his imagination into the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas that are somewhere in the background of all our minds. He could not have made Slieve-na-Mon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before he could separate them from modern association, would have changed the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, premeditated, and scientific.

When we approach subtle elaborate emotions we can but give our minds up to play or become as superstitious as an old woman, for we cannot hope to understand. It is one of my superstitions that we became entangled in a dream some twenty years ago; but I do not know whether this dream was born in Ireland from the beliefs of the country men and women, or whether we but gave ourselves up to a foreign habit as our spirited Georgian fathers did to gambling, sometimes lying, as their history has it, on the roadside naked, but for the heap of straw they had pulled over them, till they could wager a lock of hair or the paring of a nail against what might set them up in clothes again. Whether it came from Slieve-na-Mon or Mount Abora, Æ. found it with his gods and I in my 'Land of Heart's Desire,' which no longer pleases me much. And then it seemed far enough till Mr. Edward Martyn discovered his ragged Peg Inerney, who for all that was a queen in faery; but soon John Synge was to see all the world as a withered and witless place in comparison with the dazzle of that dream; and now Lord Dunsany has seen it once more and as simply as if he were a child imagining adventures for the knights and ladies that rode out over the drawbridges in the piece of old tapestry in its mother's room. But to persuade others that it is all but one dream, or to persuade them that Lord Dunsany has his part in that change I have described I have but my superstition and this series of little books where I have set his tender, pathetic, haughty fancies among books by Lady Gregory, by Æ., by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by John Synge, and by myself. His work which seems today so much on the outside, as it were, of life and daily interest, may yet seem to those students I have imagined rooted in both. Did not the Maeterlinck of 'Pelleas and Melisande' seem to be outside life? and now he has so influenced other writers, he has been so much written about, he has been associated with so much celebrated music, he has been talked about by so many charming ladies, that he is less a vapour than that Dumas fils who wrote of such a living Paris. And has not Edgar Allen Poe, having entered the imagination of Baudelaire, touched that of Europe? for there are seeds still carried upon a tree, and seeds so light they drift upon the wind and yet can prove that they, give them but time, carry a big tree. Had I read 'The Fall of Babbulkund' or 'Idle Days on the Yann' when a boy I had perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are idle, unhappy and exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is not paved with gold and silver.

IV

These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world. He describes the dance in the air of large butterflies as we have seen it in the sun-steeped air of noon. 'And they danced but danced idly, on the wings of the air, as some haughty queen of distant conquered lands might in her poverty and exile dance in some encampment of the gipsies for the mere bread to live by, but beyond this would never abate her pride to dance for one fragment more.' He can show us the movement of sand, as we have seen it where the sea shore meets the grass, but so changed that it becomes the deserts of the world: 'and all that night the desert said many things softly and in a whisper but I knew not what he said. Only the sand knew and arose and was troubled and lay down again and the wind knew. Then, as the hours of the night went by, these two discovered the foot-tracks wherewith we had disturbed the holy desert and they troubled over them and covered them up; and then the wind lay down and the sand rested.' Or he will invent some incredible sound that will yet call before us the strange sounds of the night, as when he says, 'sometimes some monster of the river coughed.' And how he can play upon our fears with that great gate of his carved from a single ivory tusk dropped by some terrible beast; or with his tribe of wanderers that pass about the city telling one another tales that we know to be terrible from the blanched faces of the listeners though they tell them in an unknown tongue; or with his stone gods of the mountain, for 'when we see rock walking it is terrible' 'rock should not walk in the evening.'

Yet say what I will, so strange is the pleasure that they give, so hard to analyse and describe, I do not know why these stories and plays delight me. Now they set me thinking of some old Irish jewel work, now of a sword covered with Indian Arabesques that hangs in a friend's hall, now of St. Mark's at Venice, now of cloud palaces at the sundown; but more often still of a strange country or state of the soul that once for a few weeks I entered in deep sleep and after lost and have ever mourned and desired.

V

Not all Lord Dunsany's moods delight me, for he writes out of a careless abundance; and from the moment I first read him I have wished to have between two covers something of all the moods that do. I believe that I have it in this book, which I have just been reading aloud to an imaginative young girl more French than English, whose understanding, that of a child and of a woman, and expressed not in words but in her face, has doubled my own. Some of my selections, those that I have called 'A Miracle' and 'The Castle of Time' are passages from stories of some length, and I give but the first act of 'Argimenes,' a play in the repertory of the Abbey Theatre, but each selection can be read I think with no thoughts but of itself. If 'Idle Days on the Yann' is a fragment it was left so by its author, and if I am moved to complain I shall remember that perhaps not even his imagination could have found adventures worthy of a traveller who had passed 'memorable, holy Golnuz, and heard the pilgrims praying,' and smelt burned poppies in Mandaroon.

Normandy 1912.

W. B. Yeats.

THE GODS OF THE MOUNTAIN

ACT I

SCENE: The East. Outside a city wall; three beggars seated on the ground.

OOGNO These days are bad for beggary.

THAHN They are bad.

ULF (an older beggar but not grey) Some evil has befallen the rich ones of this city. They take no joy any longer in benevolence, but are become sour and miserly at heart. Alas for them! I sometimes sigh for them when I think of this.

OOGNO Alas for them. A miserly heart must be a sore affliction.

THAHN A sore affliction indeed, and bad for our calling.

OOGNO (reflectively) They have been thus for many months. What thing has befallen them?

THAHN Some evil thing.

ULF There has been a comet come near to the earth of late and the earth has been parched and sultry so that the gods are drowsy and all those things that are divine in man, such as benevolence, drunkenness, extravagance and song, have faded and died and have not been replenished by the gods.

OOGNO It has indeed been sultry.

THAHN I have seen the comet o' nights.

ULF The gods are drowsy.

OOGNO If they awake not soon and make this city worthy again of our order, I for one shall forsake the calling and buy a shop and sit at ease in the shade and barter for gain.

THAHN You will keep a shop? (Enter Agmar and Slag. Agmar, though poorly dressed, is tall, imperious, and older than Ulf. Slag follows behind him.)

AGMAR Is this a beggar who speaks?

OOGNO Yes, master, a poor beggar.

AGMAR How long has the calling of beggary existed?

OOGNO Since the building of the first city, Master.

AGMAR And when has a beggar ever followed a trade? When has he ever haggled and bartered and sat in a shop?

OOGNO Why, he has never done so.

AGMAR Are you he that shall be first to forsake the calling?

OOGNO Times are bad for the calling here.

THAHN They are bad.

AGMAR So you would forsake the calling.

OOGNO The city is unworthy of our calling. The gods are drowsy, and all that is divine in man is dead. (To third Beggar) Are not the gods drowsy?

ULF They are drowsy in their mountains away at Marma. The seven green idols are drowsy. Who is this that rebukes us?

THAHN Are you some great merchant, Master? Perhaps you will help a poor man that is starving.

SLAG My Master a Merchant! No, no. He is no merchant. My Master is no merchant.

OOGNO I perceive that he is some lord in disguise. The gods have woken and have sent him to save us.

SLAG No, no. You do not know my Master. You do not know him.

THAHN Is he the Soldan's self that has come to rebuke us?

AGMAR (with great pride) I am a beggar, and an old beggar.

SLAG There is none like my Master. No traveller has met with cunning like to his, not even those that come from Aethiopia.

ULF We make you welcome to our town, upon which an evil has fallen, the days being bad for beggary.

AGMAR Let none that has known the mystery of roads, or has felt the wind arising new in the morning, or who has called forth out of the souls of men divine benevolence, ever speak any more of any trade or of the miserable gains of shops and the trading men.

OOGNO I but spoke hastily, the times being bad.

AGMAR I will put right the times.

SLAG There is nothing that my Master cannot do.

AGMAR (to Slag) Be silent and attend to me. I do not know this city, I have travelled from far, having somewhat exhausted the city of Ackara.

SLAG My Master was three times knocked down and injured by carriages there, once he was killed and seven times beaten and robbed, and every time he was generously compensated. He had nine diseases, many of them mortal….

AGMAR Be silent, Slag…. Have you any thieves among the calling here?

ULF We have a few that we call thieves here, Master, but they would scarcely seem thieves to you. They are not good thieves.

AGMAR I shall need the best thief you have.

(Enter two citizens richly clad, Illanaun and Oorander)

ILLANAUN Therefore we will send galleons to Ardaspes.

OORANDER Right to Ardaspes through the silver gates.

(Agmar transfers the thick handle of his long staff to his left armpit, he droops on to it and it supports his weight, he is upright no longer. His right arm hangs limp and useless. He hobbles up to the citizens imploring alms.)

ILLANAUN I am sorry. I cannot help you. There have been too many beggars here, and we must decline alms for the good of the town.

AGMAR (sitting down and weeping) I have come from far. (Illanaun presently returns and gives Agmar a coin. Exit Illanaun. Agmar, erect again, walks back to the others.)

AGMAR We shall need fine raiment, let the thief start at once. Let it rather be green raiment.

BEGGAR I will go and fetch the thief. (Exit)

ULF We will dress ourselves as lords and impose upon the city.

OOGNO Yes, yes; we will say we are ambassadors from a far land.

ULF And there will be good eating.

SLAG (in an undertone to Ulf) But you do not know my Master. Now that you have suggested that we shall go as lords, he will make a better suggestion. He will suggest that we should go as kings.

ULF (incredulous) Beggars as kings!

SLAG Ay. You do not know my Master.

ULF (to Agmar) What do you bid us do?

AGMAR You shall first come by the fine raiment in the manner I have mentioned.

ULF And what then, Master?

AGMAR Why then we shall go as gods.

BEGGARS As gods?

AGMAR As gods. Know you the land through which I have lately come in my wanderings? Marma, where the gods are carved from green stone in the mountains. They sit all seven of them against the hills. They sit there motionless and travellers worship them.

ULF Yes, yes, we know those gods. They are much reverenced here; but they are drowsy and send us nothing beautiful.

AGMAR They are of green jade. They sit cross-legged with their right elbows resting on their left hands, the right forefinger pointing upwards. We will come into the city disguised, from the direction of Marma, and will claim to be these gods. We must be seven as they are. And when we sit, we must sit cross-legged as they do, with the right hand uplifted.

ULF This is a bad city in which to fall into the hands of oppressors, for the judges lack amiability here as the merchants lack benevolence ever since the gods forgot them.

AGMAR In our ancient calling a man may sit at one street corner for fifty years doing the one thing, and yet a day may come when it is well for him to rise up and to do another thing, while the timorous man starves.

ULF Also it were well not to anger the gods.

AGMAR Is not all life a beggary to the gods? Do they not see all men always begging of them and asking alms with incense, and bells, and subtle devices?

OOGNO Yes, all men indeed are beggars before the gods.

AGMAR Does not the mighty Soldan often sit by the agate altar in his royal temple as we sit at a street corner or by a palace gate?

ULF It is even so.

AGMAR Then will the gods be glad when we follow the holy calling with new devices and with subtlety, as they are glad when the priests sing a new song.

ULF Yet I have a fear.

AGMAR (to Slag) Go you into the city before us, and let there be a prophecy there which saith that the gods who are carven from green rock in the mountain shall one day arise in Marma and come here in the guise of men.

SLAG Yes, Master. Shall I make the prophecy myself? Or shall it be found in some old document?

AGMAR Let someone have seen it once in some rare document. Let it be spoken of in the market-place.

SLAG It shall be spoken of, Master. (Slag lingers. Enter thief and
Thahn)

OOGNO This is our thief.

AGMAR (encouragingly) Ah, he is a quick thief.

THIEF I could only procure you three green raiments, Master. The city is not now well supplied with them; moreover it is a very suspicious city, and without shame for the baseness of its suspicions.

SLAG (to a beggar) This is not thieving.

THIEF I could do no more, Master. I have not practised thieving all my life.

AGMAR You have got something: it may serve our purpose. How long have you been thieving?

THIEF I stole first when I was ten.

SLAG When he was ten!

AGMAR We must tear them up and divide them amongst the seven. (to
Thahn) Bring me another beggar.

SLAG When my Master was ten he had already had to slip by night out of two cities.

OOGNO (admiringly) Out of two cities!

SLAG (nodding his head) In his native city they do not now know what became of the golden cup that stood in the Lunar Temple.

AGMAR Yes, into seven pieces.

ULF We will each wear a piece of it over our rags.

OOGNO Yes, yes, we shall look fine.

AGMAR That is not the way that we shall disguise ourselves.

OOGNO Not cover our rags?

AGMAR No, no. The first who looked closely would say 'These are only beggars. They have disguised themselves.'

ULF What shall we do?

AGMAR Each of the seven shall wear a piece of the green raiment underneath his rags. And peradventure here and there a little shall show through; and men shall say 'These seven have disguised themselves as beggars. But we know not what they be.'

SLAG Hear my wise Master.

OOGNO (in admiration) He is a beggar.

ULF He is an old beggar.

ACT II

SCENE: The Metropolitan Hall of the city of Kongros. Citizens, etc. Enter the seven beggars with green silk under their rags.

OORANDER Who are you and whence come you?

AGMAR Who may say what we are or whence we come?

OORANDER What are these beggars and why do they come here?

AGMAR Who said to you that we were beggars?

OORANDER Why do these men come here?

AGMAR Who said to you that we were men?

ILLANAUN Now, by the moon!

AGMAR My sister.

ILLANAUN What?

AGMAR My little sister.

SLAG Our little sister the Moon. She comes to us at evenings away in the mountain of Marma. She trips over the mountains when she is young: when she is young and slender she comes and dances before us: and when she is old and unshapely she hobbles away from the hills.

AGMAR Yet she is young again and forever nimble with youth: yet she comes dancing back. The years are not able to curb her nor to bring grey hairs to her brethren.

OORANDER This is not wonted.

ILLANAUN It is not in accordance with custom.

AKMOS Prophecy hath not thought it.

SLAG She comes to us new and nimble remembering olden loves.

OORANDER It were well that prophets should come and speak to us.

ILLANAUN This hath not been in the past. Let prophets come; let prophets speak to us of future things. (The beggars seat themselves upon the floor in the attitude of the seven gods of Marma.)

CITIZEN I heard men speak to-day in the market-place. They speak of a prophecy read somewhere of old. It says the seven gods shall come from Marma in the guise of men.

ILLANAUN Is this a true prophecy?

OORANDER It is all the prophecy we have. Man without prophecy is like a sailor going by night over uncharted seas. He knows not where are the rocks nor where the havens. To the man on watch all things ahead are black and the stars guide him not, for he knows not what they are.

ILLANAUN Should we not investigate this prophecy?

OORANDER Let us accept it. It is as the small uncertain light of a lantern, carried it may be by a drunkard but along the shore of some haven. Let us be guided.

AKMOS It may be that they are but benevolent gods.

AGMAR There is no benevolence greater than our benevolence.

ILLANAUN Then we need do little: they portend no danger to us.

AGMAR There is no anger greater than our anger.

OORANDER Let us make sacrifice to them, if they be gods.

AKMOS We humbly worship you, if ye be gods.

ILLANAUN (kneeling too) You are mightier than all men and hold high rank among other gods and are lords of this our city, and have the thunder as your plaything and the whirlwind and the eclipse and all the destinies of human tribes, if ye be gods.

AGMAR Let the pestilence not fall at once upon this city, as it had indeed designed to; let not the earthquake swallow it all immediately up amid the howls of the thunder; let not infuriate armies overwhelm those that escape if we be gods.

POPULACE (in horror) If we be gods!

OORANDER Come let us sacrifice.

ILLANAUN Bring lambs.

AKMOS Quick, quick. (Exit some.)

SLAG (with solemn air) This god is a very divine god.

THAHN He is no common god.

MLAN Indeed he has made us.

CITIZEN (A WOMAN) (to Slag) He will not punish us, Master? None of the gods will punish us? We will make a sacrifice, a good sacrifice.

ANOTHER We will sacrifice a lamb that the priests have blessed.

FIRST CITIZEN Master, you are not wroth with us?

SLAG Who may say what cloudy dooms are rolling up in the mind of the eldest of the gods. He is no common god like us. Once a shepherd went by him in the mountains and doubted as he went. He sent a doom after that shepherd.

CITIZEN Master, we have not doubted.

SLAG And the doom found him on the hills at evening.

SECOND CITIZEN It shall be a good sacrifice, Master. (Re-enter with a dead lamb and fruits. They offer the lamb on an altar where there is fire, and fruits before the altar.)

THAHN (stretching out a hand to a lamb upon an altar.) That leg is not being cooked at all.

ILLANAUN It is strange that gods should be thus anxious about the cooking of a leg of lamb.

OORANDER It is strange certainly.

ILLANAUN Almost I had said that it was a man spoke then.

OORANDER (Stroking his beard and regarding the second beggar.)
Strange. Strange certainly.

AGMAR Is it then strange that the gods love roasted flesh? For this purpose they keep the lightning. When the lightning flickers about the limbs of men there comes to the gods in Marma a pleasant smell, even a smell of roasting. Sometimes the gods, being pacific, are pleased to have roasted instead the flesh of lamb. It is all one to the gods: let the roasting stop.

OORANDER No, no, gods of the mountain!

OTHERS No, no.

OORANDER Quick, let us offer the flesh to them. If they eat all is well. (They offer it, the beggars eat, all but Agmar who watches.)

ILLANAUN One who was ignorant, one who did not know, had almost said that they ate like hungry men.

OTHERS Hush.

AKMOS Yet they look as though they had not had a meal like this for a long time.

OORANDER They have a hungry look.

AGMAR (who has not eaten) I have not eaten since the world was very new and the flesh of men was tenderer than now. These younger gods have learned the habit of eating from the lions.

OORANDER O oldest of divinities, partake, partake.

AGMAR It is not fitting that such as I should eat. None eat but beasts and men and the younger gods. The Sun and the Moon and the nimble Lightning and I, we may kill, and we may madden, but we do not eat.

AKMOS If he but eat of our offering he cannot overwhelm us.

ALL O ancient deity, partake, partake.

AGMAR Enough. Let it be enough that these have condescended to this bestial and human habit.

ILLANAUN (to Akmos) And yet he is not unlike a beggar whom I saw not so long since.

OORANDER But beggars eat.

ILLANAUN Now I never knew a beggar yet who would refuse a bowl of
Woldery wine.

AKMOS This is no beggar.

ILLANAUN Nevertheless let us offer him a bowl of Woldery wine.

AKMOS You do wrong to doubt him.

ILLANAUN I do but wish to prove his divinity. I will fetch the Woldery wine. (Exit)

AKMOS He will not drink. Yet if he does, then he will not overwhelm us. Let us offer him the wine.

(Re-enter Illanaun with a goblet.)

FIRST BEGGAR It is Woldery wine!

SECOND BEGGAR It is Woldery!

THIRD BEGGAR A goblet of Woldery wine!

FOURTH BEGGAR O blessed day!

MLAN O happy times!

SLAG O my wise Master! (All the Beggars stretch out their hands, including Agmar. Illanaun gives it to Agmar. Agmar takes it solemnly, and very carefully pours it upon the ground.)

FIRST BEGGAR He has spilt it.

SECOND BEGGAR He has spilt it. (Agmar sniffs the fumes.)

AGMAR It is a fitting libation. Our anger is somewhat appeased.

ANOTHER BEGGAR But it was Woldery!

AKMOS (kneeling to Agmar) Master, I am childless, and I….

AGMAR Trouble us not now. It is the hour at which the gods are accustomed to speak to the gods in the language of the gods, and if Man heard us he would guess the futility of his destiny, which were not well for Man. Begone! Begone! (Exeunt all but one who lingers.)

ONE Master….

AGMAR Begone! (exit one) (Agmar takes up a piece of meat and begins to eat it: the beggars rise and stretch themselves: they laugh, but Agmar eats hungrily.)

OOGNO Ah, now we have come into our own.

THAHN Now we have alms.

SLAG Master! My wise Master!

ULF These are the good days, the good days; and yet I have a fear.

SLAG What do you fear? There is nothing to fear. No man is as wise as my Master.

ULF I fear the gods whom we pretend to be.

SLAG The gods?

AGMAR (taking a chunk of meat from his lips) Come hither, Slag.

SLAG (going up to him) Yes, Master.

AGMAR Watch in the doorway while I eat. (Slag goes to the doorway)
Sit in the attitude of a god. Warn me if any of the citizens approach.
(Slag sits in the doorway in the attitude of a god, back to the
audience)

OOGNO (to Agmar) But, Master, shall we not have Woldery wine?

AGMAR We shall have all things if only we are wise at first for a little.

THAHN Master, do any suspect us?

AGMAR We must be very wise.

THAHN But if we are not wise, Master?

AGMAR Why then death may come to us …

THAHN O Master!

AGMAR … slowly. (All stir uneasily except Slag motionless in the doorway.)

OOGNO Do they believe us, master?

SLAG (half turning his head) Someone comes. (Slag resumes his position.)

AGMAR (putting away his meat) We shall soon know now. (All take up the attitude. Enter one.)

ONE Master, I want the god that does not eat.

AGMAR I am he.

ONE Master, my child was bitten in the throat by a death-adder at noon. Spare him, Master; he still breathes, but slowly.

AGMAR Is he indeed your child?

ONE He is surely my child, Master.

AGMAR Was it your wont to thwart him in his play, while he was strong and well?

ONE I never thwarted him, Master.

AGMAR Whose child is Death?

ONE Death is the child of the gods.

AGMAR Do you that never thwarted your child in his play ask this of the gods?

ONE (with some horror, perceiving Agmar's meaning) Master!

AGMAR Weep not. For all the houses that men have builded are the play-fields of this child of the gods. (The man goes away in silence not weeping.)

OOGNO (Taking Thahn by the wrist) Is this indeed a man?

AGMAR A man, a man, and until just now a hungry one.

ACT III

Same room. A few days have elapsed. Seven thrones shaped like mountain-crags stand along the back of the stage. On these the beggars are lounging. The Thief is absent.

MLAN Never had beggars such a time.

OOGNO Ah, the fruits and tender lamb!

THAHN The Woldery wine!

SLAG It was better to see my Master's wise devices than to have fruit and lamb and Woldery wine.

MLAN Ah, when they spied on him to see if he would eat when they went away!

OOGNO When they questioned him concerning the gods and Man!

THAHN When they asked him why the gods permitted cancer!

SLAG Ah! My wise Master.

MLAN How well his scheme has succeeded.

OOGNO How far away is hunger!

THAHN It is even like to one of last year's dreams, the trouble of a brief night long ago.

MLAN Ho, ho, ho, to see them pray to us!

AGMAR (sternly) When we were beggars did we not speak as beggars? Did we not whine as they? Was not our mien beggarly?

MLAN We were the pride of our calling.

AGMAR (sternly) Then now that we are gods let us be as gods, and not mock our worshippers.

ULF I think the gods do mock their worshippers.

AGMAR The gods have never mocked us. We are above all pinnacles that we have ever gazed at in dreams.

ULF I think that when Man is high then most of all are the gods wont to mock him. (Enter Thief)

THIEF Master, I have been with those that see all and know all, I have been with the thieves, Master. They know me for one of the craft, but they do not know me as being one of us.

AGMAR Well, well …

THIEF There is danger, Master, there is great danger.

AGMAR You mean that they suspect that we are men?

THIEF That they have long done, Master. I mean that they will know it.
Then we are lost.

AGMAR Then they do not know it?

THIEF They do not know it yet, but they will know it, and we are lost.

AGMAR When will they know it?

THIEF Three days ago they suspected us.

AGMAR More than you think suspected us, but have any dared to say so?

THIEF No, Master.

AGMAR Then forget your fears, my thief.

THIEF Two men went on dromedaries three days ago to see if the gods were still at Marma.

AGMAR They went to Marma!

THIEF Yes, three days ago.

OOGNO We are lost.

AGMAR They went three days ago?

THIEF Yes, on dromedaries.

AGMAR They should be back to-day.

OOGNO We are lost.

THAHN We are lost.

THIEF They must have seen the green jade idols sitting against the mountains. They will say, 'The gods are still at Marma.' And we shall be burnt.

SLAG My Master will yet devise a plan.

AGMAR (to the Thief) Slip away to some high place and look towards the desert and see how long we have to devise a plan. (Exit Thief.)

SLAG My Master will devise a plan.

OOGNO He has taken us into a trap.

THAHN His wisdom is our doom.