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"Yes, my Lord King". "Have you received the two hundred from the Mahomet?" "They had not arrived when I left the Boodah". "So that you left only one hundred men in the Boodah, with instructions to receive two hundred others?" "That is so, my Lord King". There was silence. "But suppose I tell you that I have given no such instructions: will your heart leap?"
Of course, the eagle doesn't blink: but I am only one man, and the world, and its stupid sins, are a tidy burden. Ha! never mind. Look at that big Boodah of a sun how he blooms: isn't he launched and handled all right? Let us of this desert bend the knee to him like the old Sabaeans. There is hope"....
"What, really, is the Boodah?" asked a Servian Minister of a French: "is she a whim, a threat, or a tool?" "She is too heavy for a whim", answered the French, "too dear for a threat, and too fantastic for a tool. Time will show". But this was no answer at all: something more to the point came from a multitudinous tumult of sledges below the workmen "wedging-up".
She counted the days on her fingers: he could not have been late. Unless there had been an accident to his ship.... Her brows knit a little; she peered into the fire: and thought of the Boodah.... It was possible that when her father's steamer stopped to pay sea- rent, Hogarth might have heard, and seized him. That notion occurred to her.
Then followed the rush of the Ambassadors to the Boodah, and the frivolous round of Court-life revolved, levee, audience, dinner, drawing-room, investiture; the Lord of the Sea descended from the throne before the Court to pin a cross upon the humble breast of his best shot and give him the title of Praeceps, gave fanciful honours to emperors, received them of them wore when throned a brow-band of gold with only one stone, the biggest of the meteor octahedrons, that glanced about his brow like an icicle in whose glass gallivanted a fairy clad in rags of the rainbow.
It was about seven P.M. that what the White House would have considered specially good news occurred: for the Boodah then telegraphed through to O'Hara's Mahomet at the Straits: "B. 7651. Begins. Richard. Ends". Which meant that if any Power, or Powers, desired to concentrate force upon the attack of any island, the Lord of the Sea granted them facilities.
Gradually, as the names "Beech", "Ecuador", ceased to be associated with the islands, the name of Hogarth took their place; and Hogarth had engaged Wanda, sweetest of tenors, to a year's stay in the Boodah, whose orchestra was the most cultured anywhere; Roche, her chef, had two years previously been put into a laboratory to devote his soul to the enlargement of his art; and he and that tenor lived in suites of the Boodah such as most princes would consider Utopian.
A temporary stair under flags ran right up to a ledge above the waterline: from which ledge little steel steps led here and there to the roof; round the edge of roof and ledge running two balustrades, surrounding the hulk; and over that upper portion, four times repeated in white letters ten feet high, the name BOODAH boomed itself.
The Boodah ran up the signal: "Stop!" Those who understood rubbed their eyes: it was like a vision at high noon; they could not believe. At that news the Captain, a handsome fair-bearded man, rushed like a madman from pilot-house to bridge, and the startled passengers saw his lighted eyes. He had some moments of indecision; then down he, too, rang that word: "Stop".
It is the curses which the world is at this moment hurling upon me: as when one man, thinking evilly of another, sticks needles into wax, and needles of pain pierce the other..." a sense of evil which was deepened the next day by an ominous little accident, when one of his old gunpractice hulks arrived from Bombay, bearing the throne: for as this was being conveyed into the Boodah a front leg was broken.
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