Selden’s voice failed and he looked at Cleves with sickened eyes.
“I can’t—can’t make you understand how repulsive to me it was to see a wriggling live thing creep out between their fingers and—and go running or scrambling away—little loathsome things with humpy backs that hopped or scurried through the grass——”
“What on earth were these Yezidees doing, Tressa?” asked Cleves almost roughly.
The girl’s white face was marred by the imprints of deepening horror.
“It is the Tchor-Dagh,” she said mechanically. “They are using every resource of hell to destroy me—testing the gigantic power of Evil—as though it were some vast engine charged with thunderous destruction!—and they were testing it to discover its terrific capacity to annihilate——”
Her voice died in her dry throat; she dropped her bloodless visage into both hands and remained seated so.
Both men looked at her in silence, not daring to interfere. Finally the girl lifted her pallid face from her hands.
“That is what they were doing,” she said in a dull voice. “Out of inanimate earth they were making things animate—living creatures—to—to test the hellish power which they are storing—concentrating—for my destruction.”
“What is their purpose?” asked Cleves harshly. “What do these Mongol Sorcerers expect to gain by making little live things out of lumps of garden dirt?”
“They are testing their power,” whispered the girl.