Tristan gazed with the rest, stark with terror. The blood seemed to freeze in his veins as his eyes swept the circular vault and rested at the shrine's farther end, where branching candlesticks flanked each the foot of two short flights of stairs that led up to the summit of the great altar, garnished at the corner with hideous masks, and sending up from time to time eddies of smoke, through the reek of which some two score of men watched the ceremony from above.
Dim shapes passed to and fro. The droning chant continued. At length a shapeless form evolved itself from the crimson mist, approached the altar and cast something upon it. Instantly a blaze of light flooded the shrine, and in its radiance a weazened, bat-like creature was revealed, garbed in the fantastic imitation of a priest's robes.
Approaching the infernal altar, upon which lay obscene symbols of horror, he mounted the steps and his figure melted into the gloom.
With the cold sweat streaming from his brow, with a shudder that almost turned him dizzy, Tristan recognized Bessarion. The High Priest of Satan sat upon the Devil's altar. There was stir and movement in the chapel. Then a deep silence supervened.
Petrifaction fell upon the assembly. All voices were hushed, all movement arrested. From the black throne, surrounded by terror, where sat the great Unknown, came a dull hoarse roar, like the roar of an earthquake.
The words were unintelligible to the champions of the Cross. They were answered by the Sorcerer's Confession, the hideous, terrible contortion of the Credo, and then Tristan's ears were assailed by the sounds he had heard on that fatal night, ere he lost consciousness, and again in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, sounds meaningless in themselves, but fraught with terrible import to him now!
"Emen Hetan! Emen Hetan! Palu! Baalberi! Emen Hetan!"—
Pandemonium broke loose.
"Agora! Agora! Patrisa! Agora!"
There was screeching of pipes, made of dead men's bones. A drum stretched with the skin of the hanged was beaten with the tail of a wolf. Like leaves in a howling storm the fantastic red robed forms whirled about, from left to right, from right to left. And in their midst, immobile and terrible, sat the Hircus Nocturnus, enthroned upon the shrine.