ng the greater sorrow, the greater desolation of the
empty tomb!

There! I felt that I must think no more of that lest the thought should
unnerve me when I should most want all my courage. That way madness lay!
The darkness had already sufficient terrors of its own without bringing
to it such grim remembrances and imaginings . . . And I had yet to go
through some ordeal which, even to her who had passed and repassed the
portals of death, was full of fear.

It was a merciful relief to me when, in groping my way forwards through
the darkness, I struck against some portion of the furnishing of the
church. Fortunately I was all strung up to tension, else I should never
have been able to control instinctively, as I did, the shriek which was
rising to my lips.

I would have given anything to have been able to light even a match. A
single second of light would, I felt, have made me my own man again. But
I knew that this would be against the implied condition of my being there
at all, and might have had disastrous consequences to her whom I had come
to save. It might even frustrate my scheme, and altogether destroy my
opportunity. At that moment it was borne upon me more strongly than ever
that this was not a mere fight for myself or my own selfish purposes--not
merely an adventure or a struggle for only life and death against unknown
difficulties and dangers. It was a fight on behalf of her I loved, not
merely for her life, but perhaps even for her soul.

And yet this very thinking--understanding--created a new form of terror.
For in that grim, shrouding darkness came memories of other moments of
terrible stress.

Of wild, mystic rites held in the deep gloom of African forests, when,
amid scenes of revolting horror, Obi and the devils of his kind seemed to
reveal themselves to reckless worshippers, surfeited with horror, whose
lives counted for naught; when even human sacrifice was an episode, and
the reek of old deviltries and recent carnage tainted the air, till even
I, who was, at the risk of my life, a privileged spectator who had come
through dangers without end to behold the scene, rose and fled in horror.

Of scenes of mystery enacted in rock-cut temples beyond the Himalayas,
whose fanatic priests, cold as death and as remorseless, in the reaction
of their phrenzy of passion, foamed at the mouth and then sank into
marble quiet, as with inner eyes they beheld the visions of the hellish
powers which they had