Figures of Earth: A Comedy of AppearancesCabell, James Branch
Science
Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances
Cabell, James Branch
Fantasy fiction; Wit and humor
With these two articles Miramon dealt so as to evoke a seventh ally.
Serpents were about the throat and arms of this champion, and he wore a
necklace of human skulls: his long black hair was plaited remarkably;
his throat was blue, his body all a livid white except where it was
smeared with ashes. He rode upon the back of a beautiful white bull.
Next, riding on a dappled stag, came one appareled in vivid stripes of
yellow and red and blue and green: his face was dark as a raincloud, he
had one large round eye, white tusks protruded from his lips, and he
carried a gaily painted urn. His unspeakable attendants leaped like
frogs. The jolliest looking of all the warriors came thereafter, with a
dwarfish body and very short legs; he had a huge black-bearded head, a
flat nose, and his tongue hung from his mouth and waggled as he moved.
He wore a belt and a necklace, and nothing else whatever except the
plumes of the hawk arranged as a head-dress: and he rode upon a great
sleek tortoise-shell cat.
Now when these unusual appearing allies stood silently aligned before
them on the seashore, Dom Manuel said, with a polite bow toward this
appalling host, that he hardly thought Duke Asmund would be able to
withstand such Redeemers. But Miramon repeated that there was nothing
like the decimal system.
"That half-brother of mine, who is lord of the tenth kind of sleeping,
would nicely round off this dizain," says Miramon, scratching his chin,
"if only he had not such a commonplace, black-and-white appearance,
apart from being one of those dreadful Realists, without a scrap of
aesthetic feeling--No, I like color, and we will levy now upon the
West!"
So Miramon dealt next with a little ball of bright feathers. Then a last
helper came to them, riding on a jaguar, and carrying a large drum and a
flute from which his music issued in the shape of flames. This champion
was quite black, but he was striped with blue paint, and golden feathers
grew all over his left leg. He wore a red coronet in the shape of a
rose, a short skirt of green paper, and white sandals; and he carried a
red shield that had in its centre a white flower with the four petals
placed crosswise. Such was he who made up the tenth.
Now when this terrible dizain was completed the lord of the seven
madnesses laid fire to a wisp of straw, and he cast it to the winds,
saying that thus should the anger of Miramon Lluagor pass over the land.
Then he turned to these dreadful ten whom he had revivified from the
dustheaps and garrets of Vraidex, and it became apparent that Miramon
was deeply moved.
Said Miramon:
"You, whom I made for man's worship when earth was younger and fairer,
hearken, and learn why I breathe new life into husks from my
scrap-heaps! Gods of old days, discrowned, disjected, and treated as
rubbish, hark to the latest way of the folk whose fathers you succored!
They have discarded you utterly. Such as remember deride you, saying:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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