The single-stringed violins, the moaning pipes and the purring drums wove a harmony that sighed and sobbed like a fallen angel bewailing his lost estate. The great gong pealed with mighty, brazen reverberations. Acolytes filed into the vault, and paced in cadence to the music, and rhythmically swung fuming censers as they passed thrice in procession about the dead, and the exquisite unclad beauty of the living woman. And as the acolytes retreated, Hassan descended from his dais. He drew on the floor with a piece of chalk a circle several paces in diameter, and within it a pentacle. Each of the five points he marked with cabalistical symbols. Then with a ceremonious gesture he summoned three Initiates from among those who sat waiting beside the dais. Each Initiate took his post at his assigned station; then all four bowed to the fifth vertex and the Presence that was to be summoned. Hassan intoned a sentence; and the Initiates, beginning at his left, each in turn chanted a line of the invocation. Those without the circle solemnly pronounced a fifth sonorous phrase. "For the vacant corner," whispered the Marquis to Farrell. "They are representing the One they are calling to occupy the fifth angle." And thus they continued their prodigious utterances, four verses riming in succession, with the surge and thunder of the unrimed, antiphonal response from without. Each time the circle was completed, the riming syllable changed; and from the Arabic with which they had started, they shifted to Himyaric, and then to obscure, antique tongues whose sound was an elemental roar of deep gutturals. Then finally came a primal, bestial murmuring and muttering, a chirping and clucking of the tongues that were spoken by those who wandered through the Void before the first man walked the earth. And recurring through the entire progression was a portentous name that is seldom pronounced above a whisper. The very features of the Initiates changed as they pronounced those rustling, shivering syllables. They were achieving a unity with that which crept and crawled and loathsomely slunk through chaos and reviled the unborn stars, and mocked the light that was to be.... * * * * * Farrell, staring now with a dread that obliterated every other emotion, saw that a Presence was materializing at the fifth vertex. A vibrant glow like the luminous vapor of a mercury arc was momentarily becoming more dense and substantial. Lambent flames played about the brows of the Initiates in the pentacle. A terrific tension pervaded the vault. The bluish glow became deeper, and was shot with flashes of crimson and yellowish green. Each drawn face was now a ghastly slate-gray: the Presence at the fifth vertex was drawing the living essence from the swaying, gesturing bodies of Hassan and his trio of Initiates.