"The crucifix struck me when I seized it, and struck me again when I put it down," whispered the girl; and as she said these words she was very pale.
"And yet you did what I told you," said Fatia Negra, placing his hand on Anicza's shoulder. "You are a brave girl, and worthy of me."
"Comrades!" the leader of the adventurers now cried with a thundrous voice, "come and listen to me!"
Everyone thereupon abandoned his booth, his table or his diversion and stood in a circle round Black Mask.
"Ye know," he began, "the name of that place which is under the earth! Its name is the grave. Ye are all of you at this moment in the grave with me and if I wish it, dead men. Whoever would see once more the bright sunlight of the upper world where dawn is now breaking, he must swear that he will never at any time, drunk or sober, tell to any man what has happened, what he has seen or heard in this underground tomb, but will regard it all as a dream which he has forgotten on awakening. Swear this with me in this hour! I myself will first of all repeat the oath and ye must say whether ye are content therewith or not."
Thereupon he approached the altar whose basement formed the glass isolating "island" which all of us who have ever seen an electrical machine know so well. The electric machine itself, a battery of Leyden jars was hidden under the altar and connected by a piece of clockwork with that opening covered with metal in which the crucifix had been planted.
Black Mask stood silently for a moment on the basement of the altar after removing his helmet from his head, and those who stood nearest were horrified to observe that single hairs of his long flowing mane of hair rose slowly and remained stiffly suspended in the air. There was a deep silence, the silence that prevails under the earth—among the Dead.
And now Fatia Negra began to recite the words of the oath in a solemn ghostly voice: "I, the bearer of the Black Mask, Fatia Negra, as they call me, swear in the subterranean midnight by the living fire which falling like rain reduced Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes; by the flood which killed all the dwellers upon earth; by the gaping gulf which swallowed up the traitorous bands of Dathan and Abiram; by the spirit which announced the death of King Saul; by the Angel Lucifer who by reason of his rebellion was cast down from Heaven; by the angel Malach Hamovesh who carries in his hands the sword of violent death; by the twelve plagues of Egypt with which Moses visited the land of the Pharaohs; by all these things and by the star under which I was born do I swear secresy—and may I perish in fire and water, may I be buried alive in the bowels of the earth, may I become a pillar of salt, may the wild beast of the forest tear me to pieces, may my own weapon turn against me in the evil hour, may I be terrified by midnight spectres and hag-ridden, may my body be smitten with leprosy, my eyes with blindness, my tongue with dumbness, my bones by rottenness, if ever I speak one syllable to anybody, be it priest, or child, or father, or condemning judge, or threatening headsman, of anything I have seen, heard or learnt in this place, or write it down with my hand or put anybody on the track of it! May every drop of my blood become curse-laden; may my remotest posterity anathematize me; may I awake in my grave and go about again as a spectre, if ever I act in anyway contrary to what I now swear! May all those who are under the earth and above the earth be the witnesses of this my oath!"
This drastic formula satisfied everybody. In those parts the people much prefer such unmeaning self-objurgation to our legal oaths as taken in the presence of the judges and they are considered a hundred times more binding. Meanwhile numerous single hairs had seemed to detach themselves from Black Mask's long locks and now stood upright all around his head like some spectral crown. Those who stood around regarded him with deep horror. Many believed that a supernatural marvellous power was in his words; only the girl did not believe in him at all.
In order to increase still further this terrified respect the adventurer beckoned towards him the old men of the assembly.