Page:A Dreamers Tales and Other Stories.djvu/15

Rh of Pegana" that tells of the Thousand Home Gods, "Hish creepeth from the forest, the Lord of Silence, whose children are the bats who have broken the command of their father, but in a voice that is ever so low. Hish husheth the mouse and all the whispers in the night; he maketh all noises still. Only the cricket rebelleth. But Hish has sent against him such a spell that after he hath cried a thousand times his voice may be heard no more, but becometh part of the silence."

After he had written "The Gods of Pegana" Lord Dunsany discovered a figure that was more significant for him than any of his gods—the figure of Time. "Suddenly the swart figure of Time stood up before the gods, both hands dripping with blood and a red sword dangling idly from his fingers." Time had overthrown Sardathrion, the city they had built for their solace, and when the oldest of the gods questioned him "Time looked him in the face and edged towards him, fingering with his dripping fingers the hilt of his nimble sword." Over and over again he tells of the cities that were wonderful before Time prevailed against them—Sardathrion, with its onyx lion looming limb by limb from the dusk; Babbulkund, that was called by those who loved her "The City of Marvel," and by those who hated her "The City of the Dog," where over the roofs of her palace chambers "winged lions flit like bats, the size of every one is the size of the lions of God, and the wings are larger than any wing created"; Bethmoora, where window after window pours into the dusk its "lion-frightening light." We all must regret that these stories by Dunsany were not amongst the stories we read in our youth. "Had I read "The Fall of Babbulkund," or "Idle Days on the Yann" when I was a boy," says W. B. Yeats, "I had perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are