h had not a word on the subject. Moses had expressly declared
that secret things belong to the Lord, and only visible things to man. The
prophets had indeed foretold a terrestrial immortality, but that
immortality was the immortality of a nation; and the realization of their
prophecy the entire people awaited. Apart from that there was only Sheol,
a sombre region of the under-earth, to which the dead descended, and there
remained without consciousness, abandoned by God.

"Immortal!" Mary, with great wondering eyes, would echo. "Immortal!"

"Yes; but to become so," Sephorah replied, "you must worship at another
shrine."

"Where is it?"

Sephorah answered evasively. Mary would find it in time--when the spring
came, perhaps; and meanwhile she had a word or two to say of Baal to such
effect even that Mary questioned the khazzan.

"However great the god of the Gentiles has been imagined," the khazzan
announced, "he is bounded by the earth and the sky. His feet may touch the
one, his head the other, but of nature he is a part, and, to the Eternal,
nature is not even a garment, it is a substance He made, and which He can
remould at will. It is not in nature, it is in light, He is: in the
burning bush in which He revealed Himself; in the stake at which Isaac
would have died; in the lightning in which the Law was declared, the
column of fire, the flame of the sacrifices, and the gleaming throne in
which Isaiah saw Him sit--it is there that He is, and His shadow is the
sun."

Of this Mary repeated the substance to her friend, and Sephorah mused.

"No," she said at last--"no, he is not in light, but in the desert where
nature is absent, and where the world has ceased to be. The threats of a
land that never smiled are reflected in his face. The sight of him is
death. No, Baal is the sun-god. His eyes fecundate."

And during the succeeding months Sephorah entertained Mary with Assyrian
annals and Egyptian lore. She told her more of Baal, whose temple was in
Babylon, and of Baaltis, who reigned at Ascalon. She told her of the women
who wept for Tammuz, and explained the reason of their tears. She told her
of the union of Ptah, the unbegotten begetter of the first beginning, and
of Neith, mother of the sun; of the holy incest of Isis and Osiris; and of
Luz, called by the patriarchs Bethel, the House of God, the foothold of a
straight stairway which messengers ceaselessly ascended and descended, and
at whose summit the Elohim s