“There is something grand in this old animistic conception,” Eames had said.  “Later on, under the Romans, the place seems to have been dedicated to Priapic rites.  That is rather a depreciation, isn’t it?  It brings us down from fruitfulness to mere lasciviousness.  But where are you going to draw the line?  Everything tends to lose its hallowed meaning; it becomes degraded, bestialized.  Still, the roots of the idea are sound.  In giving sensual attributes to a garden god the ancients had in mind the recklessness, the spendthrift abundance, of all nature—­not excluding our own.  They tried to explain how it came about that the sanest man is liable, under the stress of desire, to acts of which he vainly repents at leisure.  I don’t suppose they meant to justify those acts.  If they had, they would have given a less equivocal position to Priapus in their celestial hierarchy.  Priapus, you know, was not wholly divine.  I think they only wanted to make it quite clear that we cannot drive out nature with a fork.  I wish we could,” he added.

And then he sighed.  The poor fellow was thinking at that moment, of balloons.

Denis remembered this conversation.  Earth-worship:  the cult of those generative forces which weld together in one mighty instinct the highest and lowliest of terrestrial creatures. . . .  The unalienable right of man and beast to enact that which shall confound death, and replenish the land with youth, and joy, and teeming life.  The right which priestly castes of every age have striven to repress, which triumphs over every obstacle and sanctifies, by its fruits, the wildest impulses of man.  The right to love!

Musing thus, he began to understand why men of old, who looked things squarely in the face, should have deified this friendly, all-compelling passion.  He reverenced the fierce necessity which drives the living world to its fairest and sole enduring effort.  Be fruitful and multiply.  He recognized for the firs ttime that he was not a lonely figure on earth, but absorbed into a solemn and eternal movement; bound close to the throbbing heart of the Universe.  There was grandeur, there was repose, in being able to regard himself as an integral part of nature, destined to create and leave his mark.  He felt that he was growing into harmony with permanent things—­finding himself.  He realized now what Keith had meant.

It cost him quite an effort to tear himself away from that ledge.  He began to descend once more.

Near the entrance of the Cave he paused abruptly.  It seemed as if a sound had issued from the interior of the rock.  He listened.  It came again—­a human sound, unquestionably, and within a few yards of his face.  A whisper.  There was something going on—­Earth-worship. . . .

Suddenly a succession of words broke upon the stillness—­breathless words, spoken in a language which not everybody could have translated.  He recognized the voice.  It said: