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Knowledge of the appalling effects of their touch came, she told me, from those few "who had been kissed so lightly" that they recovered. Certainly nothing, not even the Shining One, was dreaded by the Murians as these were W. T. G. The Coming of Yolara "Never was there such a girl!"
Denied by their circumscribed environment the wider experiences of us of the outer world, the Murians had perfected an amazing system of escape through the imagination. They were, too, intensely musical. Their favourite instruments were double flutes; immensely complex pipe-organs; harps, great and small.
Next, under the direction of the frog-king, levies commanded by subsidiary chieftains had completed rows of rough walls along the probable route of the Murians through the cavern. These afforded the Akka a fair protection behind which they could hurl their darts and spears curiously enough they had never developed the bow as a weapon.
These were to attack when the Murians debauched from the corials. We had little hope of doing more here than effect some attrition of Yolara's hosts, for at this place the captains of the Shining One could wield the Keth and their other uncanny weapons freely.
Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs men and women and children clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries beyond their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners men and women and children drifting, eddying each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God and devil in embrace the seal of the Shining One the dead-alive; the lost ones!
Whatever there was, indeed, of high, truly religious impulse among the Murians, this far, High God had. I found this exceedingly interesting, because it had long been my theory to put the matter in the shape of a geometrical formula that the real attractiveness of gods to man increases uniformly according to the square of their distance W. T. G.
But for long the Murians feared the return of the Taithu and greatly they feared the Three. Even the Shining One feared those who had created it for a time; and not even now is it eager to face them that I know. Nor are Yolara and Lugur so sure. It may be that the Three commanded it: but how or why I know not. I only know that it is true for here am I and from where else would I have come?"
That last thin line of the Akka was going; yet they fought to the last, and none toppled over the lip without at least one of the armoured Murians in his arms. My gaze dropped to the foot of the cliffs.
And I have set it down here, adding nothing, taking nothing from it; translating liberally, it is true, but constantly striving, while putting it into idea-forms and phraseology to be readily understood by my readers, to keep accurately to the spirit. And this, I must repeat, I have done throughout my narrative, wherever it has been necessary to record conversation with the Murians.
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