It was useless to dream of entering the temple by the main door. The twelve hermaphrodites who guarded the entrance would certainly have allowed Demetrios to pass, in spite of the order directing the exclusion of every profane person in the absence of the priests; but he had no need to prove his future guilt in this ingenuous manner, since a secret entrance led to the sanctuary. Demetrios betook himself to a part of the wood which sheltered the Necropolis of the high priests of the goddess. He counted the first tombs, opened the door of the seventh, and closed it again behind him. With great difficulty, for the stone was heavy, he raised the burial-slab under which a marble staircase plunged down into the earth, and he descended step by step. He knew that sixty paces were to be made in a straight line, and that afterwards it would be necessary to feel one’s way along the wall in order not to knock against the subterranean staircase of the temple. The exceeding freshness of the deep earth calmed him little by little. In a few minutes he arrived at the limit. He mounted the stairs, and pushed open the trap-door. The night was clear without, and pitch dark within the divine enclosure. When he had softly and carefully closed the resounding door, a chill fell upon him, and he felt as though hemmed in by the coldness of the stones. He dared not raise his eyes. This black silence terrified him: the darkness became alive with the unknown. He put his hand to his forehead like a man who does not want to awake for fear of finding himself among the living. At last he looked. He saw, in a glory of moonbeams, the dazzling figure of the goddess. She stood upon a pedestal of pink stone laden with pendent treasures. She was naked and fully sexed, vaguely tinted with the natural colours of woman. With one hand, she held a mirror with a priapus handle, and with the other she adorned her beauty with a seven-stringed pearl necklace. One pearl larger than the others, long and silvery, shone between her two nipples like a nocturnal crescent between two rounded clouds. And they were the real sacred pearls born of the water-drops which had rolled into the shell of Anadyomene. ill-033 _Demetrios lost himself in ineffable adoration._ Demetrios lost himself in ineffable adoration. He believed in very truth that Aphrodite herself was there. He did not recognise his handiwork, for the abyss between what he had been and what he had become was profound. He stretched out his arms and murmured the mysterious words of prayer which are used in the Phrygian ceremonies.