Ring within ring the awful temple closed around him; unending circles of vast stones, circle within circle, and every circle less throughout all ages.  In the center was the sanctuary of the infernal rite, and he was borne thither as in the eddies of a whirlpool, to consummate his ruin, to celebrate the wedding of the Sabbath.  He flung up his arms and beat the air, resisting with all his strength, with muscles that could throw down mountains; and this time his little finger stirred for an instant, and his foot twitched upon the floor.

Then suddenly a flaring street shone before him.  There was darkness round about him, but it flamed with hissing jets of light and naphtha fires, and great glittering lamps swayed very slowly in a violent blast of air.  A horrible music, and the exultation of discordant voices, swelled in his ears, and he saw an uncertain tossing crowd of dusky figures that circled and leapt before him.  Thee was a noise like the chant of the lost, and then there appeared in the midst of the orgy, beneath a red flame, the figure of a woman.  Her bronze hair and flushed cheeks were illuminate, and an argent light shone from her eyes, and with a smile that froze his heart her lips opened to speak to him.  The tossing crowd faded away, falling into a gulf of darkness, and then she drew out from her hair pins of curious gold, and glowing brooches in enamel, and poured out jewels before him from a silver box, and then she stripped form her body her precious robes, and stood in the glowing mist of her hair, and held out her arms to him.  But he raised his eyes and saw the mould and decay gaining on the walls of a dismal room, and a gloomy paper was dropping to the rotting floor.  A vapor of the grave entered his nostrils, and he cried out with a loud scream; but there was only an indistinct guttural murmur in his throat.

And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her.  She fled away before him through midnight country, and he followed after her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley.  And at last he captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they went up to celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath.  They were within the matted thicket, and they writhed in the flames, insatiable, for ever.  They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of thousands who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like a black smoke.

Without, the storm swelled to the roaring of an awful sea, the wind grew to a shrill long scream, the elm-tree was riven and split with the crash of a thunderclap.  To Lucian the tumult and the shock came as a gentle murmur, as if a brake stirred before a sudden breeze in summer.  And then a vast silence overwhelmed him.