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CORDOBA 71
They stood in awe when dropping down the rope
He rode * the culprit’s back as on a swing,
To flatter the gallows’ might!
And if his foe the king commanded him to slay,
Rich the pay!
Indeed the day!
Then drunk with joy and filled with terror,
The hangman’s face a radiance bore,
And on his lips a smile then broke once more,
Though in his eyes flashed lights of horror.
Those hands beware!
By the hangman’s hand
Falls the crown of kings,
On the throne you’ll see
The hangman stand.
And the rabble that grants him this elevation
Is filled anew with consternation
To have him standing there!
` Could these people forget, at this moment, that the
reciter of these lines was a leper, an outcast from hu-
man society, the hangman? ‘They crawled closer to
us, hung far over the partition gesticulating, murmur-
ing the verses under their breath, as he recited them.
And the hangman had turned toward them; his face
was a purple red; his neck swollen; the back of it
dripping with perspiration; he looked as though he
were about to be seized with a stroke of apoplexy.
In me is scrawled our earth’s long story,
In words of blood by fate dictated.
E’en autumn leaves betray my mission gory.
But has the vulgar lust of man been sated?
As age succeeds each age,
* It is related, by persons old enough to remember, that the hang-
man was sometimes obliged, when the rope did not tighten about the
culprits neck, to climb up on the gallows, lower himself on the rope
to the man’s shoulders, and tighten the rope by applying his weight
and resorting to jerks and impacts,
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