“Adele, with us the ministration is usually at the chancel rail.”
“Yes, or what corresponds to it.”
“Where from?”
“The altar; why do you ask?”
“Have you seen any altar in this Cathedral?”
Adele looked around in different directions, continually reverting to the chancel region she had idealized, as if it ought to be there. Surely there must be an altar in nature, or something she could idealize as such; for so many religions professed to have altars, from the earliest times down to the present day. She began to fear lest her imagery as to the Cathedral had failed her in a vital point. Once before she had thought she could discover some form or shape in the higher altitudes which might suggest an altar; in every case the light had been so dazzling, or what she tried to see was so vague, that her ideal had never been satisfied in its most vital need; and now with the chancel itself open, the veil rent, she saw nothing to suggest an altar. Where was it? Had it been there? If so, then what had become of it—the altar?
XLIII
SACRIFICE
ADELE was still sitting at the foot of the tree; some said it was a bo-tree; others did not have knowledge enough to tell what kind of a tree it was. She did not think of this at all, as she sat dreaming upon the magnificent spectacle before her. In her mind she was seeking for an answer to the Doctor’s inquiry; then her eyes, while searching for some object which might be idealized in some degree as an altar, were drawn to the immediate foreground, away from the chancel, to something in her own vicinity, quite near herself.
Upon the same knoll, a short distance from her, boughs of foliage were festooned with cords and ropes upon which hung hundreds of small pieces of bright-colored muslin cut fantastically; also pieces of white textile, the size of a large napkin, covered with printed or crudely stamped characters in the native language. Hanging in garlands from bough to bough, fluttering in the wind among the leaves, they were about as effective as yacht signals strung out for decoration. Signals they were, indeed, but of quite another kind; the fluttering prayer-signals of the poor Lepchas, or Bhootanese, or Thibetans, arranged in a semi-circle around their sacred place. Wafted heavenward by the breeze, such signals were presented as acceptable to the Good Spirits, and were considered to bear upwards the supplications of poor humanity. They were the symbols of prayer used by the same worshipers in whose hut Adele and the Doctor had found a welcome shelter from the storm.
At first sight Adele thought: “How very crude and tawdry!” A second glance told her the decorations symbolized something, and she felt more sympathetic. The bright colors and the printed texts on white were certainly newer, fresher, and cleaner than the garments of the Lepchas themselves; they must have been selected, and they had cost something; only a few annas perhaps, or possibly some widow’s mite.