9 - Some Account of the Palace of Jupiter - Page 2

fainter until it was lost
in the distance of the mysterious corridor. I still staggered as I
mounted the steps, and the Major Domo approached me.

"I trust you are not ill," he whispered in my ear.

"No--not ill," I replied. "Only somewhat flabbergasted by all this
magnificence, and my eyes hurt like the very deuce."

"It is perhaps too much for mortal eyes," he said; and then, turning
to a gilded Ethiopian who stood close at hand, he observed, quietly,
"Rhadamus, run over to the Argus and ask him if he can spare this
gentleman a pair of blue goggles for an hour or two."

"Better get me a dozen pairs," I put in. "I don't think one pair will
be enough. It may strain my nose to hold them, but I'd rather
sacrifice my nose than my eyes any day."

But the boy was off, and ere I reached the presence of Jupiter I was
very kindly provided with the very essential article, and I must
confess that I found great relief in them. They were so densely blue
that an ordinary bit of splendor could not have been discerned through
their opaque depths, any more than Thisbe could have been seen by her
doting lover, Pyramus, through the wall that separated them, but
nothing known to man could have shut out the supreme gloriousness of
the interior of Jupiter's palace. Even with the goggles of the Argus
regulated to protect one thousand eyes upon my nose, it made my
dazzled optics blink.

I do not know what the proportions of the palace were. I regret to say
that I forgot to ask, but I am quite confident that I walked at least
eight miles along that corridor, and never was a mansion designed that
was better equipped in the matter of luxuries. I suspect I shall be
charged with exaggerating, but it is none the less true that within
that spacious building were appliances of every sort known to man. One
door opened upon an in-door golf-links, upon which the royal family
played whenever they lacked the energy or the disposition to seek out
that on Mars. There were high bunkers, the copse of which was covered
with richest silk plush, stuffed, I was told, with spun silk, while,
in place of sand, tons of powdered sugar and grated nutmegs filled the
bunkers themselves. The eighteen holes were laid out so that no two of
them crossed, and, inasmuch as the turf was constructed of rubber
instead of grass and soil, neither a bad lie nor a dead ball was
possible through the vast extent of the fair green. The water hazards,
four in number, were nothing more nor less than huge tanks of
Burgundy, champagne, iced tea, and Scotch--which I subsequently
learned often resulted in a bad caddie service--and an open brook
along whose dashing descent a constant