A pyramid built of ten thousand heads.
No more will the North make war.
I have drunk from a thousand skulls set in gold.
I have slain the men and the women and the little children of the many lands.
The cowardly Emperor of the East has paid me ransom.
But I took his wives for slaves.
The Emperor of the South opposed me with his hordes clad in silver and in iron.
I smashed them as the whirling millstones smash the dry grains of the field.
Beyond the flat lands of the West I have ridden, a Conqueror, and the shivering men called me the Scourge of God.
For I am Attila, the Hun!"Three times he repeated the last line, winding up each time with a blood-curdling war-whoop. Then his imagination took another magnificent bound into the past centuries.
Attila? Only Attila? Of course he was Attila.
But he was also Attila s descendant. He was Genghis Khan himself, and, by a second magnificent, imaginative flight, he was also the Tartar Khan s great-grandson, Tamerlane, he whose mausoleum still stands in the ancient city of Samarkand.
"Ho!"
