elix Bulla. For
myself I have never plumed myself on such features of my adventures,
though they are not unpleasing to recall.

When, in the spring of the next year, while Fuscianus and Silanus were
consuls, I came to know Mercablis and to consider him, I arrived at the
conclusion that his inclination for solitude and his aloofness were not
the result of any dread of strangers or of any need for seclusion, like
mine, but the product of a disposition naturally churlish, crabbed, and
unsocial.

Habituated as the procurator had been to Mercablis and his loathing for
strangers, my desire for privacy had seemed to him as a matter of course.

Resolute as Mercablis was to be let alone, he was enormously vain and
self-conceited and puffed up with his conviction of his own importance. He
never smiled, but some subtle alteration in his countenance betrayed that
any flattery pleased him.

He was a tall, spare, bony man, with a dry, brown, leathery skin, lean
legs and arms, a stringy neck, almost no chin, a hooked nose, deep set
little greeny-gray eyes and intensely black, harsh, stiff, curly hair and
very bushy eyebrows. He wore old, worn, faded garments and stalked about
as if the fate of the universe depended on him.

Certainly he never failed to surprise all Rome when the time came for his
novelty to be displayed. Every one which I saw, either earlier when I was
myself or while in the Choragium as Festus the Beast-Wizard or later,
justified the claim of Mercablis to being the most original-minded
sensation-deviser ever known in the Colosseum or elsewhere.

One of his utterly unpredictable surprises recurs often to my
recollection.

It was a hot July day and, during the noon pause, the vendors of cooling
drinks did a good business among the spectators of the upper tiers. To the
ring-rope round the opening in the awning, over the middle of the arena,
had been fastened a big, strong, pulley block. One of the lightest and
most agile of the awning-boys hung by his hands from the radial rope
stretched from nearest that pulley, worked out to it, sat on it, rove
through it a light cord which he carried coiled at his waist, and worked
back along the radial rope, leaving the cord trailing from the pulley-
wheel to the sand of the arena. By means of the cord the arena-slaves rove
through the pulley first a light rope, then a very strong one.

The end of this rope they fastened to an iron ring, from which hung four
stout chains, t