camp now; all were pressing on to hear this preacher who stood on
the pedestal of the war engine; and if we had tried to swerve from
the straight course, we should have been marked at once.

So we held on through the darkness, and presently came within
earshot.

Still it was little enough of the preacher's words we could
make out at first. "Who are your chiefs?" came the question at the
end of a fervid harangue, and immediately all further rational talk
was drowned in uproar. "We have no chiefs," the people shouted,
"we are done with chiefs; we are all equal here. Take away your
silly magic. You may kill us with magic if you choose, but rule us
you shall not. Nor shall the other priests rule. Nor Phorenice.
Nor anybody. We are done with rulers."

The press had brought us closer and closer to the man who
stood on the war engine. We saw him to be old, with white hair
that tumbled on his shoulders, and a long white beard, untrimmed
and uncurled. Save for a wisp of rag about the loins, his body was
unclothed, and glistened in the wet.

But in his hand he held that which marked his caste. With it
he pointed his sentences, and at times he whirled it about bathing
his wet, naked body in a halo of light. It was a wand whose tip
burned with an unconsuming fire, which glowed and twinkled and
blazed like some star sent down by the Gods from their own place in
the high heaven. It was the Symbol of our Lord the Sun, a
credential no one could forge, and one on which no civilised man
would cast a doubt.