Quite often Penhryn had puzzled over the reasons Gothic arts were made so hideous; every cathedral he had visited, every Gothic mss read, even Medieval tapestry was cursed with this ubiquitous grotesqueness. Once a medieval archaeologist told him it perhaps was the soul--ugly and deformed--of the Age that tolerated it. Perhaps so. Certainly there was a shocking parallel between it and the practices of the witch covens that marked that period; a parallel that suggested many hidden Satanists carved the wood and stone of the cathedrals. For did not the same spirit of mockery and perversion of Mass ritual exist in the gargoyles who leered atop cathedral parapets and from cornices and recesses? Even now, the tympanum Penhryn studied was such an example of that blasphemy. A sly, cynical hint of bigotry, it seemed to him, was expressed in the too closely crowded group of saints and reveling demons. Another infamy like this present symbolism of the Elect and the Damned, he recalled, once carved on the tympanum of Rheims Cathedral, so shocked its 18th century clergy that they had it chiseled out. His examination of the stone figures on the entrance arch was broken by the verger, commenting pedantically on some IX century Saxon brickwork in the wall. Penhryn stepped into the cathedral and a palpable sea of silence which even the stone of sound (that was his footsteps) could barely ripple. Mumbling about the church's reliquary, the verger started off; and Penhryn, despite the verger's boresome presence, decided to follow him. Beneath tones of stone they passed, whose weight elfin Plantagenet ribbed vaults appeared incapable of supporting. Reaching the Reliquary in the gloom of the west transept arm, the verger unlocked it and brought out of a chest therein the cathedral's mortuary wealth--the remains of illustrious prelates and canonized saints--that reposed in bejeweled, golden urns and containers. Dryly, the verger spoke of dullsome abbots and obscure saints. "This particular urn," said the verger, picking one manifestly no different from the rest, "whose osseous contents are those of an early saint, has a quaint history. In 1163 the Popish monks here gathered some henbane found growing in their garden, mistaking it for a kind of parsley." Unimaginatively, he went on, relating--_despite_ his pedantic manner--an interesting account of how those monks who did not eat of it were woke that same midnight by the Matin's bell. And coming into the cathedral read scrawled across the sacred books what was never originally written there, saw written in chalk on the walls blasphemy, and heard profane things uttered by those who had awakened them. "The archives," said the verger, "are not explicit on the outrages; though they did say how the drugged monks, for one thing, made a mockery of Christian ritual by reverencing this urn."