fan-like ensigns of carved
wood and fretwork, and panels filled with silks, rare brocades and
embroideries. Then came priests bearing heavy vases and urns of gold,
terrelium, aquelium, plutulium, silver, and alloys of precious bronze.
Then followed others bearing litters piled with vases and figures
carved from solid pearl, or fashioned in precious metals. Cups,
plates, vases in endless shapes, designs and colors went past, piled
high on golden litters, looking like gardens of tropic flowers. Rare
laces made of threads spun from the precious metals of Atvatabar,
mosaics, ivories, art forgings, costly enamels, decorative
bas-reliefs, implements of war, agriculture and commerce, magnic
spears and daggers, with shaft and handle encrusted with grotesque
carvings in metallic alloys. These alloys took the forms of figures,
animals and emblems, having the strangest colorings, like the hilts
and scabbards of Japanese swords carved in shakudo and shibuichi.
There were exhibited vases of cinnabar, vases wondrously carved from
tea-rose, coral-red, pearl-gray, ashes-of-roses, mustard-yellow,
apple-green, pistache and crushed-strawberry colored metals. There
were also splendid crowns, flowers, animals, birds, and fishes, carved
from precious kragon, an imperial stone harder than the diamond and of
a pale rose-pink color. Every object was as perfect as though modelled
in wax.

Through all this decorative movement there was something more than
decoration understood as mere ornamentation--there was the keenest
evidence of soul movement on the part of the artist. The music
gloriously celebrated the passions of love, ambition and triumph that
had filled the souls of the artists when engaged in their incomparable
labors, and pealed forth that serene life of the spirit as symbolized
in the perfect works of art exhibited, wherein were sealed in eternal
magnificence fragments of the souls that had created them.

Between the pauses of the music an organ-megaphone shouted forth in
musically-stentorian tones the words that had been impressed on its
cylinders in praise of art. The five thousand priests and priestesses
of art had simultaneously shouted their art ritual down five thousand
tubes, which were all focussed into a single tube of large calibre.
The multitudinous sound of their voices had been indelibly impressed
on this phonograph-megaphone that now yielded up the sentiments
impressed upon it, its tones being that of a vast multitude