T. S. Stribling

“ The whole vital realm, the artist was saying, is nothing but a rainbow froth of love, lust, rapine, pain, weariness, joy and ecstasy where sunlight impinges on matter. All of it is somehow bound up in sunlight, all of it somehow, is spun out of the web of the Sun. ”

“ How gross the passion of a lover, Señor Lassiter, how cool and sublimated the rapture of an artist. Beauty is the thought of God. In the temple we will return thanks reverently for this little sleepy flower——”
The priests were picking their way back through the tunnel to the temple of the sun. They came out in a great chamber into which the last of the sunset fell through a huge rose window. Opposite the window was a rayed plate of burnished gold. ”

“ The promoter sat down on his couch and looked at his bags. He did not open them, nor make any of those little arrangements of housekeeping which a man performs even to camp for a night. It seemed not worth while. Indeed, the mental basis of every home-keeping gesture in man are a mate and children. By his desertion of Tilita, this had been torn from Lassiter's brain. ”

“ He tore along through the heat. The promoter panted after him. A hot breeze beat against the American's face; his heart pounded. The piazza was so huge his feet seemed to patter up and down in one place. Nunes gradually crept up on him.
By the time they reached the bolsa at the edge of the piazza, the muleteer was abreast. He drew out his automatic and stuck it butt foremost to the flying New Yorker. Lassiter got it without breaking his stride. ”

“ The third victim, a girl, which is thought to be the Tilita mentioned in Lassiter's narrative, fell into the hands of a Professor Waldrup, a tourist flying through Motobatl. When last heard from, oddly enough in Arkansas, Professor Waldrup was giving hypnotic performances with the body, allowing it to lie all night in the show-windows of village drug stores, sticking it full of hat pins and such like, catering to the scientific mind of America. It should be a matter of national pride how we Americans derive culture and refinement out of the most untoward circumstances. ”

“ Lassiter wondered dully if any consciousness lay behind their slow-batting eyes. If they felt pain or discomfort or nothing.
The light died with the suddenness which the promoter had noted from the rim of the cliff. Then all the new ecclesiast could see were three dim figures kneeling in the gloom. As Lassiter marched out with the other priests, a curious fear assailed him. He was afraid that a rat might gnaw Tilita in the night. [2]
↑ The temple of the Sun in Motobatl was probably the most populous cenobite known to history. ”

“ XIV THE chronic suppression of society prevents a man from bewailing his griefs openly and sanitarily. Probably ages of fighting and military training has taught the mind the wisdom of the generalissimo who stands off cool and collected, thinking what best may be done in the emergency, even while his army breaks and perishes.
Charles Lassiter deliberately ceased thinking of the mestizo girl almost as soon as he left the paddlewood. ”

“ Among the Jivaros we found a fully developed 'spider worship, resembling the 'mantis worship' among the African Bushman, or a similar spider worship called 'ananzi' by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa.
“These enormous spiders are, no doubt, the most formidable creatures in existence today. They go on long forays and can kill and drag a bullock to the den. My guide declared he saw one capture a jaguar in its toils. These large spiders seem to equal, proportional1y, the ordinary spider in speed and agility. The common cteniza can move twenty times its own length in a second. ”