arn. And as the time went
on we became great favourites with the people, and even with
the courtiers, gaining an enormous reputation for cleverness,
because, as I think I have said, Sir Henry was able to show them
how to make glass, which was a national want, and also, by the
help of a twenty-year almanac that we had with us, to predict
various heavenly combinations which were quite unsuspected by
the native astronomers. We even succeeded in demonstrating the
principle of the steam-engine to a gathering of the learned men,
who were filled with amazement; and several other things of the
same sort we did. And so it came about that the people made
up their minds that we must on no account be allowed to go out
of the country (which indeed was an apparent impossibility even
if we had wished it), and we were advanced to great honour and
made officers to the bodyguards of the sister Queens while permanent
quarters were assigned to us in the palace, and our opinion was
asked upon questions of national policy.

But blue as the sky seemed, there was a cloud, and a big one,
on the horizon. We had indeed heard no more of those confounded
hippopotami, but it is not on that account to be supposed that
our sacrilege was forgotten, or the enmity of the great and powerful
priesthood headed by Agon appeased. On the contrary, it was
burning the more fiercely because it was necessarily suppressed,
and what had perhaps begun in bigotry was ending in downright
direct hatred born of jealousy. Hitherto, the priests had been
the wise men of the land, and were on this account, as well as
from superstitious causes, looked on with peculiar veneration.
But our arrival, with our outlandish wisdom and our strange
inventions and hints of unimagined things, dealt a serious blow
to this state of affairs, and, among the educated Zu-Vendi, went
far towards destroying the priestly prestige. A still worse
affront to them, however, was the favour with which we were regarded,
and the trust that was reposed in us. All these things tended
to make us excessively obnoxious to the great sacerdotal clan,
the most powerful because the most united faction in the kingdom.

Another source of imminent danger to us was the rising envy of
some of the great lords headed by Nasta, whose antagonism to
us had at best been but thinly veiled, and which now threatened
to break out into open flame. Nasta had for some years been
a candidate for Nyleptha's hand in marr