gned heart.

She had no fear of the crowd of men she would find in the Serapeum. Her
father and Olympius were there to protect her, and Dame Herse, too, would
be a support and comfort; but even without those three, on such a night
as this--the last perhaps that they might ever see--she would have
ventured without hesitation among thousands, for she firmly believed that
every votary of the gods was awaiting his own end and the crash of
falling skies with devout expectancy, and perhaps with not less terror
than herself.

These were her thoughts as she and her guide stopped at a strong door.
This was presently opened and they found themselves in an underground
chamber, devoted to the mysteries of the worship of Serapis, in which the
adepts were required to go through certain severe ordeals before they
were esteemed worthy to be received into the highest order of the
initiated--the Esoterics. The halls and corridors which she now went
through, and which she had never before seen, were meagrely lighted with
lamps and torches, and all that met her eye filled her with reverent awe
while it excited her imagination. Everything, in fact--every room and
every image--was as unlike nature, and as far removed from ordinary types
as possible, in arrangement and appearance. After passing through a
pyramidal room, with triangular sides that sloped to a point, she came to
one in the shape of a polygonal prism. In a long, broad corridor she had
to walk on a narrow path, bordered by sphinxes; and there she clung
tightly to her guide, for on one side of the foot-way yawned a gulf of
great depth. In another place she heard, above her head, the sound of
rushing waters, which then fell into the abyss beneath with a loud roar.
After this she came upon a large grotto, hewn in the living rock and
defended 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 sign