On the night arranged I turned up about eight, and found the leader sitting alone in almost total darkness in a small back room.  He was dressed in a black gown, like an inquisitor’s dress in an old drawing, that left nothing of him visible:  except his eyes, which peered out through two small round holes.  Upon the table in front of him was a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with painted symbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped like quern stones, which were used to control the elemental powers in some fashion I did not discover.  I also put on a black gown, and remember that it did not fit perfectly, and that it interfered with my movements considerably.  The sorcerer then took a black cock out of a basket, and cut its throat with one of the daggers, letting the blood fall into the large bowl.  He opened a book and began an invocation, which was certainly not English, and had a deep guttural sound.  Before he had finished, another of the sorcerers, a man of about twenty-five, came in, and having put on a black gown also, seated himself at my left band.  I had the invoker directly in front of me, and soon began to find his eyes, which glittered through the small holes in his hood, affecting me in a curious way.  I struggled hard against their influence, and my head began to ache.  The invocation continued, and nothing happened for the first few minutes.  Then the invoker got up and extinguished the light in the hall, so that no glimmer might come through the slit under the door.  There was now no light except from the herbs on the brass dish, and no sound except from the deep guttural murmur of the invocation.

Presently the man at my left swayed himself about, and cried out, “O god!  O god!” I asked him what ailed him, but he did not know he had spoken.  A moment after he said he could see a great serpent moving about the room, and became considerably excited.  I saw nothing with any definite shape, but thought that black clouds were forming about me.  I felt I must fall into a trance if I did not struggle against it, and that the influence which was causing this trance was out of harmony with itself, in other words, evil.  After a struggle I got rid of the black clouds, and was able to observe with my ordinary senses again.  The two sorcerers now began to see black and white columns moving about the room, and finally a man in a monk’s habit, and they became greatly puzzled because I did not see these things also, for to them they were as solid as the table before them.  The invoker appeared to be gradually increasing in power, and I began to feel as if a tide of darkness was pouring from him and concentrating itself about me; and now too I noticed that the man on my left hand had passed into a death-like trance.  With a last great effort I drove off the black clouds; but feeling them to be the only shapes I should see without passing into a trance, and having no great love for them, I asked for lights, and after the needful exorcism returned to the ordinary world.