ce and
awe, they cried, softly, odiously, appallingly, the name of the Being
whom they momentarily expected to appear.

Then, at the end of the room, where the windows seemed to have
disappeared so that he saw the stars, there rose into view far up
against the night sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind
of grey glory enveloped it so that it resembled a steel-cased statue,
immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendour; while, at the same
time, the face was so spiritually mighty, yet so proudly, so austerely
sad, that Harris felt as he stared, that the sight was more than his
eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power of vision would
fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter nothingness.

So remote and inaccessible hung this figure that it was impossible to
gauge anything as to its size, yet at the same time so strangely close,
that when the grey radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and
mournful, beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the
powers of spiritual evil, he felt almost as though he were looking into
a face no farther removed from him in space than the face of any one of
the Brothers who stood by his side.

And then the room filled and trembled with sounds that Harris understood
full well were the failing voices of others who had preceded him in a
long series down the years. There came first a plain, sharp cry, as of a
man in the last anguish, choking for his breath, and yet, with the very
final expiration of it, breathing the name of the Worship--of the dark
Being who rejoiced to hear it. The cries of the strangled; the short,
running gasp of the suffocated; and the smothered gurgling of the
tightened throat, all these, and more, echoed back and forth between the
walls, the very walls in which he now stood a prisoner, a sacrificial
victim. The cries, too, not alone of the broken bodies, but--far
worse--of beaten, broken souls. And as the ghastly chorus rose and fell,
there came also the faces of the lost and unhappy creatures to whom they
belonged, and, against that curtain of pale grey light, he saw float
past him in the air, an array of white and piteous human countenances
that seemed to beckon and gibber at him as though he were already one of
themselves.

Slowly, too, as the voices rose, and the pallid crew sailed past, that
giant form of grey descended from the sky and approached the room that
contained the worshippers and their pri