Our entrance awoke a pandemonium. Myriads of bats and owls, and all
manner of fowls of darkness and bad omen, crazed by the glare of twenty
torches, startled the echoes with infernal clangor. Screaming and
huddling together, some fled under the wide skirts of sable, which
Darkness, climbing to the roof in fear, drew up after her; some hid
with lesser shadows between columns of great girth, or in the remotest
murky niches, or down in the black profound of resounding chasms; some,
bewildered or quite blinded by the flashes of the co-eternal beam,
dashed themselves against the stony walls, and fell crippled, gasping,
staring, at our feet. And when, at last, our guides and servants,
mounting to pinnacles and jutting points, and many a frieze and coigne
of vantage, placed blue lights on them all, and at the word illuminated
all together, there was redoubled bedlam in that abode of Hecate, and
the eternal calm of the Boodh became awful. For what deeds of outer
darkness, done long ago in that black hole of superstition, so many
damned souls shrieked from their night-fowl transmigrations, 'twere
vain to question there were no disclosures in that trance of stone.
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