Some months ago I read Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. In one scene there is a flood on a Hollywood set that leaves two women stranded atop the head of a giant idol. It was such an odd image that it stuck in my head. I’ve changed the idol to a conquerer’s head and placed it in the ocean.
It reminds me somewhat of this passage from Richard II:
“… let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, …”

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