The Curtain Rises On A Rocky
Ravine With A Tinsel Torrent In The Background And A Group Of Robbers On
The Stage.
Gestas, the impenitent thief, stands sulky and glum in a
corner, fingering his dagger as you might be sure he would, and
informing himself in a growling soliloquy that his heart is consumed
with envy and hate because he is not captain.
The captain, one Issachar,
comes in, a superbly handsome young fellow, named Mario, to my thinking
the first comedian in Spain, dressed in a flashy suit of leopard hides,
and announces the arrival of a stranger. Enters Demas, who says he hates
the world and would fain drink its foul blood. He is made politely
welcome. No! he will be captain or nothing. Issachar laughs scornfully
and says he is in the way of that modest aspiration. But Demas
speedily puts him out of the way with an Albacete knife, and becomes
captain, to the profound disgust of the impenitent Gestas, who exclaims,
just as the profane villains do nowadays on every well-conducted stage,
"Damnation! foiled again!"
The robbers pick up their idolized leader and pitch him into the tinsel
torrent. This is also extremely satisfactory to the wide-awake young
Arabs of the cock-loft. The bandits disperse, and Demas indulges in some
fifty lines of rhymed reflections, which are interrupted by the approach
of the Holy Family, hotly pursued by the soldiery of Herod. They stop
under a sycamore tree, which instantly, by very clever machinery, bends
down its spreading branches and miraculously hides them from the
bloodthirsty legionaries.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 215 of 254
Words from 57254 to 57519
of 67759
