cept Otter and Juanna
when they arrived mysteriously in the land.

It had been prophesied that they should arrive thus--that was a
fact; and their outward appearance exactly fitted every detail of the
prophecy--that was another fact; and these two facts together seemed to
point to a conclusion so irresistible that, shrewd and experienced as
he was, Nam, was unable to set it down to mere coincidence. Therefore
in the first rush of his religious enthusiasm he had accorded a hearty
welcome to the incarnations of the divinities whom for some eighty years
he had worshipped as powers spiritual.

But though pious zeal had much to do with this action, as Olfan informed
Juanna, it was not devoid of worldly motives. He desired the glory of
being the discoverer of the gods, he desired also the consolidation of
the rule which his cruelties had shaken, that must result from their
advent.

All this was well enough, but he had never even dreamed that the first
step of these new-born divinities would be to discard the ancient
ceremonial without which his office would become a sinecure and his
power a myth, and even to declare an active hostility against himself.

Were they or were they not gods? This was the question that exercised
his mind. If there was truth in prophesies they should be gods. On the
other hand he could discover nothing particularly divine about their
persons, characters, or attributes--that is to say, nothing sufficiently
divine to deceive Nam himself, whatever impression they produced upon
the vulgar. Thus Juanna might be no more than a very beautiful woman
white in colour, and Otter only what he knew him to be through his
spies, a somewhat dissolute dwarf.

That they had no great power was also evident, seeing that he, Nam,
without incurring the heavenly vengeance, had been able to abstract,
and afterwards to sacrifice comfortably, the greater number of their
servants. Another thing which pleaded against their celestial origin
was that so far, instead of peace and prosperity blessing the land as
it should have done immediately on their arrival, the present season
was proving itself the worst on record, and the country was face to face
with a prospect of famine in the ensuing winter.

And yet, if they were not gods, who were they? Would any human beings
in their senses venture among such people as the Children of the Mist,
merely to play off a huge practical joke of which the finale was likely
to be so seriou