, a priest or a monk preached a daily sermon. This began a
short while after the young man had taken his place, and it was with
painful feelings that he recognized, in the hollow-eyed and ragged monk
who mounted the pulpit, a priest whom he had seen more than once drunk
to imbecility, in Nesptah's tavern, And the revolting creature, who thus
flaunted his dirty, dishevelled person even in the pulpit, thundered
down on the trembling congregation declarations that the delay in
the rising of the Nile was the consequence of their sins, and God's
punishment for their evil deeds. Instead of comforting the terrified
souls, or encouraging their faith and bidding them hope for better
times, he set before them in burning words the punishment that awaited
their wicked despondency.

God Almighty was plaguing them and the land with great heat; but this
was like the cool north wind at Advent-tide, as compared with the
fierceness of the furnace of hell which Satan was making hot for them.
The scorching sun on earth at any rate gave them daylight, but the
flames of hell shed no light, that the terrors might never cease of
those whom the devil's myrmidons drove over the narrow bridge leading to
his horrible realm, goading them with spears and pitchforks, with heavy
cudgelling or gnawing of their flesh. In the anguish of death, and the
crush by the way, mothers trod down their infants and fathers their
daughters; and when the damned reached the spiked threshold of hell
itself, a hideous and poisoned vapor rose up to meet them, choking
them, and yet giving them renewed strength to feel fresh torments with
increased keenness of every sense. Then the devil's shrieks of anguish,
which shake the vault of hell, came thundering on their ears; with
hideous yells he snatched at them from the grate on which he lay,
crushed and squeezed them in his iron jaws like a bunch of grapes, and
swallowed them into his fiery maw; or else they were hung up by their
tongues by attendant friends in Satan's fiery furnace, or dragged
alternately through ice and flames, and finally beaten to pieces on
the anvil of hell, or throttled and wrung with ropes and cloths.--As
compared with the torments they would suffer there, every present
anxiety was as the kiss of a lover. Mothers would hear the brain
seething in their infants' skulls....

At this point of the monk's grewsome discourse, Orion turned away with a
shudder. The curse with which the patriarch had threatene