Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
Si whispered in the ear of that good woman the nature of my errand, with doubtless some blandishment of her own; and my errand being one so much above the vulgar and so nearly touching the sovereign, I was at once accorded a separate room in the gate-house, whence I could look down in comparative peace on the common herd of suitors, and listen to the buzz of their invective as they practised speeches which I calculated it would take Ar-hap all the rest of his reign to listen to, without allowing him any time for pronouncing verdicts on them.
And as its ghostly, self-emitting light beamed up in the darkness with weird brilliancy, there by it, in gold and furs and war panoply, huge, fierce, and lowering, stood AR-HAP HIMSELF! Ay, and behind him, towering over the crouching Martians, blocking every outlet and street, were scores and hundreds of his men. Never was surprise so utter, ambush more complete.
Ar-hap had prayed with a wealth of picturesque ceremonial. We had all prayed and cursed by turns, but still the heavens would not relent, and the rain came not. At last the stifling heat and vapour reached an almost intolerable pitch.
The king writhed, and begged me with a sign to desist. "We have no wish to anger you. Do us this other task and none will doubt that you are a potent spirit, and even I, Ar-hap, will listen to you." "Well, then," I answered sulkily, "what is it to be this time?" After a minute's consultation, and speaking slowly as though conscious of how much hung on his words, the king said, "Listen!
The big water outside stops us for a space, but," he added, laughing gruffly and taking a draught of a strong beer he had been heating by the fire, "King Ar-hap has their pretty noses between his fingers; he takes tribute and girls while he gets ready they say he is nearly ready this summer, and if he is, it will not be much of an excuse he will need to lick up the last of those triflers, those pretences of manhood."
All the water gave out on the morning after I had bearded Ar-hap in his den, and our strength went with it. No earthly heat was ever like it, and it drank our vitality up from every pore. Water there was down below in the bitter, streaming gulf, but so noisome that we dared not even bathe there; here there was none but the faintest trickle.
This was reassuring, but as to recovering the lady, that was another matter over which the good woman shook her head. It was ill coming between Ar-hap and his tribute, she said; still, if I wanted to see Heru once again, this was my opportunity, and, for the rest, that chance, which often favours the enamoured, must be my help.
Couldn't I drop in there to lunch? It would make a fine paper for an antiquarian society." Again the woodman frowned. "Do as I bid you, son. You are too young and green to go on ventures by yourself. Keep to the straight road: shun the swamps and the fairy forest, else will you never see Ar-hap."
The heat was tremendous, the odour of Thither men and the ill-dressed hides they wore almost overpowering. Yet little I recked for either, for there at the top of the room, seated on a dais made of rough-hewn wood inlet with gold and covered with splendid furs, was Ar-hap himself.
When she learned I had "robbed the lion of his prey" and taken his new wife singlehanded from the dreaded Ar-hap her astonishment was unbounded.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking