Mulcebant zephyri natos sine semine flores...Ovidii Metamorphoses, Liber I, cviii.
Shaven and silvered were the scalps of all adventitious neophytissæ, to flash from the summit so long as hair re-grew to unsilver them; but what eyes in the jungle saw, here or there in its rolling, horizon-spanning green, the hierarchy unknew. Girls came to them, that they knew, stumbling on bruised feet, by narrow, slip-fatal paths, to the wall that ringed their shrine, calling up like birds for admittance; but whether jungle-born or monticolous, exiled or exalted, none thereof could tell, being memoriless. ’Twas as though new-born they entered the wind-goddess’s service, high-breasted, venerimonted for all, and slowly learnt the sibilant sect-tongue and its turbiniform script. And when their hair was re-grown and more, to hip’s-length or longer, unbraided for the wind’s way-with-it, a quadripuellum would be chosen by means of arrows fired zenithward and one-wise by the candidatæ, dashing aside thereafter from the herbless target, to watch which descendant arrowheads would bury themselves deepest.
And the four so to do would select the quadripuellum by the pattern of their shafts’ fletching, who would be braided that night for morrow’s attachment to the giant rotor on the summit’s height. And this, worked by the failing bow-girls, would lift the favored four and whirl them at the limit of their braids, like petals of a flower, stem-rolled, till hierarchess nodded and ritual ax flashed, cutting a cord that held the four and flinging them out, out, each to her haphazard quarter, wide, wide of the mountain, that they might fall to the jungle below. But the descent would be protracted, for each flung girl was strapped with a parachute, woven with immemorial skill of tight-packing, wide-oping silks, that the four might ride their mistress’s will for minutes, watched summit-ence till they vanished against the jungle’s green, like four seeds of the dandelion or hawkweed blown from a hierarchess’s anemomantic palm.