by a row of staring crocodiles’ heads, plated with gold; the heavy smell of stale incense and acrid resins choked her, and her way now lay over iron gratings and past strangely contrived furnaces.  The walls were decorated with colored reliefs:  Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus toiling at his stone, looked down on her in hideous realism as she went.  Rock chambers, fast closed with iron doors, as though they enclosed inestimable treasures or inscrutable secrets, lay on either hand, and her dress swept against numerous images and vessels closely shrouded in hangings.

When she ventured to look round, her eye fell on monstrous forms and mystical signs and figures; if she glanced upwards, she saw human and animal forms, and mixed with these the various constellations, sailing in boats—­the Egyptian notion of their motions—­along the back of a woman stretched out to an enormous length; or, again, figures by some Greek artist:  the Pleiades, Castor and Pollux as horsemen with stars on their heads, and Berenice’s star-gemmed hair.

The effect on the girl was bewildering, overpowering, as she made her way through this underground world.  The things she had glimpses of were very sparely illuminated, nay scarcely discernible, and yet appallingly real; what mysteries, what spells might not be hidden in all she did not see!  She felt as if the end of life, which she was looking for, had already begun, as if she had already gone down, alive, into Hades.

The path gradually sloped upwards and at last she ascended, by a spiral staircase, to the ground-floor of the temple.  Once or twice she had met a few men, but solemn silence reigned in those subterranean chambers.

The sound of their approaching and receding steps had only served to make her aware of the complete stillness.  This was just as it should be—­just as she would have it.  This peace reminded her of the profound silence of nature before a tempest bursts and rages.

Gorgo took off her veil as she went up the stairs, shook out the folds of her dress, and assumed the dignified and reverent demeanor which became a young girl of rank and position when approaching the altars of the divinity.  But as she reached the top a loud medley of noises and voices met her ear-flutes, drums?—­The sacred dance, she supposed, must be going on.

She came out into a room on one side of the hypostyle; her companion opened a high door, plated with gilt bronze and silver, and Gorgo followed him, walking gravely with her head held high and her eyes fixed on the ground, into the magnificent hall where the sacred image sat enthroned in veiled majesty.  They crossed the colonnade at the side of the hypostyle and went down two steps into the vast nave of the temple.

The wild tumult that she had heard on first opening the door had surprised and puzzled her; but now, as she timidly looked up and around her, she felt a shock of horror and revulsion such as might come over a man who, walking by night and believing that he is treading on flowers, suddenly finds that the slimy slope of a bottomless bog is leading him to perdition.  She tottered and clutched at a statue, gazing about her, listening to the uproar, and wondering whether she were awake or dreaming.