Others are of a stern
and threatening nature, designed to make the most hardened ill-doer
pause, as--in their own tongue--"Rubbish may be shot here"; which we
should render, "At any moment, and in such a place as this, a just
doom and extinction may overtake the worthless." This inscription is
never to be seen except in waste expanses, where it points its
significance with a multiplied force. There is another definite threat
which is lavishly set out, and so thoroughly that it may be
encountered in the least frequented and almost inaccessible spots.
This, as it may be translated, reads, "Trespass not the forbidden. The
profligate may flourish like the gourd for a season, but in the end
assuredly they will be detected, and justice meted out with the
relentless fury of the written law."
In a converse position, the wide difference in the ceremonial forms of
retaliatory invective has practically disarmed this usually eloquent
person, and he long since abandoned every hope of expressing himself
with any satisfaction in encounters of however acrimonious a trend. At
first, with an urbane smile and gestures of dignified contempt, he
impugned the authenticity of the Ancestral Tablets of those with whom
he strove, in an unbroken stream of most bitter contumely. Finding
them silent under this reproach, he next lightly traced their origin
back through generations of afflicted lepers, deformed ape-beings, and
Nameless Things, to a race of primitive ghouls, and then went on in
relentless fluency to predict an early return in their descendants to
the condition of a similar state.
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