The adepts were swaying from their hips, and making statuesque passes and gestures that resembled an animation of the figures of Egyptian sculpture. Their glassily staring eyes shifted in regular cadence to follow their darting finger tips. They were as revivified corpses that had not yet gained full control of their bodies. Then they lifted their voices in a chant like the wailing of ghouls imprisoned in a looted tomb; dead brazen faces chanting to the dead. And Shirkuh, arms extended, made antiphonal responses in a voice that surged and thundered like a distant surf. The notes of that diabolical wind instrument behind the arras became more and more like the voice of a woman: a mellow sweetness against a background of sepulchral wailing and the solemn intonation of Shirkuh. "Good Lord, Pierre, that's awful!" muttered Farrell. "Wait until it fairly starts," countered d'Artois in a whisper. "This is primitive magic. Very primitive, but deadly. They are imitating that which they design to accomplish. "_Pardieu_, hear that damnable pipe--_her_ very voice, now. They imitate in music and symbolize in their chant the triumph of the dead as they return from Beyond." That satanically sweet voice was now almost articulate. Farrell strained his ears as he leaned forward, clutching the arms of his chair. He sought to distinguish the words that it spoke. And then another instrument came into play: a hoarse, reverberant roaring like the lustful bellowing of pre-Adamite monsters. The hall trembled with that terrific bestial blast. The fumes of the censers were swirling and twining like fantasmal serpents in the ghastly blueness, weaving arabesques, spiralling in vortices, gathering about that hellish sextet and its leader like shapes from beyond the border clamoring at the periphery of a necromancer's pentacle. A luminous haze was gathering and drawing to itself the censer fumes. The nebulous iridescence pulsed and quivered like a sentient thing. It throbbed with the slow, persistent beat of a turtle's heart after it has been removed from the body. It elongated; then as it slowly settled, that amorphous luminescence took shape: the graceful form of La Dorada. The pipe that mimicked a woman's voice was articulating now in unison, joining the necromancer's antiphonal answer to the chanting adepts and the minotaurean bellowing of that monstrous horn. The master had called her, and she was there. The phantom presence slowly merged with the nacreous body of La Dorada. The dead woman shivered for a moment, extended her shapely arms, sat erect on the bier. Her cry was a mingling of exultation and bewilderment; then she accepted the hand that Shirkuh offered her, and splendid in her unclad beauty, sprang gracefully to the dais. [Illustration: "_The dead woman shivered for a moment, then sat erect on the bier._"]