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Updated: May 21, 2025
The Caryatids repeated throughout this court are the joint work of John Bateman and A. Stirling Calder. They inject into the court its fairy spirit without disturbing its repose. They are Puckish, bat-winged, goblin-horned fairy creatures of an eerie beauty, elfin, roguish and quaint.
The Spirit of Thunder, for whom Lei Tsu is often mistaken, is represented as an ugly, black, bat-winged demon, with clawed feet, monkey's head, and eagle's beak, who holds in one hand a steel chisel, and in the other a spiritual hammer, with which he beats numerous drums strung about him, thus producing the terrific noise of thunder.
We need men who will rip the mask off the putrid face of corruption and pronounce God's sentence upon it; who will lift up the trap-door of the cess-pools of men's hearts and bid them look within at their own slime and filth; who will "cry aloud and spare not," though the infuriated cohorts of bat-winged demons snarl and shriek.
Before man the great and prevalent creatures followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals, the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being again.
Far back before Jurassic times, millions of years ago, before the coming of bony fishes, when the only mammals were tiny nameless creatures, hardly larger than mice; when the great Altantosaurus dinosaurs browsed on the quaint herbage, and Pterodactyls those ravenous bat-winged dragons of the air hovered above the surface of the earth, in this epoch we can imagine a pair of long-tailed, half-winged creatures which skimmed from tree to tree, perhaps giving an occasional flop the beginning of the marvellous flight motions.
He saw what it would do when life should be given it. He knew all things. He now put fire in the image, but fire is not life. He put fire within and a red glow passed through and through it. The fire dried the clay of which the image was made, and gave the image an exceedingly fierce aspect. It shone through the scales upon the breast, through the gills, and the bat-winged ears.
For to Spud, with all his inherited ancestral faith in gnomes and pixies, these bat-winged things were nothing less than people of the under world demons from some purgatory of the Moon devils, living and breathing, spewed out from that buried hell for a moment of relaxation from their horrid work.
There was something terrible in their appearance and the rushing speed of their movements. Amy screamed and ran behind her mother, who visibly shrank. Katy stood her ground; but the bat-winged fiends in Dore's illustrations to Dante occurred to her, and her fingers trembled as she dropped some money in the cups. Even mendicant friars are human.
The thing is obvious, clear and unmistakable. It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and till a man can do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over Nature, and all the rest of it. He is a mere slave, and prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the corridors of his own brain.
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