An immense sound of chatter and laughter filled the vast place, scarcely subdued by the magic of a huge massed orchestra.
The Garden had been set to represent Mount Olympus; white pigeons were flying everywhere amid flowers and foliage; the backdrop was painted like a blue horizon full of rosy clouds, and the two entrances were divided by a marble-edged pool in which white swans sailed unconcerned and big scarlet gold-fish swam in the limpid water among floating blossoms.
But he had little time to gaze about through the lilac-haze of tobacco smoke hanging like an Ægean mist across the dancing floor, for already boy trumpeters, in white tunics and crowned with roses, were sounding the flourish and were dragging back the iris-hued hangings at either entrance.
From the right entrance came the Greek gods and heroes—Zeus aloft in a chariot, shaking his brazen thunder bolts; Athene in helmet and tunic, clutching a stuffed owl; Astarte very obvious, long-legged and pretty; Mars with drawn sword and fiery copper armour; Hermes wearing wings on temples and ankles and skilfully juggling the caduceus, Aphrodite most casually garbed in gauze, perfectly fashioned by her Maker and rather too visible in lovely detail.
Eros, very feminine too, lacked sartorial protection except for a pair of wings and a merciful sash from which hung quiver and bow. In fact, it was becoming startlingly apparent that the artists responsible for the Ball of All the Gods scorned to conceal or mitigate the classical and accepted legends concerning them and their costumes—or lack of costumes.
Fauns, dryads, nymphs, satyrs, naiads, bacchantes poured out from the right entrance, eddying in snowy whirlpools around the chariots of the Grecian gods; and the influence of the Russian ballet was visible in every lithely leaping figure.
Contemporaneously, from the left entrance, emerged the old Norse gods: Odin, shaggy and fully armed; Loki, all a-glitter with dancing flames; Baldin the Beautiful, smirking; Fenris the Wolf; Frija, blond and fiercely beautiful—the entire Norse galaxy surrounded by skin-clad warriors and their blond, half-naked mates.
The two processions, moving in parallel lines along the north and south tiers of boxes, were overlapping and passing each other now, led in a winding march by trumpeters; and all the while, from either entrance new bevies of gods and immortals were emerging—the deities of Ancient Egypt moving stiffly in their splendid panoply; the gods of the ancient Western World led by the Holder of Heaven and Hiawatha, and followed by the Eight Thunders plumed in white escorting the Lake Serpent—a young girl, lithe and sinuous as a snake and glittering from head to foot, with the serpent spot on her forehead.