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Updated: May 10, 2025
Was it waiting for night to steal upon him in the darkness, to wreath around him those terrible tentacles, and to drain his life-blood? Now, indeed, all stood clear. "The Spider" was no allegorical term, but literal fact. That frightful monster with which he had just come face to face was indeed the demon-god of the Ba-gcatya!
For Evil can destroy only itself and its own; it could destroy no enemy could at worst but cause a succession of deaths, from each of which the defiant soul would rise to loftier defiance, to more victorious endurance until at length it laughed Evil in the face, and the demon-god shrunk withered before it.
The friendship of the king? No. That was based on superstition, even as the friendship of the entire nation. Even it was assumed for an end. Again, should he boldly challenge the pretensions of the demon-god, whatever it might be, and asserting himself to be the real one, offer to slay the horror in open conflict?
"Eve after eve that haggard anchorite Would haunt the desolated fane, and there Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low 'Vicisti Galilaee'; louder again, Spurning a shatter'd fragment of the God, 'Vicisti Galilaee! but when now Bathed in that lurid crimson ask'd 'Is earth On fire to the West? or is the Demon-god Wroth at his fall? and heard an answer 'Wake Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life Of self-suppression, not of selfless love. And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West, And at his ear he heard a whisper 'Rome, And in his heart he cried 'The call of God! And call'd arose, and, slowly plunging down Thro' that disastrous glory, set his face By waste and field and town of alien tongue, Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere Of westward-wheeling stars; and every dawn Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome.
"Hu, the mighty, whose history as a patriarch is precisely that of Noah, was promoted to the rank of the principal demon-god among the Britons; and, as his chariot was composed of rays of the sun, it may be presumed that he was worshipped in conjunction with that luminary, and to the same superstition we may refer what is said of his light and swift course." DAVIES, Mythol. and Rites of the Brit.
For as he drew nearer to Imvungayo there issued from its gate a crowd of figures of black, grotesque, horrible figures, and in the midst a man, whom they were dragging along in grim silence, even as they had hauled Lutali to his unknown doom, and as they disappeared into the gathering darkness, Laurence knew only too well that here was another victim another hideous sacrifice to the grisly and mysterious demon-god.
Yet now in the white peaks towering to the cloudless heavens, in the black and craggy rifts, in the wide, rolling, partially-wooded plains the hunter's paradise this man saw only a gloomy wizard circle, inclosing some horrible inferno, the throne of the frightful demon-god of this extraordinary race. Then it occurred to Laurence that he had better not let this thing get too much upon his nerves.
To the student of history the story of such a funeral seems like the prostration of a nation of barbarians before the car of some demon-god.
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