“Two marble bridges lead to it. There are fourteen hundred mosques there. Then come the Eight, each with his shroud, chanting the prayers for those dead in hell. And there the Yezidees pray blasphemously, all their minds in ferocious unison.... And I have seen a little yort full of Broad Faces with their slanting eyes and sparse beards, sicken and die, and turn black in the sun as though the plague had breathed on them. And I have seen the Long Noses and bushy beards of walled towns wither and perish in the blast and blight from the Namaz-Ga where the Slayer of Souls sat his saddle and prayed to Erlik, and half a million Yezidees prayed in blasphemous unison.”
Recklow’s head rested on his left hand. The other, unconsciously, had crept toward his pistol—the weapon which had become so useless in this awful struggle between this girl and the loosened forces of hell.
“Is that what you think Sanang is about?” he asked heavily.
“Yes. I know it. He has seized the minds of a million men in America. Every anarchist is to-day concentrating in one evil and supreme mental effort, under Sanang’s direction, to will the triumph of evil and the doom of civilisation.... I wish my husband would come home.”
“Tressa?”
She turned her pallid face in the firelight: “If Sanang has appointed a Place of Prayer,” she said, “he himself will pray on that spot. That will be the Namaz-Ga for the last two Yezidee Sorcerers still alive in the Western World.”
“That’s what I wished to ask you,” said Recklow softly. “Will you try once more, Tressa?”
“Yes. I will send out my soul again to look for the Namaz-Ga.”
She lay back in her armchair and closed her eyes.
“Only,” she added, as though to herself, “I wish my dear lord were safe in this room beside me.... May God’s warriors be his escort. And surely they are well armed, and can prevail over demons. Aie-a! I wish my lord would come home out of the darkness.... Mr. Recklow?”