The Keepers of the People

947Then he set about tightening his grip on the sovereignty. He set the Varandals building, and in the glow of their gratitude the devoted people laboured for three years to raise for him an impregnable palace-fortress, on a spur of the mountain of Indra; and in it he welded the chains of their servitude to himself and his children’s children, through the generations to this day. Secure on his throne, he was fired with the ambition to build a people; shut off Varandaleel from the nations by blocking every pass but one, and leaving half a mile in that so strait that ten men could hold it against an army; and brought a statecraft to aid his passion, the like of which had never been known in the Eastern world. He worked at his design with the pitiless insensibility to human suffering of an idealist; spending on it thousands of lives with a lavishness splendidly unhuman; slaying noble, priest, or common man who hindered the working out of his purpose. The Varandals acquiesced in the slaying, for a frequent saying of his, “It is expedient that one man die for the people,” had grown a household word among them, and in their eyes it was wholly good. The priests were destroyed as having corrupted the worship of his father Indra; they had their wisdom, and alone might have been his rivals, or distorted the people’s growth. With them perished the arts of reading and writing, and neither he, nor the Princes who ruled after him, saw fit to revive them.

948Half a year after crushing the invaders he had vanished from among them for three months, while the people were busy with the land, repairing the havoc worked by the invaders, and bringing fresh land under tillage. He had seen how fertile a country might be made in that temperate air, out of that rich soil, and bent all their energies to the task. The work went on, as if his eyes were all the time on it; he had bidden so much be done before his return from his father Indra; and it was done. He came back as suddenly, and as secretly as he had gone; and a story spread abroad that a woman of a wonderful white beauty and a baby son dwelt in his house; and eight great black men guarded them night and day. After the building of the palace he withdrew himself from the eyes of the Varandals; little by little mutes took the place of living men and women in its halls; and the ten men through whom he ruled, only heard his voice through a curtain. But now and again a belated villager would see him riding in the moonlight, always in haste, at the head of a few horsemen; his governors knew that his knowledge of the people, their needs, and their complaints, could only have been gained by the devices of a Haroun Al Raschid; and the working of his justice and his generosity was always before their eyes.