She was sent to a distant, lonely, forsaken place on the very outskirts
of the kingdom, or, to be precise, queendom. According to all accounts,
that spot is really a terrible one. Drorathusa was, in fact, in exile,
though Brendaldoombro did not like to hear any one call it that. But
almost everybody did or regarded it as such, and there were murmurs,
not only amongst the Droman people, but even amongst those priestesses
and priests whom the old villain had counted upon to applaud his every
word and act.
Nor did time still those murmurs. On the contrary, they grew louder,
more persistent. Brendaldoombro was learning that it is one thing to
send a person into exile and quite another to banish that person from
the popular esteem. Nor did he stop at banishment; he had recourse to
the assassin's dagger and the arts of the poisoner. But, in all these
attempts upon the life of Drorathusa, he was thwarted by the agents of
the queen. Lepraylya knew her opponent, and had at once taken measures
to safeguard the life of the exiled priestess, who held as high a place
in the esteem of her sovereign as she did in the hearts of the people.
How strange it seems to be writing of things like these in this the
Twentieth Century, the Golden Age of Science! But, as I believe I have
already remarked, Science hasn't discovered everything yet. This is
a stranger, a more wonderful, a more mysterious old globe than even
Science herself dreams it to be.
When our acquisition of the language became a real one, we began to
learn something of the science of Drome and to impart a knowledge
of the wonderful science of our own world. Never shall I forget the
amazement of the queen and those learned men of Drome when Rhodes
brought his mathematics into play. Problems that only a Droman
Archimedes could solve and that only after much labor (what with their
awful notation) Rhodes solved, presto--just like that! So unwieldly
was the system of notation employed by these Hypogeans that even their
greatest mathematicians had been able to do no more than roughly
approximate _pi_.
When Rhodes proceed to the solution of trigonometrical problems,
their amazement knew no bounds. And, when he explained to them that
all they had to do to become masters of such problems was to discard
their cumbersome notation and adopt the simple numerals used by
ourselves--well, I do actually believe that that was the straw that
broke the back of Brendaldoombro's power! For (strange though it may
seem to a world that is more interested in any kind of abracahokum, and
especially any kind of political jiggumbob, than it is in science) that
brought over to our side virtually every learned man in Drome and a
majority of the people themselves. Nor should I forget the priestesses
and the priests. Your average Droman is much interested in all things
of a scientific nature, and no one more so than the true priestess or
priest, though there are, of course, some lamentable exceptions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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