After a few moments of terror, the blacks came closer to the cage, rage taking the place of fear--rage and curiosity.
At the sight of the body within the cage with the lion, the women and children of the village set up a most frightful lamentation, working themselves into a joyous hysteria which far transcended the happy misery derived by their more civilized prototypes who make a business of dividing their time between the movies and the neighborhood funerals of friends and strangers--especially strangers.
The sun was shining in at the open door of the Cage, and this dazzled and offended me.
On the morning of the third day, when we had been forty-eight hours in the Cage, I awoke with a great relief of spirits, very weak and weary indeed, but seeing things of the right size and with their honest, everyday appearance.
The other apes turned now upon me, and as I stood facing them a sullen roar from the audience answered the wild cheers from the cages. From the tail of my eye I saw a score of guards rushing across the glistening sand toward me.
He paused a moment before the cages, with upraised sword.
He backed the animal down the length of the cage, continually rapping at the nose and keeping it down to the floor.
If he was crazy, he wouldn't know, and I wouldn't know his mind either, and I wouldn't be that one jump ahead of him, and he'd get me and mess the whole cage up with my insides."
Carthoris brought the
cage to a sudden stop at one of the higher levels of the palace.
"For having made a great
cage of wood of solid beams, timbers and wall-plates, measuring nine feet in length by eight in breadth, and of the height of seven feet between the partitions, smoothed and clamped with great bolts of iron, which has been placed in a chamber situated in one of the towers of the Bastille Saint-Antoine, in which
cage is placed and detained, by command of the king our lord, a prisoner who formerly inhabited an old, decrepit, and ruined
cage.
The copying-clerk, or, as the lady said, the brown field-bird, was put into a small
cage, close to the Canary, and not far from "my good Polly." The only human sounds that the Parrot could bawl out were, "Come, let us be men!" Everything else that he said was as unintelligible to everybody as the chirping of the Canary, except to the clerk, who was now a bird too: he understood his companion perfectly.
The following morning the
cages would be filled with a new consignment of victims, and so on throughout the ten days of the games.