Thermae

“ So Tremsin went out into the wide world and pastured his steed on the vast steppes, and his steed spoke to him and said, “When we have gone a little farther, thou wilt see before thee a plume of the Bird Zhar [12] ; pick it not up, or sore trouble will be thine!” Then they went on again. They went on and on, through ten tsardoms they went, till they came to another empire in the land of Thrice Ten where lay 96 the feather. And the youth said to himself, “Why should I not pick up the feather when it shines so brightly even from afar?” ”

“ Tremsin went out to the stall of the gray steed and wept bitterly. “Surely the evil that comes to me will never end. I caught the Zhar bird in a net, the thrice-lovely Nastasia I brought my master for a bride and now I must bring the necklace of pearls from the bottom of the sea or I will lose my head from my shoulders.” ”

“ When they settled in Thrace, they introduced their arts, and their worship, among the barbarous [1045] natives, by whom they were revered for their superior knowledge. They likewise bequeathed many memorials of themselves, and of their forefathers, which were probably some emblematical sculptures upon wood or stone: hence we read of the tablets of Orpheus preserved in Thrace, and particularly upon mount [1046] Hæmus. The temple which they built upon this mountain seems to have been a college, and to have consisted of a society of priests. ”

“ The road that climbs from the square, which is Thrums's heart, to the north is so steep and straight, that in a sharp frost children hunker at the top and are blown down with a roar and a rush on rails of ice. At such times, when viewed from the cemetery where the traveller from the schoolhouse gets his first glimpse of the little town, Thrums is but two church steeples and a dozen red stone patches standing out of a snow-heap. ”

“ Tremaine whispered. "When they turn and I see them edge-on, they're thin...."
"An effect of dimensional attenuation. They strive now to match matrices with this plane. If they succeed, this earth you know will lie at their feet."
"What are they? Where are they? That's solid rock—"
"What you see is the Niss Command Center. It lies in another world than this, but here is the multihedron of intersection. They bring their harmonic generators to bear here in the hope of establishing an aperture of focus."
"I don't understand half of what you're saying, Bram. And the rest I don't believe. ”

“ They are all so anxious to follow up the victory, as they put it, and make a great show of taking Spartan ships, that they will not take the trouble. Theramenes and Thrasybulus are to do it. I know that they have been in command in former years and may be supposed to be competent. Thrasybulus, too, is trustworthy; but Theramenes—to put it plainly—is a scoundrel. You know that I don’t care about politics; I am a plain sailor and leave such things to others; but I say this, politics or no politics, a man who turns against his friends is a scoundrel. ”

“ Tremaine turned to Bram. "Look—" he started.
"What man are you?" Bram cut in in heavily accented English. "How do you come to this place?"
"Listen to me, Bram!" Tremaine snapped. "Time is mutable. You stayed here, to protect Linda Carroll—and Linda Carroll's world. You've just made that decision, right?" Tremaine went on, not waiting for a reply. "You were stuck here ... for sixty years. Earth technology developed fast. One day a man stumbled in here, tracing down the signal from your Repellor; that was me. You showed me how to use the device ... and with it I wiped out the Niss. ”

“ Where the queen gained the knowledge of them I dare not even hazard a guess.
"She has instituted human sacrifice, and since her mating with Constantius, no less than five hundred men, women and children have been immolated. Some of these have died on the altar she has set up in the temple, herself wielding the sacrificial dagger, but most have met a more horrible doom.
"Taramis has placed some sort of monster in a crypt in the temple. ”

“ Let things befall as the gods decree. Who am I that I should make myself a god and destroy a life that they have fashioned?”
So the boy Rames lived and throve, and Mermes and Asti, when they came to hear of these things, thanked Pharaoh and blessed him.
Now the house of Mermes, as Captain of the Guard, was within the wall of the great temple of Amen, near to the palace of the priestesses of Amen where the Princess Neter-Tua was nurtured. ”

“ Dr. Ledsmar laughed. “That depends so much upon the quality of the meals!” he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.
He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron, stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly of all a broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the result of baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face. There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort not easy to classify, at once long and thick. ”

“ Nasica, in the mean time, who had ridden out to the skirmishers, saw the whole force of the enemy on the point of eugaging. First marched the Thracians, who, he himself tells us, inspired him with most terror; they were of great stature, with bright and glittering shields and black frocks under them, their legs armed with greaves, and they brandished, as they moved, straight and heavily-ironed spears over their right shoulders. ”

“ We cannot believe this legend on its own merits, though it may be true; for Trêves is without doubt one of the most ancient towns in Europe: so ancient in fact that its foundation has been attributed to one Trebeta, the step-son of Semiramis, the Assyrian empress, whose story resembles that of Bellerophon in the Greek legend. But nothing is historically known of Trêves till the Roman times. Then the chief city of the Treviri became under the empire the metropolis of the north. ”

“ No more to receive them, when back they returned from the Thracian folk,
Our towers within, that so they might heed the right, or begone
Hence to another land, even they and their thralls war-won.
Then required they of us their sons, even what manchild soe’er
Had been left in the town, and returned unto Thrace; and to this day there
The Lemnian men on the snowy Thracian corn-lands dwell.
Then tarry ye sojourning here: and if haply it please thee well
To abide in the land, and it seem to thee good, of a surety thine
Shall be Thoas my father’s honour. ”

“ The heat from large fires soon penetrated through roofs of slate and thatch; and it was quite a common thing for a man to be flattened to the ground by a slithering of snow from above just as he opened his door. But it had seldom more than ten feet to fall. Most interesting of all was the novel sensation experienced as Thrums began to assume its familiar aspect, and objects so long buried that they had been half forgotten came back to view and use. ”

“ Now those that were with Spitfire departed with him in the secretest manner that they could out of the fight, wrapping about him a watchet-coloured cloak to hide his shining armour. They stanched the blood that ran from the great wound in his shoulder and bound it up carefully, and carried him a-horseback by Volle's command into Tremmerdale by secret mountain paths up to a desolate corrie east of Sterry Gap, under the great scree-shoot that flanks the precipices of the south summit of Dina. A long time he lay there senseless, like to one dead. ”

“ The hard mandible's clashed over one of the steel bars. The jaws crunched shut, with a nerve-rasping grind. They made, naturally, no impression on the bar. The guard retired to its post at the doorway.
The termite-ruler seemed to think this over, for a moment. Then at some telepathic order, its two bearers picked up the spear and carried it, and their physically helpless ruler, over to one of the living cisterns—one filled with a dark red liquid. ”

“ Arise, around me, children of heroes, in a land unknown! Let each look on his shield, like Trenmor, the ruler of wars. "Come down," thus Trenmor said, "thou dweller between the harps! Thou shalt roll this stream away, or waste with me in earth."
Around the king they rise in wrath. No words come forth: they seize their spears. Each soul is rolled into itself. ”

“ Seeing the creeks descend in noisy foaming cascades, or hearing the roaring of steers in the uplands and the strange sounds of the wind-beaten forests, the Thracians thought they heard the voice and the calls of the lord of that empire, and imagined a god who was fond of extravagant leaps and of wild roaming over the wooded mountains. This conception inspired their religion, for the surest way for mortals to ingratiate themselves with a divinity was to imitate him, and as far as possible to make their lives resemble his. ”

“ Ever hotter it grew as they descended, till at length a blast of heat like a draft from a furnace met them as they rounded a corner and stepped into a corridor that no longer led downward. They knew that they were very near the ruler's lair now, on the lowest level, deep in the foundations of the vast pile.
Dennis wiped perspiration, caused as much by emotion as by heat, from his face. He alone of all students on earth was going to penetrate the very heart of the termite mystery. ”

“ Considering her beauty as an island and her comparative nearness to the mainland of Greece or to Crete, Thera is surprisingly little known. Historically Thera had small celebrity compared with her neighbors; but in every other way it seemed to us that she surpassed them all. Legend appears to have left the island comparatively unhonored, and poetry has permitted her to remain unsung. No Byron has filled high his bowl with Theran wine. No burning poetess lived or sang in her single tortuous street. No god of Olympus claimed the isle for his birthright. ”

“ One mighty statue lies prostrate—a colossal figure of Rameses ii., erected by himself in front of the temple of Ptah. It is lying on its face in a broad ditch, deserted and alone, save when some wandering Arab passes by, or cattle come to drink of the water which, for most part of the year, fills the trench and submerges the gigantic figure—
Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. ”

“ Thrale called on him in his stuffy lodgings in a court off Fleet Street, and suggested that the air of Streatham would be good for him. Would he come to them? He would. He was not the man to deny himself the care of a young, rich, and charming woman, who would feed him well, understand him, and add to the joys of conversation. From that time on, whether at their residence in Deadman’s Place in Southwark, or at Streatham, or at Brighton, even on their journeys, the Thrales and Johnson were constantly together ”

“ If you want to find your way into the host of the Trojans, there are the Thracians, who have lately come here and lie apart from the others at the far end of the camp; and they have Rhesus son of Eioneus for their king. His horses are the finest and strongest that I have ever seen, they are whiter than snow and fleeter than any wind that blows. His chariot is bedight with silver and gold, and he has brought his marvellous golden armour, of the rarest workmanship- too splendid for any mortal man to carry, and meet only for the gods. ”

“ Thrale laughed. “That’s truer than you guess,” he said. “Every large generalization, however trite, is a valuable contribution to knowledge—if it’s more or less accurate.”
“Generalize, then, mon vieux,” suggested Gurney, “from the characters and doings of your little geese.”
“I’ve seen glimmerings of the immortal god in the old man,” said Thrale, “like the hint of sunlight seen through a filthy pane of obscured glass. He’s a prurient-minded old beast leading what’s called a [25] respectable life, but if he could indulge his ruling desire with absolute secrecy, no woman would be safe with him. ”

“ He might as well have spoken to a figure of bronze for aught that she was moved by it.
She scarcely heard him; she was thinking every moment of the fugitive hidden in the tombs of the rocks: was he safe? did he want for anything in her absence? might faintness overcome him and, without succour, pass into the endless swoon of death? if he were well, was he wondering why she was so long, was he doubting her? would the old man of Telamone talk of her and cause her refuge to be found? ”

“ Civilization in general had assumed that Thrale had housed the top echelons of the Boskonian Empire, and that the continuing inimical activity had been due solely to momentum. Kinnison and his friends had had their doubts, but they had not been able to find any iota of evidence that any higher authority had ever issued any orders to Thrale. The Gray Lensman now knew, however, that Thrale had never been the top. Nor was Kalonia. The information on this tape, by its paucity, its brevity, its incidental and casual nature, made that fact startlingly clear. Thrale and Kalonia were equals. ”

“ This extreme reaction displeased Theramenes, who in return began to agitate for the calling of the 5000 into real existence. Furthermore he warned Athens against the treason of the extreme oligarchs, and induced the troops to raze a mole erected to facilitate a Spartan descent on Peiraeus.
After the disaster of Eretria (see Peloponnesian War) , which caused the fall of the extremists and the institution of a government of “5000” (i.e. all citizens who could afford a suit of armour) , Theramenes stood in high esteem. ”