.

The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
presently struggled and found itself still a living man. It could
scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy.
An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and
bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of
pride in its bearing. "Your bidding has been done, Sire," it said.

"So," said the Emperor, unappeased. "And you live? Well-- Leap
again...."

And then came other stories. The young man told them as he had heard
them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along
the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast
went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of
wonder, his refrain was, "HERE! Not a hundred years ago.... It makes one
almost believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now."

They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The
lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the
sunshine. The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black
fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for
some saleable memento....

Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of deliberate cruelty was
always an actual physical distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy
afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded
into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men
toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing
and crawling black figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten
down under blow and anguish. He saw eyes alight with terror and lips
rolled back in agony, he saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud
destruction, he saw the poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in
his soul....

He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and
then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes
but humility.

There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural
sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a
definite direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart
he feels, even if he does not k