nd their new
Messiah may deceive them as bitterly with unwise meddling as Cortez did
with greed and cruelty."

"Messiah for these pigs!" Eloin sneered. "What pleasure it gives him,
_I_ can't see."

CHAPTER XV

THE RITUAL

"... a bearded man,
Pamper'd with rank luxuriousness and ease."
--_Dante._

The Emperor was coming--elaborately, by august degrees.

First, and far in advance, arrived a haughty pack liveried in the royal
green of ancient Aztec dynasties. New tenants might have been moving on
this bright May day, for the flunkies attended a small caravan of
household stuff, which they crammed through the gaping doorway as nuts
into a goose's maw. The stuff was all royal, of royalty's absolute
necessities. There were soft rugs, and finely spun tapestries, and
portieres to smother a whisper. There was a high-backed chair, and a
velvet-covered dais for the high-backed chair. There were brushes, whose
stroke caressed gently and purringly the Hapsburg whisker. There was a
Roman poet, fastidiously bound, and then--there was the Ritual.

The Ritual was a massive tome, of glazed, gilt-edged paper, of print as
big for the proclaiming of truth as the Family Bible, of weight to
burden a strong man, of contents to stagger a giant brain, unless the
giant brain had in it the convolution of a smile. Maximilian and
Charlotte had reigned a year, and so far the Ritual was the supreme
monument to the glory and usefulness of their Empire. It decreed, by
Imperial dictation and signature, the etiquette that must and should be
observed in the courtly circle. But alas, you can't codify
genuflections, nor yet a handshake.

The next degree in the imperial advent was the imperial courier, who
proclaimed from a curveting steed what everybody suspected. "Our August
Sovereign" was approaching.

Several hundred peons stared with open mouths. Gathered before the
house, they prattled to one another in childlike expectancy of the Senor
Emperador. Most of them were learning for the first time that they had
an emperor. Still, it sufficed to know this was an occasion for
auto-inspiring vivas, like once when the Ilustrisimo Bishop came. They
took new hold on the green boughs they were to wave. A handkerchief here
and there fluttered from a bamboo pole. Down in an adobe village by the
river junction, every gala scrap of calico print, whether shirt or
skirt, pended from cords stretched across t