desperate rush of words
crowding vainly behind the halting tongue.

The name refused to pass his lips. He could not pronounce it as they
did. He could not pronounce it at all. His sense of helplessness then
entered the acute stage, for this inability to speak the name produced
a fresh sense of quite horrible confusion in his mind, and he became
extraordinarily agitated.

"I came here for a friendly visit," he tried to say with a great effort,
but, to his intense dismay, he heard his voice saying something quite
different, and actually making use of that very word they had all used:
"I came here as a willing _Opfer_," he heard his own voice say, "and _I
am quite ready_."

He was lost beyond all recall now! Not alone his mind, but the very
muscles of his body had passed out of control. He felt that he was
hovering on the confines of a phantom or demon-world,--a world in which
the name they had spoken constituted the Master-name, the word of
ultimate power.

What followed he heard and saw as in a nightmare.

"In the half light that veils all truth, let us prepare to worship and
adore," chanted Schliemann, who had preceded him to the end of the room.

"In the mists that protect our faces before the Black Throne, let us
make ready the willing victim," echoed Kalkmann in his great bass.

They raised their faces, listening expectantly, as a roaring sound, like
the passing of mighty projectiles, filled the air, far, far away, very
wonderful, very forbidding. The walls of the room trembled.

"He comes! He comes! He comes!" chanted the Brothers in chorus.

The sound of roaring died away, and an atmosphere of still and utter
cold established itself over all. Then Kalkmann, dark and unutterably
stern, turned in the dim light and faced the rest.

"Asmodelius, our _Hauptbruder_, is about us," he cried in a voice that
even while it shook was yet a voice of iron; "Asmodelius is about us.
Make ready."

There followed a pause in which no one stirred or spoke. A tall Brother
approached the Englishman; but Kalkmann held up his hand.

"Let the eyes remain uncovered," he said, "in honour of so freely giving
himself." And to his horror Harris then realised for the first time that
his hands were already fastened to his sides.

The Brother retreated again silently, and in the pause that followed all
the figures about him dropped to their knees, leaving him standing
alone, and as they dropped, in voices hushed with mingled reveren