e grove, swiftly passing, hoof and pad; leaping girls and
laughing youths; amid sentient flowers and trees whose life was joy.
Earth's magic sap pulsed through them all and being was an orgy of
worship--worship of a bountiful Mother, of Earth in her golden youth....

He passed thence to the banks of Egypt's Nile, and heard the
lamentations of priests and wailing of women as a black ox, flower
bedecked and wearing a collar encrusted with gems, was drowned in the
turgid stream. Time and space ceased to exist for him. Through the murk
of cavernous passages he paced, pausing before a pit in which reposed a
sarcophagus of huge dimensions; and when the dim company and he had paid
tribute to that which lay there, all ascended to a temple, lofty and
awesome, its dizzy roof upheld by aisles of monstrous granite. To an
accompaniment of sorrowful chanting, the doors of the altar were opened,
and within upon the shrine rested a square-hewn statue. Jewelled lamps
glowed and censers smoked before the image of the bull, Apis.

The sistrums called him to a shrine of Isis, where _kyphi_ was burning,
and priestesses, fair royal virgins, made lotus offerings to the mother
of light; but magic of old Nileland might not withhold him from the
Rites of Ceres when the _Hymn to Demeter_ arose within those wonder
halls of Ictinus. He saw the blood of a white kid flow upon the altar of
Diana at Ephesus and with his own hands laid poppy and dittany at the
pearly feet of the Huntress. The _Lament for Adonis_ wooed him to the
Temple of the Moon, the _Hymn to Ra_ won him back to Egypt's god of
gods. He lighted _Tsan Ihang_, sweet perfume of Tibet, before Gautama
Buddha in Canton's Temple of Five Hundred Ginns and kissed the sacred
covering of the Kaaba at Mecca.

* * * * *

Consciousness intruding upon sub-consciousness, the mind calling upon
the spirit, he found himself questing a likeness, a memory, a furtive
thought; and partly it took shape, so that it seemed to him that Apis,
Isis, Orpheus and the Buddha had a common resemblance to some person
living and human, known to him; whose voice he had heard, and heard
again leading the Orphic hymn, chanting the Buddhist prayers and
bewailing the passing of Adonis. A man it was his memory sought, and
alike in granite statue and golden idol he had detected him; in the
silver note of the sistrum, in the deeps of the _Hymn to Ra_....

All blended into one insistent entreaty