onze doors, and out
there surged and rustled a throng of Bacchanalian beings who sported and
shouted around a terminal god, which, with smiling, ironic lips,
accepted their delirious homage. White nymphs and brown displayed in
choric rhythms the dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, and their goat-hoofed
mates gave vertiginous pursuit. At first the pagan gayety of the scene
fired the fancy of the solitary spectator; but soon his nerves,
disordered by the rout and fatigued by the spoor of so many odours,
warned him that something disquieting was at hand. He felt a nameless
horror as the sinister bitter odour of honeysuckle, sandalwood, and
aloes echoed from the sacred grove. A score of seductive young witches
pranced in upon their broomsticks, and without dismounting surrounded
the garden god. A battalion of centaurs charged upon them. The
vespertine hour was nigh, and over this iron landscape there floated the
moon, an opal button in the sky. Then to his shame and fear he saw that
the Satyr had vanished and in its place there reared the Black Venus,
the vile shape of ancient Africa, and her face was the face of Lilith.
The screaming lovely witches capered in fantastic spirals, each sporting
a lighted candle. It was the diabolic Circus of the Candles, the
infernal circus of the Witches' Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur
realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam's
prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her
stature of a goddess--he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze
in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting
vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis,
and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious
hair. She was that other Lilith, the only offspring of the old Serpent.
On what storied fresco, limned by what worshipper of Satan, had these
accursed lineaments, this lithe, seductive figure, been shown! Names of
Satanic painters, from Hell-fire Breughel to Arnold Boecklin, from
Felicien Rops to Franz Stuck, passed through the halls of Irving
Baldur's memory.

The clangour of the feast was become maddening. He heard the Venus
ballet music from Tannhaeuser entwined with the acridities of aloes,
sandal, and honeysuckle. Then the aroma of pitch, sulphur, and
assafoetida cruelly strangled the other melodic emanations. Lilith,
disdaining the shelter of her nymphs and their clowneries, stood fort