’It was only afterwards, when I was in a position to compare dates, that I was enabled to determine what had been the length of my imprisonment.  It appears that I was in that horrible den more than two months,—­two unspeakable months.  And the whole time there were comings and goings, a phantasmagoric array of eerie figures continually passed to and fro before my hazy eyes.  What I judge to have been religious services took place; in which the altar, the bronze image, and the beetle on its brow, figure largely.  Not only were they conducted with a bewildering confusion of mysterious rites, but, if my memory is in the least degree trustworthy, they were orgies of nameless horrors.  I seem to have seen things take place at them at the mere thought of which the brain reels and trembles.

’Indeed it is in connection with the cult of the obscene deity to whom these wretched creatures paid their scandalous vows that my most awful memories seem to have been associated.  It may have been—­I hope it was, a mirage born of my half delirious state, but it seemed to me that they offered human sacrifices.’

When Mr Lessingham said this, I pricked up my ears.  For reasons of my own, which will immediately transpire, I had been wondering if he would make any reference to a human sacrifice.  He noted my display of interest,—­but misapprehended the cause.

’I see you start, I do not wonder.  But I repeat that unless I was the victim of some extraordinary species of double sight—­in which case the whole business would resolve itself into the fabric of a dream, and I should indeed thank God!—­I saw, on more than one occasion, a human sacrifice offered on that stone altar, presumably to the grim image which looked down on it.  And, unless I err, in each case the sacrificial object was a woman, stripped to the skin, as white as you or I,—­and before they burned her they subjected her to every variety of outrage of which even the minds of demons could conceive.  More than once since then I have seemed to hear the shrieks of the victims ringing through the air, mingled with the triumphant cries of her frenzied murderers, and the music of their harps.

’It was the cumulative horrors of such a scene which gave me the strength, or the courage, or the madness, I know not which it was, to burst the bonds which bound me, and which, even in the bursting, made of me, even to this hour, a haunted man.

’There had been a sacrifice,—­unless, as I have repeatedly observed, the whole was nothing but a dream.  A woman—­a young and lovely Englishwoman, if I could believe the evidence of my own eyes, had been outraged, and burnt alive, while I lay there helpless, looking on.  The business was concluded.  The ashes of the victim had been consumed by the participants.  The worshippers had departed.  I was left alone with the woman of the songs, who apparently acted as the guardian of that worse than slaughterhouse.  She was, as usual after such an orgie, rather a devil than a human