“Like tuning up a huge machine?” muttered Selden.
“Yes.”
“For what purpose?”
“To make larger living creatures out of—of clay.”
“They can’t—they can’t create!” exclaimed Cleves. “I don’t know how—by what filthy tricks—they make rats out of dirt. But they can’t make a—anything—like a—like a man!”
Tressa’s body trembled slightly.
“Once,” she said, “in the temple, Prince Sanang took dust which was brought in sacks of goat-skin, and fashioned the heap of dirt with his hands, so that it resembled the body of a man lying there on the marble floor under the shrine of Erlik.... And—and then, there in the shadows where only the Dark Star burned—that black lamp which is called the Dark Star—the long heap of dust lying there on the marble pavement began to—to breathe!—”
She pressed both hands over her breast as though to control her trembling body: “I saw it; I saw the long shape of dust begin to breathe, to stir, move, and slowly lift itself——”
“A Yezidee trick!” gasped Cleves; but he also was trembling now.
“God!” whispered the girl. “Allah alone knows—the Merciful, the Long Suffering—He knows what it was that we temple girls saw there—that Yulun saw—that Sa-n’sa and I beheld there rising up like a man from the marble floor—and standing erect in the shadowy twilight of the Dark Star....”