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Incense was burning on a tripod placed upon the floor, and the priests muttering prayers, which sounded very like incantations, ever and anon threw some new perfume upon the charcoal, which produced what our friend Dousterswivel would call a "suffumigation."
The orifice or vent-hole of the cave was covered with a tripod consecrated to Apollo, on which the priestesses, called Pythonesses, sat, to fill themselves with the prophetic vapour, and to conceive the spirit of divination, with the fervor that made them know futurity, and foretel it in Greek hexameters.
Occasionally at night the N.C.O. seizes the traversing-handles, and with his thumb on the button slowly sweeps that range of sand-bags, till the feed-block sucks up the cartridge-belt like a chaff-cutter and the empty cartridge-cases lie as thick round the tripod as acorns under an oak. The Huns reply by taking a flashlight photograph of us with a calcium flare, and then all is still again.
These were for the painful art of wrestling. For the winner there was a great tripod ready for setting upon the fire, and the Achaeans valued it among themselves at twelve oxen. For the loser he brought out a woman skilled in all manner of arts, and they valued her at four oxen. He rose and said among the Argives, "Stand forward, you who will essay this contest."
The spinning thing atop the tripod made it quite pleasant to be out-of-doors around the Gissell Bay base, though there were forty-mile winds and thermometers read ten below zero two hundred yards from the thing Hod had set up. The cooking-pot boiled merrily without fuel, with an increasingly thick layer of frost on its outside.
So he drew the comb out of the bag, flung it behind him, and it instantly became a long, high fence, which the witch could not climb over, so she was obliged to go a long way round, and he thus gained a start. "Throw down the brush," said the horse, when it again heard the trampling of the tripod near them.
All at once I almost tripped over a massive iron bar; others, a rusty network of them, grew into being above and around me, like the arms of a ghostly polyp. 'What infernal spider's web is this? I thought, and stumbled clear. I had strayed into the base of a gigantic tripod, its gaunt legs stayed and cross-stayed, its apex lost in fog; the beacon, I remembered.
We groped our way along as best we could. The place was full of men. It was only possible to get my tripod and camera along by passing it from one to another. Then as the men stooped low I stepped over them, eventually reaching the other end and daylight. The "strafe" was still on, but not quite so violent. Our parapets were in a sorry condition, battered out of all shape.
At this Ayling's Number One, who was carrying a machine-gun tripod weighing forty-eight pounds, said something something distressingly audible and groaned deeply. "If we'd come the way I wanted," continued the guide, much pleased with the effect of his words upon his audience, "we'd a' been there be now. But the Adjutant, 'e says to me "
Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us, that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspirations.
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