“Great God!” burst forth Cairnes, his voice so close as to startle me.  “’T is like the end of the world!”

“Be still,” I commanded hastily, pressing him flat, “there they come.”

A dozen flaming torches rounded the rock projection the lights glistening over the half-naked bodies of the bearers.  Saint Andrew! it was a weird sight, one to strike terror to the soul!  With gritted teeth, my heart pounding, I looked out upon it.  The leader was a priest, black from head to heel, his face showing devilish in the torch flare, his coarse hair matted high in horrid resemblance to some wild beast.  Behind surged a mob of warriors, women, and children, half-nude bodies striped with red and yellow, a malignant demoniacal crew, yelling and pushing under the flaming lights, rushing tumultuously forward to fling themselves prostrate before the altar.  It seemed they would never cease pouring forth from the narrow tunnel, a struggling, gesticulating stream.  Behind them lightning played in jagged streaks across the little patch of sky, and the black smoke of the torches curled upward to the roof.  Their appearance was not human, but that of demons incarnate; some ran upon all fours like wolves, gnashing their teeth and howling; many yelped in fiendish chorus; others brandished weapons aloft in the yellow flame, or lay, writhing like glistening snakes on the rock floor.  It was a pandemonium, a babel, an unspeakable hell.  To count was impossible, but the great room was filled with bodies, and rang with guttural, inarticulate cries.  The busily flitting priests stirred up the wood until the blaze leaped nearly to the roof, mumbling as they worked, the incessant moaning of the tribesmen deepening into a weird chant.  The frenzied singers leapt into the air, flinging their limbs about in wild contortion, their movements increasing in violence, their grotesquely painted faces becoming hellish from awakening passion.  They became brutes, fiends, whose only thought was cruelty.  I saw them strike each other with stone knives, slashing the flesh till blood ran.  Heartsick and trembling, I glanced aside at my companions.  The pere lay clasping the stone, his eyes wide with horror, his countenance death-like; Cairnes was upon his knees, his great hands gripped, staring straight down like some animal crouching for a spring.

It was when I turned back, loathing the sight yet unable to resist facing it, that I beheld for the first time those I sought—­Eloise, De Noyan, and the Queen Naladi.  An instant I blinded my eyes with uplifted arm, half believing that the horror had turned my brain, that all this was vision.  Yet, as I ventured to look again, they were there before me in the flesh—­Naladi all in red, a wondrous figure amid that spectral glow, tall, straight, with proud, imperious face, crowned by the brilliant hair, radiant and sparkling in the flame.  Beside her loitered De Noyan, like one who enjoyed a spectacle