“There are spirits and spirits,” continued Arioch, “spirits which come in visible shape, and with which you can talk face to face, and spirits whose voices only can be discerned by mortal senses. The first are terrible to look upon and dangerous to deal with.”
“We do not fear,” said the young men.
“But I fear,” returned the magician, “if not for you, yet for myself. What would your king say if two of his officers, traced to my house, should be missing, or—I have seen such things—should be found strangled? Not all my art—and I know something I assure you—would save me. And then I dread the spirits, if I call them up unprepared, even more than I dread your king. No, my young friends, I dare not call up the strongest spirits that I know. But, believe me, you shall not repent of having come, or think your time wasted.”
“Do as you think best,” said Charidemus. “We shall be content; it is your art, not ours.”
Arioch commenced a low chant which gradually grew louder and louder till the roof rang again with the volume of sound. The listeners could not understand the words. They were in the tongue of the Accadian tribes whom the Babylonian Semites had long before dispossessed; but they could distinguish some frequently recurring names, always pronounced with a peculiar intonation, which they imagined to be the names of the spirits whom the magician was invoking.
The chant reached the highest pitch to which the voice could be raised, and then suddenly ceased.
“Be sure,” said Arioch, in his usual voice, “that you stand within the circle, and do not speak.”
The circle was the region that was protected by incantations from the intrusion of spirits, that of the more powerful and malignant kind being excepted, as the magician had explained.
“These strangers seek to know the future,” said Arioch, with the same strained voice and in the same tongue which he had used in his invocation. He interpreted his words in Greek, as he also interpreted the answers. These answers seemed to come from a distance; the language used was the same, as far as the hearers could judge of words which they did not understand; the voice had a very different sound.
“They were foes and they are friends. Dear to the immortal gods is he that can forgive, and dear is he who can bear to be forgiven. The years shall divide them, and the years shall bring them together. They shall travel by diverse ways, and the path shall be smooth to the one and rough to the other, but the end shall be peace, if only they be wise. The tree that was a sapling yesterday to-morrow shall cover the whole earth. But it shall be stricken from above, and great will be its fall. Many will perish in that day. Happy is he who shall be content to stand afar and watch.”