Page:The Downfall of the Gods (1911).pdf/178

 CHAPTER XI

THE PROCESSION OF THE SWORD

forum, packed with people, was a sea of shifting, kaleidoscopic colour, with a surface of black heads and brown upturned faces. The outer courts and cloisters of the Ba Yon were thronged by a struggling, perspiring multitude. The crowd, filling every available spot of standing-room, overflowed in broken waves on to the crests of walls, on to the temple-steps, into the branches of trees, and clung in clusters to the steep sides of tile and thatched roofs.

At the foot of the great stairway leading upward into the Ba Yon, elephants, their big bodies covered with rich but tawdry caparisons, and with tall howdahs on their backs, were massed. They stood there, with the people pressing fearlessly about them, almost touching their flanks, with their mahouts, goad in hand, standing at their shoulders, and with three or four disreputable-looking ruffians—such as in Asia are always to be found in the train of an elephant-driver—astride upon them. Their little, wise eyes looked forth from the immense