As we passed through the second village the scouts brought back a woman, a slender frightened girl of fifteen or so, with a face which might have been a Gorgon’s and a figure fit to make a Broadway entrepreneur discharge his entire chorus in disgust.
“Thou art my father and my mother,” she greeted Ingraham conventionally.
“Where are thy people?” he demanded.
“In the land of ghosts, lord,” she replied. “A day and a day ago there came to us the servants of Bazarri, men of the Little Leopards, with iron claws upon their hands and white men’s guns. They said to us: ‘The Emperor-King is overthrown; no longer shall his soldiers bring the law to you. Come with us and serve Bazarri, who is the servant of the Great King of All Devils, and we shall make you rich.’
“‘This is bad palaver, and when Hiji comes he will hang you to a tree,’ my father told them.
“‘Hiji is gone across the great water, and will never come here more,’ they told my father. Then they killed many of my people, and some they took as slaves to serve Bazarri where the King of Devils makes a marriage with a mortal woman. Lord, hadst thou been here three days ago my father had not died.”
“Maiden,” Ingraham answered, “go tell thy people to come again into their village and build the huts the evil men burned down. Behold, I and my soldiers travel swiftly to give punishment to these evil men. Some I shall hang and some my men will shoot; but surely I shall slay them all. Those who defy the Emperor-King’s commands have not long lives.”
THE SUDDEN TROPIC DARK had long since fallen, and it was almost midnight by the hands on Ingraham’s luminous watch dial when we reached the edge of a large clearing with a sharply rising hill upon its farther side. From behind this elevation shone a ruddy light, as though a dozen wooden houses burned at once.
“Quiet, thirty lashes for the one who makes a sound,” said Ingraham as we halted at the forest edge. “Get those Lewis guns ready; fix bayonets.
“Sergeant, take two men and go forward. If anyone accosts you, shoot him down immediately. We’ll charge the moment we hear a shot.”
Twenty minutes, half an hour, three-quarters, passed. Still no warning shot, no sign of Sergeant Bendigo or his associates.
“By the Lord Harry, I’m half a mind to chance it!” Ingraham muttered. “They may have done Bendigo in, and—”
“No, sar, Bendigo is here,” a whisper answered him, and a form rose suddenly before us. “Bendigo has drunk the broth of serpent’s flesh, he can move through the dark and not be seen.”
“I’ll say he can,” the Englishman agreed. “What’s doing?”
“No end dam’ swanky palaver over there,” returned the sergeant. “Many people sit around like elders at the council and watch while others make some show before them. I think we better go there pretty soon.”
“So do I,” returned his officer.
“Attention, charge bayonets; no shooting till I give the word. Quick step, march!”
We passed across the intervening clearing, mounted the steep slope of grassy bank, and halted at the ridge. Before us, like a stage, was such a sight as I had never dreamed of, even in my wildest flights of fancy.
24. The Devil’s Bride
“GREAT GUNS!” INGRAHAM EXCLAIMED as we threw ourselves upon our stomachs and wriggled to the crown of the hill. “Old MacAndrews knew a thing or two, dotty as he was! Look at that masonry—perfect as it was when Augustus Caesar ruled the world! The old Scotsman would have had the laugh on all of ’em, if he’d only lived.”
What I had thought a long, steep-sided natural hill was really the nearer of two parallel earthen ramparts, and between these, roughly oval in form, a deep excavation had been made, disclosing tier on tier of ancient stone benches rising terrace-like about an amphitheater. Behind these were retaining walls of mortised stone—obviously the well-preserved remains of a Roman circus.
The arena between the curving ranks of benches was paved with shining sand, washed and rewashed until it shone with almost dazzling whiteness, and the whole enclosure was aglow with ruddy light, for stretching in an oval round the sanded floor was set a line of oil-palms, each blazing furiously, throwing tongues of orange flame high in the air and making every object in the excavation visible as though illumined by the midday sun.
The leaping, crackling flames disclosed the tenants of the benches, row after row of red-robed figures, hoods drawn well forward on their faces, hands hidden in the loose sleeves of their gown, but every one intent upon the spectacle below, heads bent, each line of their voluminously robed bodies instinct with eagerness and gloating, half-restrained anticipation.
The circus proper was some hundred yards in length by half as many wide. Almost beneath us crouched a group of black musicians who, even as we looked, began a thumping monody on their double-headed drums, beating a sort of slow adagio with one hand, a fierce, staccato syncopation with the other. The double-timed insistence of it mounted to my head like some accursed drug. Despite myself I felt my hands and feet twitching to the rhythm of those drums, a sort of tingling racing up my spine. The red-robed figures on the benches were responding, too, heads swaying, hands no longer hidden in their sleeves, but striking together softly, as if in acclamation of the drummers’ skill.
At the arena’s farther end, where the double line of benches broke, was hung a long red curtain blazoned with the silver image of the strutting peacock, and from behind the folds of the thick drapery we saw that some activity was toward, for the carmine cloth would swing in rippling folds from time to time as though invisible hands were clutching it.
“Now, I wonder what the deuce—” Ingraham began, but stopped abruptly as the curtain slowly parted and into the firelight marched a figure. From neck to heels he was enveloped in a robe of shimmering scarlet silk, thick-sewn with glistening gems worked in the image of a peacock. Upon his head he wore a beehive-shaped turban of red silk set off with a great medallion of emeralds.
One look identified him. Though we had seen him suffer death in the electric chair and later looked upon him lying in his casket, there was no doubt in either of our minds. The Oriental potentate who paced the shining sands before us was Grigor Bazarov, the Red Priest who officiated at the Mass of St. Secaire.
Beside him, to his right and left, and slightly to the rear, marched the men who acted as deacon and subdeacon when he served the altar of the Devil, but now they were arrayed in costumes almost as gorgeous as their chief’s, turbans of mixed red and black upon their heads, brooches of red stones adorning them, curved swords flashing in jeweled scabbards at their waists.
Attended by his satellites the Red Priest made the circuit of the colosseum, and as he passed, the red-robed figures on the benches arose and did him reverence.
Now he and his attendants took station before the squatting drummers, and as he raised his hand in signal the curtains at the arena’s farther end were parted once again and from them came a woman, tall, fair-haired, purple-eyed, enveloped in a loose-draped cloak of gleaming cloth of gold. A moment she paused breathlessly upon the margin of the shining sand, and as she waited two tall black women, stark naked, save for gold bands about their wrists and ankles, stepped quickly forward from the curtain’s shrouding folds, grasped the golden cloak which clothed her and lifted it away, so that she stood revealed nude as her two serving-maids, her white and lissom body gleaming in sharp contrast to their black forms as an ivory figurine might shine beside two statuettes of ebony.
A single quick glance told us she was crazed with aphrodisiacs and the never-pausing rhythm of the drums. With a wild, abandoned gesture she threw back her mop of yellow hair, tossed her arms above her head and, bending nearly double, raced across the sands until she paused a moment by the drummers, her body stretched as though upon a rack as she rose on tiptoe and reached her hands up to the moonless sky.
Then the dance. As thin as nearly fleshless bones could make her, her figure still was slight, rather than emaciated, and as she bent and twisted, wri
thed and whirled, then stood stock-still and rolled her narrow hips and straight, flat abdomen, I felt the hot blood mounting in my cheeks and the pulses beating in my temples in time with the insistent throbbing of the drums. Pose after pose instinct with lecherous promise melted into still more lustful postures as patterns change their forms upon the lens of a kaleidoscope.
Now a vocal chorus seconded the music of the tom-toms:
Ho, hol, hola,
Ho, hol, hola;
Tou bonia berbe Azid!
The Red Priest and the congregation repeated the lines endlessly, striking their hands together at the ending of each stanza.
“Good God!” Ingraham muttered in my ear. “D’ye get it Trowbridge?”
“No,” I whispered back. “What is it?”
“‘Tou bonia berbe Azid’ means ‘thou has become a lamb of the Devil!’ It’s the invocation which precedes a human sacrifice!”
“B-but—” I faltered, only to have the words die upon my tongue, for the Red Priest stepped forward, unsheathing the scimitar from the jeweled scabbard at his waist. He tendered it to her, blade foremost, and I winced involuntarily as I saw her take the steel in her bare hand and saw the blood spurt like a ruby dye between her fingers as the razor-edge bit through the soft flesh to the bone.
But in her wild delirium she was insensible to pain. The curved sword whirled like darting lightning round her head, circling and flashing in the burning palm-trees’ light till it made a silver halo for her golden hair. Then—
It all occurred so quickly that I scarcely knew what happened till the act was done. The wildly whirling blade reversed its course, struck inward suddenly and passed across her slender throat, its super-fine edge propelled so fiercely by her maddened hand that she was virtually decapitated.
The rhythm of the drums increased, the flying fingers of the drummers increased, the flying fingers of the drummers beating a continuous roar which filled the sultry night like thunder, and the red-robed congregation rose like one individual, bellowing wild approval at the suicide. The dancer tripped and stumbled in her corybantic measure, a spate of ruby lifeblood cataracting down her snowy bosom; wheeled round upon her toes a turn or two, then toppled to the sand, her hands and feet and body twitching with a tremor like the jerking of a victim of St. Vitus dance. She raised herself upon her elbows and tried to call aloud, but the gushing blood drowned out her voice. Then she fell forward on her face and lay prostrate in the sand, her dying heart still pumping spurts of blood from her severed veins and arteries.
The sharp, involuntary twitching of the victim ceased, and with it stopped the gleeful rumble of the drums. The Red Priest raised his hand as if in invocation. “That the Bride of Lucifer may tread across warm blood!” he told the congregation in a booming voice, then pointed to the crimson pool which dyed the snowy sand before the trailing scarlet curtain.
The two black women who had taken off her cloak approached the quivering body of the self-slain girl, lifted it—one by the shoulders, the other by the feet—and bore it back behind the scarlet curtain, their progress followed by a trail of ruddy drops which trickled from the dead girl’s severed throat at every step they took.
Majestically the Red Priest drew his scarlet mantle round him, waved to the drummers to precede him, then followed by his acolytes, passed through the long red curtains in the wake of the victim and the bearers of the dead.
A whispering buzz, a sort of oestrus of anticipation, ran through the red-robed congregation as the archpriest vanished, but the clanging, brazen booming of a bell cut the sibilation short.
Clang!
A file of naked blacks marched out in the arena, each carrying a sort of tray slung from a strap about his shoulders, odd, gourd-like pendants hanging from the board. Each held a short stave with a leather-padded head in either hand, and with a start of horror I recognized the things—trust a physician of forty years’ experience to know a human thigh-bone when he sees it!
Clang!
The black men squatted on the glittering, firelit sand, and without a signal of any sort that we could see, began to hammer on the little tables resting on their knees. The things were crude marimbas, primitive xylophones with hollow gourds hung under them for resonators, and, incredible as it seemed, produced a music strangely like the reeding of an organ. A long, resounding chord, so cleverly sustained that it simulated the great swelling of a bank of pipes; then, slowly, majestically, there boomed forth within that ancient Roman amphitheater the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin.
Clang!
Unseen hands put back the scarlet curtain which had screened the Red Priest’s exit. There, reared against the amphitheater’s granite-wall, was a cathedral altar, ablaze with glittering candles. Arranged behind the altar like a reredos, was a giant figure, an archangelic figure with great, outspread wings, but with the lone, bearded face of a leering demon, goat’s horns protruding from its brow. The crucifix upon the altar was reversed, and beneath its down-turned head stretched the scarlet mattress which I knew would later hold a human altar-cloth. To right and left were small side altars, like sanctuaries raised to saints in Christian churches. That to the right bore the hideous figure of a man in ancient costume with the head of a rhinoceros. I had seen its counterpart in a museum; it was the figure of the Evil One of Olden Egypt, Set, the slayer of Osiris. Upon the left was raised an altar to an obscene idol carved of some black stone, a female figure, gnarled and knotted and articulated in a manner suggesting horrible deformity. From the shoulder-sockets three arms sprang out to right and left, a sort of pointed cap adorned the head, and about the pendulous breasts serpents twined and writhed, while a girdle of gleaming skulls, carved of white bone, encircled the waist. Otherwise it was nude, with a nakedness which seemed obscene even to me, a medical practitioner for whom the human body held no secrets. Kali, “the Six-Armed One of Horrid Form,” goddess of the murderous Thags of India, I knew the thing to be.
Clang!
The bell beat out its twelfth and final stroke, and from an opening in the wall directly under us a slow procession came. First walked the crucifer, the corpus of his cross head-downward, a peacock’s effigy perched atop the rood; then, two by two, ten acolytes with swinging censers, the fumes of which swirled slowly through the air in writhing clouds of heady, maddening perfume. Next marched a robed and surpliced man who swung a tinkling sacring bell, and then, beneath a canopy of scarlet silk embossed with gold, the Red Priest came, arrayed in full ecclesiastical regalia. Close in his footsteps marched his servers, vested as deacon and subdeacon, and after them a double file of women votaries arrayed in red, long veils of crimson net upon their heads, hands crossed demurely on their bosoms.
Slowly the procession passed between the rows of blazing palm-trees, deployed before the altar and formed in crescent shape, the Red Priest and his acolytes in the center.
A moment’s pause in the marimba music; then the Red Priest raised his hand, palm forward, as if in salutation, and chanted solemnly:
To the Gods of Egypt who are Devils,
To the Gods of Babylon in Nether Darkness,
To all the Gods of all Forgotten Peoples,
Who rest not, but lust eternally—Hail!
Turning to the rhinoceros-headed monster on the right he bowed respectfully and called:
Hail Thee who are Doubly Evil,
Who comest forth from Ati,
Who proceedest from the Lake of Nefer,
Who comest from the Courts of Sechet—Hail!
To the left he turned and invoked the female horror:
Hail, Kali, Daughter of Himavat,
Hail, Thou about whose waist hang human skulls,
Hail, Devi of Horrid Form,
Malign Image of Destructiveness,
Eater-up of all that it good,
Disseminator of all which is wicked—Hail!
Finally, looking straight before him, he raised both hands above his head and fairly screamed:
And Thou, Great Barran-Sath
anas,
Azid, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Asmodeum,
Or whatever name Thou wishest to be known by,
Lucifer, Mighty Lord of Earth,
Prince of the Powers of the Air;
We give Thee praise and adoration,
Now and ever, Mighty Master,
Hail, all hail, Great Lucifer. Hail, all hail!
“All hail!” responded the red congregation.
Slowly the Red Priest mounted to the sanctuary. A red nun tore away her habit, rending scarlet silk and cloth as though in very ecstasy of haste, and, nude and gleaming white, climbed quickly up and laid herself upon the scarlet cushion. They set the chalice and the paten on her branded breast and the Red Priest genuflected low before the living altar, then turned and, kneeling with his back presented to the sanctuary, crossed himself in reverse with his left hand and, rising once again, his left hand raised, bestowed a mimic blessing on the congregation.
A long and death-still silence followed, a silence so intense that we could hear the hissing of the resin as the palm-trees burned, and when a soldier moved uneasily beside me in the grass the rasping of his tunic buttons on the earth came shrilly to my ears.
“Now, what the deuce—” Ingraham began, but checked himself and craned his neck to catch a glimpse of what was toward in the arena under us; for, as one man, the red-robed congregation had turned to face the tunnel entrance leading to the amphitheater opposite the altar, and a sigh that sounded like the rustling of the autumn wind among the leaves made the circuit of the benches.
I could not see the entrance, for the steep sides of the excavation hid it from my view, but in a moment I descried a double row of iridescent peacocks strutting forward, their shining tails erected, their glistening wings lowered till the quills cut little furrows in the sand. Slowly, pridefully, as though they were aware of their magnificence, the jeweled birds marched across the hippodrome, and in their wake—
“For God’s sake!” exclaimed Ingraham.
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