een borne out to sea by the waves, and that it had
been cast up at Byblos, where an enormous tree had sprung up about
it, enclosing within its trunk the body of the god and his floating
dwelling. The king of that domain had commanded a mighty column to be
made out of the enormous tree, not knowing that within it reposed the
god Osiris himself, the great bestower of life. Isis goes to Byblos;
she arrives there fatigued with sultriness, thirst, and the toilsome,
stony road. She liberates the sarcophagus out of the midst of the tree,
carries it with her, and buries it in the earth near the city wall.
But Seth again secretly steals away the body of Osiris, cuts it up into
fourteen parts, and strews them over all the towns and settlements of
Upper and Lower AEgpyt.

And again with great grief and lamentations Isis set out in search of
the sacred members of her spouse and brother. Her sister, the goddess
Nephthys, and the mighty Thoth, and the son of the goddess, the radiant
Horus,--Horus of the Horizon,--all join their plaints to her weeping.

Such was the hidden meaning of the present procession in the first half
of the sacred service. Now, upon the departure of the common believers,
and after a short rest, the second part of the great mystery was about
to be consummated. In the temple were left only those initiated into the
higher degrees,--mystagogues, epopts, prophets and sacrificators.

Boys in white vestments bore about, upon salvers of silver, flesh,
bread, dried fruits, and sweet wine of Pelusium. Others poured hippocras
out of narrow-necked Tyrian vessels,--a drink given in those days to
condemned criminals before execution, to arouse their manhood, but which
also possessed the great virtue of generating and sustaining in men the
fire of a sacred madness.

At a sign from the priest on duty the boys withdrew. A priest who was
also the keeper of the gates locked all doors. Then he attentively made
the rounds of all those who remained, scrutinizing their faces and
testing them with secret words that constituted the pass-orders for this
night. Two other priests drew a silvern thurible upon wheels down the
length of the temple and around each of its columns. The temple filled
with the blue, thick, heady, aromatic fumes of incense, and through the
layers of smoke grew barely visible the vari-coloured flames of the
lamp,--lamps made of translucent stones, lamps set in carved gold and
suspended from the ceiling upon long