they looked at it, from out the trunk, shot an enormous thing—­white and glistening, and fashioned like a human tongue.  And after pointing derisively at them, it withdrew; whereupon all the fruit shook, as if convulsed with unseemly laughter.  They then saw between the foremost branches of the tree a big eye.  The white of it was thick and pasty, the iris spongy in texture, and the pupil bulging with a lurid light.  It stared at them with a steady stare—­insolent and quizzical.  Hamar and his friends stared back at it in fascinated horror, and would have continued staring at it indefinitely, had not Hamar’s mercenary instincts come to their rescue.  He recollected that time was pressing, and that unless he got into communication with the strange thing at once, according to the book, it would vanish—­and he might never be able to get in touch with it again.  Thus egged on, he made a great effort to regain his courage, and at length succeeded in forcing himself to speak.  Though his voice was weak and shaking he managed to pronounce the prescribed mode of address, viz.:—­“Bara phonen etek mo,” which being interpreted is, “Spirit from the Unknown, give ear to me.”  He then explained their earnest desire to pay homage to the Supernatural, and to be initiated into the mysteries of the Black Art.  When Hamar had concluded his address, the anticipations of the three as to how it would be answered, or whether it would be answered at all—­were such that they were forced to hold their breath almost to the point of suffocation.  If the Thing could speak what would its voice be like?  The seconds passed, and they were beginning to prepare themselves for disappointment, when suddenly across the intervening space separating them from the Unknown, the reply came—­came in soft, silky, lisping tones—­human and yet not human, novel and yet in some way—­a way that defied analysis—­familiar.  Strange to say, they all three felt that this familiarity belonged to a far back period of their existence, no less than to a more modern one—­to a period, in fact, to which they could affix no date.  And, although a perfect unity of expression suggested that the utterance of the Thing was the utterance of one being only, a certain variation in its tones, a rising and falling from syllable to syllable, led them to infer that the voice was not the voice of one but of many.

“You are anxious to acquire knowledge of the Secrets associated with the Great Atlantean Magic?” the voice lisped.

“We are!” Hamar stammered, “and we are willing to give our souls in exchange for them.”

“Souls!” the voice lisped, whilst trunk and branches swayed lightly, and the air was full of silent merriment.  “Souls! you speak in terms you do not understand.  To acquire the secrets of Black Magic, all you have to do is to agree that during a brief period—­a period of a few months, you will live together in harmony; that you will make use of the powers you acquire to the detriment of all save yourselves; that you will never allow your minds to revert to anything spiritual; and—­that you will abstain from—­marrying.”